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
Following in the monosyllabic wake of Katharine Hepburn's Me comes Bacall's Now: essays on love, work, children, and friendship. They're a bit makeshift but very human and, finally, offer a likable portrait of an interesting, complex survivor. For those who haven't heard from Bacall since her 1979 autobiography By Myself, she's a bit lonely. She's married off her children, and they all have a pretty good relationship, even though everyone has had ups and downs. She's trying to sell her house in Amagansett, N.Y., because she's not there enough, what with trips to London and Paris. She's ``traveling solo'': no men on the horizon, though at this point she feels she could align herself with Mr. Right. But is he ever hard to find! If the truth be told, there's never been anyone to match Bogie (and this, Bacall says, is the right spelling). In fact, these days she's practically channeling him (``the core of Bogie resides in me''). It's hard to get work even for a legend, and work is what has always defined her. So she's feeling a little tender and wondering what the future holds in store and after all, no one said life was easy. She emerges, even with a mantel full of little Henry Moores and memories of an amazing list of friends (Lenny Bernstein, Spence Tracy, Larry and Vivien, etc.), like an American woman approaching 70. She's a classy Jewish mother who tries to remain nonjudgmental as her only daughter, Leslie, is married by a Tibetan priest. And Bogie's baby is a grandma (she doesn't babysit). In describing how she took Leslie to the L.A. house on Mapleton Drive that she shared with Bogart and their two young children, she tries hard to show us that they were not just celluloid myths—they were real. Bacall's reminiscences of famous people are a little too dutiful. (Where is her famous sense of humor?) But her documentation of getting older, like Hepburn's, is real and recognizable to the aging rest of us. (40 b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 200,000; Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1994
ISBN: 0-394-57412-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
Another big Lenny B. bio, jam-packed with accomplishment and angst. This is not a terrible book, and there are occasional passages of nice insight. Ultimately, however, the limitations that biographer Secrest admits at the outset prove to be too much for her. She is not a music historian, her previous subjects mostly having been figures from architecture and the visual arts (Frank Lloyd Wright, 1992, etc.), and her self-professed inability to evaluate Bernstein as composer exacerbates the inherent difficulties of writing his life so soon after his death. ``Various family members, close friends, and colleagues'' refused to talk to her because the Bernstein estate was contracted to another biographer (presumably Humphrey Burton, author of Leonard Bernstein, p. 260); for the same reason, she did not have access to the ``vast Bernstein archives.'' There were, of course, still plenty of folks who would talk (and talk and talk) to her about the maestro, and they had a lot to say, on every now-familiar subject from L.B.'s ambivalent sexuality to his podium manners, his business acumen, and his skills as father and teacher. If it were not for the thematic and chronological connective passages that display Secrest's skill as a biographer, the book could be called Reminiscences on Bernstein. Predictably, not all of the lengthy, sometimes rambling, quotations are of equal merit; all are self- interested and some don't make sense. We hear much about Bernstein's conflicts—conducting vs. composing, his attraction to men vs. women—but in the absence of an overview of his creative legacy (which simply may not be possible at this early date), the reader winds up feeling merely exhausted by Lenny's energy level. Another book for the growing shelf from which some Maynard Solomon or musical Walter Jackson Bate will have to winnow when the time comes to write a critical biography rather than the Bernstein story. (100 b&w photos) (First printing of 35,000)
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40731-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
