Her personal tenacity is something of a miracle, and readers of this honest, engaging memoir will wish the author well.
Wary, defiant, not a little defensive, and not a little pissed off, Lords recaptures her youthful voice as she excavates all the rocks on her road from underage porn star to singer and actress.
She hailed from a low-rent Ohio mill town, product of a drunken father and a feckless mother, soon divorced. Sexually abused by one of her mother’s boyfriends, she fled home at 15. To make money, she agreed to do some nude posing (she was still only 15 when Penthouse featured her as a centerfold), and from there it was an alarmingly simple step to pornographic movies. She captures this dark and rotten world with all its ambiguities—and hers: “[Porn] allowed me to release all the fury I'd felt my entire life. And that's what got me off.” But it was hardly a joyous milieu; drugs and booze calmed her, while a series of wretched relationships gave her glancing moments of security. Federal agents finally started giving child pornography the scrutiny it deserved, but the actors, not the producers, bore the public brunt of their investigation. Still a teenager, Lords pulled in the reins and, remarkably, engineered her own reversal of fortune. With a self-control that invites admiration, she got roles in R-rated flicks, worked her way up to John Waters movies, and then a sequence of TV and film roles. As if out of nowhere (it’s not clear where she discovered her musical talent), she charged to the top of the charts as a techno queen, meanwhile grabbing roles in Melrose Place and Roseanne, all the while contending with her past as a porn star. If on occasion Lords sounds a wee superficial (“Howard Fine's annual Christmas party was a must appear, so I searched my closet for a festive frock”), you can see she knows how to play the Hollywood survival game.
Her personal tenacity is something of a miracle, and readers of this honest, engaging memoir will wish the author well.Pub Date: July 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-050820-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
A laudable, if cautious, attempt to reclaim the literary status of an important American author from successive waves of neglect and politically charged reinterpretation. Placing Jewett firmly within the pantheon of late 19th century intellectual society, Blanchard (Margaret Fuller, 1978) blends biography and textual analysis to reveal a life of apparently astonishing balance. Born in 1849 in the comfortable and bucolic town of South Berwick, Maine, the daughter of a broad-minded physician, Jewett managed the difficult feat, notes Blanchard, of gaining fame and fortune ``simply by going her own way and doing what she liked to do.'' Although she was past 40 when her most enduring work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, appeared, Jewett, despite crippling bouts of rheumatoid arthritis, began publishing in her teens. At 32 she established her extraordinarily successful liaison with Annie Fields, widow of publisher and Atlantic Monthly founder James T. Fields, and thereafter shuttled happily between her beloved Maine and the highbrow salons of Boston. While giving ample play to Jewett's singular achievement of creating a life and art that constantly sustained and reflected her intellectual and spiritual interests, Blanchard, in her meticulous portrayal of the world of educated 19th-century women, skillfully demonstrates how unexceptional her subject's life appeared within its heady environs. Similarly, her probably asexual relationship with Fields, seen by many as ``perhaps the classic `Boston marriage,' '' was unremarkable in an era of flowery ``romantic friendships'' between accomplished, independent women who rarely had the option of combining work and family. By the same token, Jewett's literary themes—notably the importance of community, a Transcendentalist reverence for nature, and a realism leavened by optimism—were addressed to and embraced by readers of both sexes. Persuasively argued, this spirited work falters only in its failure to measure Jewett's achievements against the best, rather than the whole, literature of her time.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-51810-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
A superb dual portrait of the 32nd President and his First Lady, whose extraordinary partnership steered the nation through the perilous WW II years. In the period covered by this biography, 1940 through Franklin's death in 1949, FDR was elected to unprecedented third and fourth terms and nudged the country away from isolationism into war. It is by now a given that Eleanor was not only an indispensable adviser to this ebullient, masterful statesman, but a political force in her own right. More than most recent historians, however, Goodwin (The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 1987) is uncommonly sensitive to their complex relationship's shifting undercurrents, which ranged from deep mutual respect to lingering alienation caused by FDR's infidelity. One element creating tension was tactical politics: FDR, seeing increased arms production as crucial to the war effort, sought to close the divide between businessmen and his administration, while Eleanor prodded him not to forget about labor, civil rights, and Jewish refugees. As grateful as he was to her for acting as his political eyes and ears, Franklin also could react testily to her unremitting lobbying at times when he desperately needed relief from the strains of running the war effort. Equally fascinating here are the often semi-permanent White House guests who filled the couple's "untended needs": their daughter and four sons; FDR alter ego Harry Hopkins, shaking off grave illness to go on critical diplomatic missions; Franklin's secretary Missy LeHand, prevented by a stroke from serving the man she loved; exiled Princess Martha of Norway, who gave Franklin the unqualified affection of which Eleanor was incapable; two of Eleanor's confidantes, future biographer Joe Lash and the lesbian ex-journalist Lorena Hickok; and Winston Churchill. A moving drama of patchwork intimacy in the White House, played out against the sweeping tableau of the nation rallying behind a great crusade.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-64240-5
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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