Sunday, November 8, 2009

Biographies “Movie-star biographies - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel” plus 3 more

Biographies “Movie-star biographies - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel” plus 3 more

Movie-star biographies - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Posted: 07 Nov 2009 02:02 PM PST

Posted: Nov. 7, 2009

In the "Mad Men" era, they were the pinnacles of sophisticated pin-upry: grown-up, smart and sexy. That's as good a reason as any for the recent explosion of biographies of iconic actresses of the 1950s and '60s.

High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly. By Donald Spoto. Harmony. 304 pages. $25.99.

Grace Kelly lived a fairy-tale life: from Philadelphia society girl to cover-girl model to Hollywood princess (and Oscar winner, for "The Country Girl") to real-life princess. Or at least that's what it said in the papers.

So how was her life really? Donald Spoto, who's written a slew of celebrity biographies, has an answer: pretty much the same as the fairy tale.

It may not be completely Spoto's fault that "High Society" has a glossy, less-is-less feel to it. As he explains in the introduction, he first met Kelly when she already was settled into her role as Princess Grace of Monaco, and she immediately cast a spell over him. (I'm sure he wasn't the first.)

What you get is largely Kelly's life from Kelly's point of view, a poor little rich girl who has it all and lives happily ever after, while missing what she had.

There's some of the gossip-page stuff, like her coulda-woulda-shouldn'ta relationship with fashion designer Oleg Cassini. There's unpublished interviews with co-stars (James Stewart, Cary Grant) and directors (Alfred Hitchcock).

But for all the pop psychology - a hard-to-please father and the daddy complex that resulted - "High Society" is more a valentine than the detailed portrait it might have been.

Thank Heaven: A Memoir. By Leslie Caron. Viking. 272 pages. $25.95.

In her enchanting but sketchy memoir, Caron doesn't pretend she's got the whole story on herself. Which is a good thing, since there are whole chunks of her history missing from "Thank Heaven."

What you do get are some captivating remembrances of some of her best-known movies ("An American in Paris," "Gigi") and Caron's opinions on just about everyone in her life. And for someone with her résumé - hired as a teenager by Gene Kelly, befriended by French film giants Francois Truffaut and Jean Renoir, a player by marriage in the London theater revival, lover of Warren Beatty (who then rejected her as a co-star in "Bonnie and Clyde") - that's a lot of people.

She also offers a lot of insight into the nature of celebrity, a world that she loathes and, when it's gone, mourns.

Caron recalls, after leaving a Hollywood party, nearly driving into a house in the middle of the street; it was being moved to a higher-priced neighborhood. What surprised her most was that no one else was surprised. "Everyone in Hollywood was in transit," Caron writes. "You were either rising or slipping."

How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood. By William J. Mann. Houghton Mifflin. 484 pages. $28.

Mann's point is simple: Liz Taylor invented modern-day movie stardom. And he's right, although he probably could have made his point better without the cattiness and hero worship.

Then again, if you can't be dishy about Liz - who busted up two famous marriages (not counting her own famous marriages), took on one movie studio while nearly bankrupting another, and gave the paparazzi their reason for being - who can you be dishy about?

For what is, in its essence, a superficial subject, Mann digs pretty deep, with loads of interviews and context to show Taylor's steady, deliberate construction of her fame from her days as a teen star (1944's "National Velvet") to winning her second Oscar (for 1966's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?").

In the end, the tone is the funnest thing about "How to Be a Movie Star." But it's also a distraction from an otherwise engaging and insightful study of celebrity.

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Ayn Rand: goddess of the market, gateway to the American right - Seattle Times

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 01:08 AM PST

'Ayn Rand and the World She Made'

by Anne C. Heller

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 592 pp., $35

'Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right'

by Jennifer Burns

Oxford University Press, 362 pp., $27.95

Two biographies are being published this fall of Ayn Rand. Both are remarkably evenhanded, given that opinions about the author of "The Fountainhead" (1943) and "Atlas Shrugged" (1957) rarely run lukewarm. Critics hated her rejection of the duty to be one's brother's keeper and the unabashed heroism of her fiction. Legions of readers come away from her books feeling awakened and transformed. Those who knew her said they never met anyone so brilliant, or so intellectually aggressive.

Rand lived a life a biographer should love: a life of opposition and conflict. But in the 27 years since her death, she has been the subject of only one major work, "The Passion of Ayn Rand" (1986). Its author, Barbara Branden, wrote a fascinating account, but she had been a Rand acolyte and her husband was Rand's secret sexual partner. Rand's story needed a more neutral biographer.

Now there are two. Anne Heller is a former fiction editor at Esquire and Redbook who first read Rand in her 40s. Jennifer Burns teaches history at the University of Virginia and first researched Rand for a Ph.D. thesis. Neither accepts Rand's philosophy of radical individualism. Burns was given access to Rand's papers and Heller was not, though Heller had many other sources.

Heller's is the better biography of Rand the writer. It is 45 percent longer. It has more about Rand's life in Russia, where she was born into a Jewish family whose business was seized by the Communists; how she came to America in 1926, and her early struggles as a writer in Hollywood. Heller shows how Rand's early life and work influenced her later books.

Heller focuses also on Rand's powerful sexuality, telling the story of how Rand stalked the man she married, Frank O'Connor, on a Hollywood movie set, and seduced her most prominent follower, Nathaniel Branden, when he was 25 and she 50. About this Heller pulls no punches. Of Branden she writes, "He made an ideal mistress, even as Frank had become an ideal wife."

Burns' biography, subtitled "Ayn Rand and the American Right," is the better book on Rand's influence.

