A thin sheet in the crammed Hollywood Babylon file cabinet but of interest to celebrity murder buffs.
Natalie Wood’s younger sister demands not closure but hard answers in the matter of the star’s death 40 years ago.
As the author recounts, a “Gypsy fortune-teller” once foretold that Natalie would die in dark water. Ever after, she stayed away from water, even the swimming pools to which actor friends like Dennis Hopper, Tab Hunter, and Sal Mineo would flock during their teen-heartthrob years, “especially when there happened to be a teen magazine photograph around.” Yet, in 1981, Natalie drowned, her body washing ashore on Catalina Island, having drifted there from a yacht in open, stormy water. Wood loses no time in asserting that Natalie’s husband, Robert Wagner, was behind the death. In the manner of a who-killed-JFK exercise, the author assembles all the bits of evidence that don’t add up, throwing in Hollywood dish along the way: Kirk Douglas raped Natalie in an encounter arranged by Natalie’s mother; Wagner and Natalie divorced—but later remarried—after she caught him with another man. Much of the case hangs on the “dinghy theory,” regarding a Zodiac boat tied to the back of the yacht that was found adrift after Natalie disappeared. Wagner asserted in a short police interview that Natalie must have heard it banging against the yacht in heavy seas and “got out of bed to secure it and slipped on the swim step.” Given Natalie’s morbid fear of water, writes the author, especially dark water, that’s nonsense. By her account, Wagner later spun other, divergent stories about how Natalie wound up dead in the water. Gossipy and sometimes clunky, Wood’s account nonetheless raises questions that should have been answered 40 years ago. However, since celebrity coroner Thomas Noguchi ruled the case an accidental drowning and, argues the author, disposed of most of the evidence, we are now left to rely on the conjecture and hearsay assembled here.
A thin sheet in the crammed Hollywood Babylon file cabinet but of interest to celebrity murder buffs.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-308162-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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