JUST IN TIME: Notes from My Life

by Phyllis Newman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1988

Actress-singer-comedienne Newman's bouts with two mastectomies and her upbeat homage to Broadway folk is a smashing heart-wringer. Wife of the lyricist Adolph Green (of Comden and Green), Newman springs from a life deep-soaked in Broadway arts. She knows just where the heartline is in each little turn leading to her big turns. Perhaps this show-time gutsiness derives as well from her father--a man of infinite chutzpah and failure and a laughably inept handwriting soothsayer--and her mother, a fortuneteller with crystal ball who outearned Dad at reading lives and was always passing him money under restaurant tables. Already successful, Newman really took off when she auditioned for slippery Hungarian genius Green and slowly adapted to his pals and collaborators, Lenny Bernstein, Steve Sondheim, Jule Styne, Frank Sinatra, Betty Bacall--and irrepressible Sydney Chaplin, who spirited Phyllis and Adolph off for evenings on the veranda with Charlie and Oona at Vevey. Along the way we meet Newman's buddies--Cynthia and Patrick O'Neal, Gloria [James] Jones, Barbara ""Bobby"" Handman, and a small cocoon of others. Among her great passages is a set-piece about funerals for famous close friends--Bennett Cerf, Michael Kidd, Bob Fosse--at some of which she was requested to sing (farewells that squeeze the old chest sponge), and another about forked-tongued surgeons she shuffled through for each sick breast in its turn. And don't skip her Streepian sobbing and scrubbing and screaming in the shower scene the night she was about to lose her second breast. A show-stopper.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1988

Categories: NONFICTION