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Burns writes that Rand's philosophy offered readers "the idea that things made sense, that the world was rational, logical and could be understood." In an age of moral relativism, Rand was "an unabashed moralist, an ideologue, and an idealist." In a century when critics expected angst and alienation, she offered heroes. She celebrated the ego and told readers their lives belonged to them — a message that appealed to the young.

Rand's influence was also political. "For over half a century Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right," Burns writes, and it is true, not that conservatives always welcomed her. She was an atheist, and in 1950 she said to William F. Buckley in her Russian accent, "You arrh too eentelligent to bihleef in Gott!" Buckley, a Catholic, went on believing in God and Rand went on believing in herself.

Heller's book is copy-edited better than Burns', which has more than a dozen small errors, such as misstating when Republican leader Wendell Willkie's book was published and misspelling the name of his mistress.

In the end Rand believed too much in herself, which is clear from the last half of both biographies. Believing she had the truth, she broke with almost everyone close to her — Isabel Paterson, her mentor in American political culture; John Hospers, her fan in academia; Bennett Cerf, her publisher; and Nora, her Russian sister who didn't like her books.

Many don't. "Almost everything she wrote was unfashionable," writes Heller, and the statement holds true today. But Americans have bought 13 million of her books and are buying them still. She had a remarkable life, which makes both of these biographies worth reading.

Bruce Ramsey is a Seattle Times editorial writer.

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Keeping veterans' stories alive - Traverse City Record-Eagle

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 05:25 AM PST

TRAVERSE CITY -- America's last surviving World War I veteran is 108. World War II veterans are dying at the rate of more than 1,000 a day. And Vietnam War veterans now are collecting Social Security benefits.

If ever there was a need to keep their stories alive, it's now.

It's a fact that seems to be hitting home as groups everywhere step up their efforts to remember the American war experience. Last week the National World War II Museum opened its new complex featuring a reproduction canteen and a state-of-the-art theater -- home of a Tom Hanks-produced 4-D "cinematic experience" on the war. The Senate introduced a bill to rededicate and rename the District of Columbia War Memorial on the Washington Mall the "National and District of Columbia World War I Memorial." And Tributes.com, the online resource for local and national obituary news, announced the launch of a new section on its Web site dedicated to military tributes.

State and local efforts aren't far behind. In West Virginia, archives and history officials are working to develop online biographies for all 11,427 soldiers whose names are carved in the West Virginia Veterans Memorial. In Michigan, a documentary about the area's World War I soldiers known as the Polar Bears airs today on a Detroit PBS station and Nov. 16 on WCMU-TV.

"The memories of that war are rapidly fading," said Michael Rutledge, who tries to keep the stories alive through classes on military history and the first and second world wars at Traverse City College Preparatory Academy.

An Army careerist who served in the Persian Gulf War, Rutledge calls on novels, diaries and other first-person accounts to help tell the story of war. Besides well-known books like Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" and Ernst Junger's "Storm of Steel," he draws on a volume by the late local Holocaust survivor Harry Burger, whose daughter attends the school.

"He was a soldier in the war but he fought as a partisan. He was with other partisans who lived in the mountains in the Italian Alps for pretty much the whole war," Rutledge said. "It's honest and it's raw. That's the beauty of the primary source when you're studying something like this. You want it in the words of the person who went through it."

Rutledge said the classes are popular with students for whom "war" means the recent conflicts in the Middle East.

"It's something that they see a lot on television and I think they want to know more. Hopefully they want to find out what's really happening, not the fictional version," he said.

Senior Walter Hoover was born long after other wars ended, but has seen them in movies.

"In my opinion Hollywood really corrupts a lot of truth about what war is. They're trying to sell tickets," said Hoover, 17, a martial arts practitioner who took Rutledge's military history class to learn about the art and strategy of combat. "The veterans you talk to from World War II and Vietnam and earlier world wars have the truth about war and a deeper understanding of war and how horrific it is."

Learning about veterans' experiences first-hand allows younger generations to "put themselves in the soldiers' shoes," Hoover said. Yet many veterans are reluctant to revisit their war days unless pressed.

"Some of the World War II veterans never really talk about their experiences or what they've done," said John Korzek, who helps keep their stories alive by creating military displays for them and their families. "The displays, when we're working on them, actually get them talking to the families about their experiences."

A Vietnam veteran and retired Michigan State Police detective, Korzek began making law enforcement displays for retiring friends on the police force back in 1980. Now his Special Tributes, which he operates in a shop above his Old Mission Peninsula garage, is a retirement hobby and business that includes military, memorial, graduation and other displays.

Korzek said the displays are similar to shadow boxes and capture military service in words and objects like military medals, ribbons, patches, insignias, commendations, mission logbooks, photos, certificates and other memorabilia.

"Instead of all of that stuff sitting in a sock drawer, I put it in a display," he said, adding that he gets help from his wife, Sandy.

Retired police officer Keith Smith had a display made for his father, Donald Smith, who served under Gen. George S. Patton in World War II and landed on Utah Beach on D-Day. Then he ordered another for his mother- and father-in-law, Joseph and Belle Mullen, who met and married in uniform -- Belle was a nurse, Joe a hospital administrator -- while serving in the Army Air Force. When Joe died, the shadow box was displayed at his funeral.

Smith said the displays are not just tributes to those who served but catalysts for releasing their never-before-shared memories.

"I think it just brings good and bad memories back and I think this late in life veterans just want to tell their stories. It's turned families around," he said.

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Denise M. Koons of Palmerton - Allentown Morning Call

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 03:17 AM PST