A warm, detailed memoir that is a record of the author’s truest love–the theater.
A charming memoir by a 76-year-old actor who began his career alongside Claude Rains in Darkness at Noon, worked as a talent agent for 22 years and eventually returned to the stage and screen.
The book is as appealingly self-deprecating as its title. Seff captions an early photo of himself, “the young actor, 20, vacuous,” and finishes a story about touring a play for the USO during World War II by writing “it’s a miracle that we won the war anyway.” Never a star, Seff was a sensitive and witty observer of the people around him, from Chita Rivera and Bob Fosse to Martin Scorsese. (In Taxi Driver, Seff played one of Travis Bickle’s customers, but writes that he never really met Robert De Niro: “It is clear that when he’s into a character, he is INTO him, and no polite ‘hellos’ are going to interfere.”) Colorful but never gossipy, the book is also a trove of theater trivia–for example, the story of how Rex Harrison influenced the title of My Fair Lady, by bellowing “It cannot say REX HARRISON in Lady Liza on a marquee!” Following the arc of his life, Seff describes changes in the acting industry, from the emergence of television and the domination of Hollywood to the popularization of method acting. More touching are the author’s sincere stories about his personal life, from growing up as a Brooklyn kid who saved his nickels to go to the movies to how he became a mature gay actor. His sentimental education, introduction to New York’s gay society and reminisces about his loves are sweet, refreshing intermissions between chapters about his professional life as an actor and agent.
A warm, detailed memoir that is a record of the author’s truest love–the theater.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4257-3934-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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