An appealing portrait of the attractive Lunts and of Broadway in its heyday.
Veteran biographer Peters (May Sarton, 1997, etc.) limns the glamorous life of the American theater’s most successful acting team.
Alfred Lunt (1892–1977) and Lynn Fontanne (1887–1983) were a couple offstage as well as on, though persistent rumors peg it as a sexless marriage between a gay man and a bisexual woman. Their biographer seems to accept this judgment, though she never comes right out and says so: more important, she correctly assumes, was their lifelong devotion and the astonishing partnership that began in 1924 with Ferenc Molnár’s witty two-hander, The Guardsman, and continued through Friedrich Dürrenmat’s mordant satire, The Visit, in 1958. The Lunts were particularly admired for their flawless comic gifts, highlighted to scandalous effect in pal Noël Coward’s smash Design for Living, which had Coward and his costars romping through a threesome that implied—as much as you could in 1933—the two men’s sexual involvement. But they had a serious side, highlighted in Robert E. Sherwood’s brooding prewar allegory Idiot’s Delight and his patriotic drama There Shall Be No Night, which they played amidst bombs falling over Fontanne’s native England in 1943. When relaxing, they retreated in high style to their country manor in Lunt’s home state, Wisconsin, where he could cook and redecorate to his heart’s content while she sewed her ultra-chic clothes. Capably following their busy career and social life—friends included Alexander Woollcott, Helen Hayes, and Laurence Olivier—Peters hews to the accepted wisdom that Fontanne was a brilliant technician, Lunt a truly great actor who slightly limited himself after 1928 by working only with her. Both were relentless perfectionists who refined their performances long after the Broadway premieres, in the vanished days when stars routinely made national tours and successful actors worked exclusively year-round on the stage. Peters’s footnotes are spotty, and she stoops at least once to inventing a conversation, but she colorfully evokes her subjects’ theatrical personalities and stylish amusements nonetheless.
An appealing portrait of the attractive Lunts and of Broadway in its heyday.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41117-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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