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
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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