A feisty memoir by one of America's most gifted actresses. Although movie fans might know her best as the pushy mother of Dick Van Dyke in Bye Bye Birdie (a part she played when she was in her 30s), theater buffs have long revered Stapleton for her power in parts ranging from the heavily dramatic (Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic) to the wildly comic (Neil Simon's Plaza Suite, in which she played three roles). Personally, she was known as a very outspoken lady with a roller-coaster private life. Now Stapleton, with celebrity coauthor Scovell, has put all sides of her personality on display in this fascinating autobiography. Despite her unconventional looks and figure (about which she's very hard on herself), Stapleton leapt to stardom quite young, when Tennessee Williams took a chance on this relatively unknown actress by casting her for the lead in The Rose Tattoo, a part he had written for Anna Magnani. It was an exciting time in the theater, and Stapleton knew, and tells wonderful anecdotes about, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and many others. We see her move with apparent ease from theater to television to film, eventually winning several Tonys, an Emmy, and an Oscar. Writing in a pleasing conversational tone, Stapleton is also candid and refreshingly unapologetic about the darker sides of her life: her phobias (multiple), her drinking (heavy, for many years), and her relationships (varied, including one with the legendary George Abbott, from the time he was 81 until he was 91, when he left her for a younger woman); but throughout the rockiest portions of her life, the reader feels the thrill she still gets from her work. Stapleton has written an autobiography reminiscent of her best performances: brash, peppery, sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious, and always involving. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81092-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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