What lay beneath the compulsions? Leigh never gets beyond the surface of Kelly’s need to please a distant, philandering...
Gossipy biography of Her Serene Highness.
Setting to work on a biography of Grace Kelly, Leigh (The Secret Letters of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, 2003, etc.) was advised by her editor, “I don’t want anything warmed over.” By that criterion, her results are decidedly mixed. In broad outline, Leigh’s version offers little that departs from the themes of nine other Kelly biographies and several books that consider her in passing. Here again we see Kelly obsessed with becoming a star. “She was,” a friend recalls, “like a Patton tank on her way to somewhere.” Kelly threatened to break a long-term contract at MGM if the studio refused to loan her to Paramount to play a plum role in The Country Girl. Metro relented and Kelly copped an Oscar for her performance. Leigh also follows other biographers to the bedrooms where Kelly walked in, stripped naked, then pursued an affair, often with a considerably older co-star (Gary Cooper, William Holden, Frank Sinatra, et al.). Kelly’s storybook marriage to Prince Rainier had scant effect on her promiscuity. The union, which sprang from a public-relations move to polish Monaco’s faded image, soon left Princess Grace lonely; she diverted herself, as her husband did, with affairs. Leigh does bring a fresh perspective to Kelly’s acting, especially in a favorable critique of Kelly’s underrated work in High Noon. To a narrative highlighting sleeping arrangements, Leigh adds to what has already been reported about Kelly’s prodigious sex life the news that she slept with Tony Curtis. The author also devotes an entire chapter to the question of whether Kelly’s affair with David Niven was short- or long-term.
What lay beneath the compulsions? Leigh never gets beyond the surface of Kelly’s need to please a distant, philandering father.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-34236-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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