An intriguing but uneven account of a movie-land love story steeped in Hollywood glamour.
A passionate love affair between an actor and a model ends in tragedy in this partially fictionalized memoir set in 1960s Hollywood.
Long before Eric Fleming got his big break with a leading role on the television series Rawhide, he was Edward Heddy Jr., born in Southern California and raised during the Depression. Escaping the constant physical abuse of his father, young Fleming hopped a train and took up the harsh life of a street urchin, stealing in order to eat and trading his father’s beatings for those of his teenage hoodlum bosses. He joined the Navy’s Construction Battalion during World War II. When a terrible accident deformed his face, Navy doctors were able to perform reconstructive surgery that left him more handsome than ever. Rebranded as Eric Fleming, he was already a successful actor in 1963 when he met Garber, a “Manhattan model/showgirl” whose fast-paced social life included men with Mafia connections. Despite the fact that he had a blind date with Garber’s roommate, Fleming and the author fell for each other at first sight and immediately became inseparable. Both shared a love-hate relationship with the glitzy but shallow allure of the “Hollyweird” movie culture, and Fleming saw his relationship with Garber as his ticket to escaping the scene for a peaceful life in Hawaii. Financial ruin at the hands of a shady accountant forced him to accept a role in another film, with disastrous results. The author has taken on an interesting challenge in writing this memoir in both her voice and Fleming’s. Though mention is made of his lifelong journal-keeping, Garber does not credit his diaries with providing the material written from the actor’s viewpoint. The hard-boiled style is appropriate and captivating in a portrait of mid-20th-century Los Angeles, as when the author recalls purring: “I liked men who shelled out bread for my Manhattan penthouse.” But this hard edge sometimes slides into mean-spiritedness, including a few scenes of homophobia and fat shaming. Hardest to understand is Garber’s choice to devote almost half the narrative to the on-location film shoot that ended Fleming’s life on the Amazon River in Peru while omitting any account of his no doubt thrilling journey from injured Seabee to acclaimed TV star.
An intriguing but uneven account of a movie-land love story steeped in Hollywood glamour.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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