Not John O’Hara, but not Judith Krantz either: girl talk somewhere in between, suitable for YA readers aged 14 to 84 and...
Novelist/memoirist Johnson (Perfect Together, 1991, etc.) revisits Century City, Culver City, and New York City in the days when bicoastal travel meant riding The Chief or The Twentieth Century and the movies starred quick-witted women and well-groomed men speaking clever dialogue.
A lot of that dialogue was scripted by Nunnally Johnson, a dominant Hollywood writer/producer as well as the author’s father. So what would it be like, you ask, coming of age in Hollywood’s Golden Age? In glorious black and white, Johnson recalls little Shirley Temple and Roddy McDowell, the pools, the croquet games, the gossip of The Business in the summers with Pop. Winters in New York with Mom involved the Gorgon School with Tony Perkins, Old Golds, cocktail shakers, Peck & Peck, and “coming out”—in a more innocent time when that had nothing to do with your sexual orientation and everything to do with debutante balls. East or West, once the war was over, Johnson endured teenage parties and the rigors of dating. She sailed to Europe on the Queen Mary and flew home into Idlewild. Johnson’s flashback includes friends like frosty Gregory, anorexic Julie, and Don Sweetheart (yes, that’s his real name). The cast includes Betty and Bogey, Smith classmate Sylvia Plath, and colorful stepparents. Her memory piece’s best-drawn portraits are Hollywood Pop, he of three wives and four children, and New York Mom. It’s all terribly dramatic, but why not? Nunnally advised his daughter to think of herself “not as Schrafft’s but as ‘21’,”and so she does. She trots out the grand old motifs of teenage angst, money, and sex—the latter problem temporarily solved when she finally does it. The book ends with Nora’s marriage and the prospect of settlement in an Aramco post in the Arabian desert. It seems more installments are due.
Not John O’Hara, but not Judith Krantz either: girl talk somewhere in between, suitable for YA readers aged 14 to 84 and good company on the red-eye or the beach.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3447-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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