A revealing look behind the curtain—if not the persona—from the man who helped Garland reclaim the limelight after Hollywood...
Hollywood producer Luft reflects on his relationship with show business legend Judy Garland, whom he married (and managed) during the final great phase of her performing career.
The author, who died in 2005, had a reputation as a controlling Svengali, but he comes across here as concerned, pragmatic, and, more often than not, right about Garland’s professional trajectory. Luft was instrumental in the production of her critically heralded film comeback, A Star Is Born (1954), and he orchestrated her triumphant performances at the London Palladium and Broadway’s Palace Theatre, epochal shows that cemented her late-period legacy and led to the creation of her own TV series. Throughout, Luft credits Garland’s genius and gallantly excuses her erratic behavior, drug dependency, and financial recklessness as the inevitable results of a lifetime of exploitation at the hands of Hollywood. More interestingly, he candidly expresses his physical attraction to Garland and appreciation of her unconventional sexual appeal—his ardor reads as completely sincere—and expresses concern about the consequences of his laissez faire disposition toward Garland’s peccadilloes. Luft’s memoir was written in fits and starts over a period of many years and completed after his death with the aid of interview transcripts and other scattered sources, and the narrative frequently feels choppy, with strangely abrupt transitions. Still, Luft, a former boxer and test pilot, has a winningly direct and confident authorial voice. A Hemingway-esque man’s man, he doesn’t delve too deeply into psychology, but Garland fanatics will gobble up his detailed, insightful backstage accounts of Garland’s classic late productions and gossipy tidbits about their social circle, which included Humphrey Bogart and the Prince of Wales. The story ends darkly, as Garland falls under the sway of agents Freddie Fields and David Begelman, who, according to Luft, ruthlessly manipulated Garland into excising him from her career and personal life. On the evidence here, that was a terrible mistake.
A revealing look behind the curtain—if not the persona—from the man who helped Garland reclaim the limelight after Hollywood let her down.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61373-583-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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