A respectful overview that lets an icon of women's filmmaking emerge as a full-fledged human being, social crusader, and artist. As in My Last Days with Errol Flynn (not reviewed), which he coauthored, Donati uses abundant research to coax readers to a broader understanding of his subject—in this case, to reestablish Lupino's (191895) position as a top film actress and discuss her directorial accomplishments in aesthetic rather than gender-related terms. Born into a generations-old stage family in England, the teenage Lupino was already an experienced actress when summoned to Hollywood in 1933. The big-studio years that follow comprise some of the book's liveliest passages, partly because Lupino's star was on the rise (she earned more than Bogart in High Sierra) and partly because her Hollywood cohorts, particularly the moguls, live up to their stereotypical dazzle. Jack Warner pegged Lupino ``another Bette Davis''; Columbia head Harry Cohn pronounced, ``You are not beautiful, Ida, but you've got a funny little pan.'' Years of acclaim followed (The Hard Way, Pillow to Post), until 1947 when her contract with Warner Bros. was canceled. Over the next decade, she wrote scripts and formed a production company, Filmakers, making movies about social problems others avoided—illegitimacy, rape, polio. For two decades she was a respected film and television director (Hard, Fast and Beautiful, The Hitchhiker), hailed for her economical, fast-paced style. Throughout her life she was known for her professional largesse, giving several people an early break, notably director Sam Peckinpah. While this book enthralls with the glamour of a high-rolling Hollywood life, its restraint is refreshing. Donati treads lightly over common tell-all stomping grounds—three failed marriages, affairs, career decline, estrangement from her only child, Bridget. Ida Dearest will have to be written by someone else. A welcome, gentlemanly work on a lauded yet underappreciated figure. (24 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8131-1895-6
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as focused as Just Kids, but an atmospheric, moody, and bittersweet memoir to be savored and pondered.
Iconic poet, writer, and artist Smith (Just Kids, 2010, etc.) articulates the pensive rhythm of her life through the stations of her travels.
Spending much of her time crouched in a corner table of a Greenwich Village cafe sipping coffee, jotting quixotic notes in journals, and “plotting my next move,” the author reflects on the places she’s visited, the personal intercourse, and the impact each played on her past and present selves. She describes a time in 1978 when she planned to open her own cafe, but her plans changed following a chance meeting with MC5 guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, who swiftly stole and sealed her heart with marriage and children. A graceful, ruminative tour guide, Smith writes of traveling together with Fred armed with a vintage 1967 Polaroid to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in northwest French Guiana, then of solitary journeys to Frida Kahlo’s Mexican Casa Azul and to the graves of Sylvia Plath, Jean Genet, and a swath of legendary Japanese filmmakers. After being seduced by Rockaway Beach in Queens and indulgently purchasing a ramshackle bungalow there, the property was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy—though she vowed to rebuild. In a hazy, often melancholy narrative, the author synchronizes past memories and contemporary musings on books, art, and Michigan life with Fred. Preferring to write productively from the comfort of her bed, Smith vividly describes herself as “an optimistic zombie propped up by pillows, producing pages of somnambulistic fruit.” She spent seasons of lethargy binge-watching crime TV, arguing with her remote control, venturing out to a spontaneous and awkward meeting with chess great Bobby Fischer, and trekking off to interview Paul Bowles in Tangiers. No matter the distance life may take her, Smith always recovers some semblance of normalcy with the simplistic pleasures of a deli coffee on her Gotham stoop, her mind constantly buoyed by humanity, art, and memory.
Not as focused as Just Kids, but an atmospheric, moody, and bittersweet memoir to be savored and pondered.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87510-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
SEEN & HEARD
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.
An epic cradle-to-grave biography of the king of pop art from Gopnik (co-author: Warhol Women, 2019), who served as chief art critic for the Washington Post and the art and design critic for Newsweek.
With a hoarder’s zeal, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) collected objects he liked until shopping bags filled entire rooms of his New York town house. Rising to equal that, Gopnik’s dictionary-sized biography has more than 7,000 endnotes in its e-book edition and drew on some 100,000 documents, including datebooks, tax returns, and letters to lovers and dealers. With the cooperation of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the author serves up fresh details about almost every aspect of Warhol’s life in an immensely enjoyable book that blends snappy writing with careful exegeses of the artist’s influences and techniques. Warhol exploded into view in his mid-40s with his pop art paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and silkscreens of Elvis and Marilyn. However, fame didn’t banish lifelong anxieties heightened by an assassination attempt that left him so fearful he bought bulletproof eyeglasses. After the pop successes, Gopnik writes, Warhol’s life was shaped by a consuming desire “to climb back onto that cutting edge,” which led him to make experimental films, launch Interview magazine, and promote the Velvet Underground. At the same time, Warhol yearned “for fine, old-fashioned love and coupledom,” a desire thwarted by his shyness and his awkward stance toward his sexuality—“almost but never quite out,” as Gopnik puts it. Although insightful in its interpretations of Warhol’s art, this biography is sure to make waves with its easily challenged claims that Warhol revealed himself early on “as a true rival of all the greats who had come before” and that he and Picasso may now occupy “the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses.” Any controversy will certainly befit a lodestar of 20th-century art who believed that “you weren’t doing much of anything as an artist if you weren’t questioning the most fundamental tenets of what art is and what artists can do.”
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-229839-3
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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