A new, different twist on familiar Brando stories.
With her debut memoir, Marlon Brando’s former executive assistant delivers a chatty tell-all about the often erratic Hollywood legend.
Peardon’s life story may cause readers to ask: Why would an intelligent, energetic and attractive young woman be friends with a man who once locked her in the trunk of a car for fun and threatened to cut her hand with a knife—even if his name was Marlon Brando? Gossip about the late actor’s troubled family life and accusations of his abusive behavior toward women are nothing new, but this memoir isn’t intended as another scathing account of the Hollywood icon. Instead, it’s a loving—and gushing—tribute to a friend, warts and all. Peardon met Brando in the late 1970s, when she was 20 and working as an assistant at her father’s dental office; Brando, in his 50s, was a patient. They were immediately attracted to each other, writes Peardon, but Brando wouldn’t have sex with her, he said, because he liked her father. Thus began their “on again off again” 28-year platonic friendship, during which Peardon sometimes worked for the difficult Brando; he fired her twice. The author writes about Brando with fawning adoration, quick to forgive and point out his good qualities, such as his commitment to civil rights issues. In some ways, Brando seems to have been a father figure to her, especially after her own father committed suicide; according to Peardon, her conversations with Marlon Brando helped her through many life challenges, including her divorce. The book re-creates dialogue between Peardon and Brando, which makes for a vivid, easy read, and also includes a few pictures, letters and handwritten notes from Brando himself. Alice Marchak, Brando’s personal assistant for 50 years, offers a tougher, more inside look into the legend’s day-to-day life in her 2008 memoir Me and Marlon, but hard-core fans may appreciate Peardon’s wide-eyed adulation.
A new, different twist on familiar Brando stories.Pub Date: April 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988455719
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The Falcon Press
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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