A touching, bittersweet remembrance of a workaday career in acting.
Lenz’s debut memoir recounts his four decades on the stage and screen.
Brushes with greatness are a recurring theme throughout Lenz’s reflection on a lifetime playing Hollywood bit parts and regional theater roles. Among the memories: an old friendship with Goldie Hawn, a fight scene with John Wayne and a bout of drinking with Jason Robards and George C. Scott. Lenz concedes that he peaked early, however, gaining minor buzz in the late 1960s as an up-and-coming actor only to follow a trajectory that delivered lots of work but not much acclaim. “My God, people listened when I spoke,” he recalls in one wistful memory of early promise. “Naturally, I assumed this was the way it would always be.” Instead, Lenz was relegated to endless auditions and decades of journeyman roles in TV series like Marcus Welby, MD, The Six Million Dollar Man and Falcon Crest. His story is freighted with disappointment, although the author blames only himself for some of his bad breaks. These include the decision to pass on a stage opportunity with a well-known Hollywood director for a lead role in a Kansas City dinner-theater production of The Owl and the Pussy Cat. Lenz uses the present tense to suitable effect in sustaining immediacy between flashbacks from decades ago and more recent events, and he documents a career longevity that is breathtaking. He writes with self-punishing honesty in places, opening up about substance abuse, failed marriages and troubled children. He describes visiting a Los Angeles speakeasy to revel in his notoriety as a working actor only to have his bubble burst by a drunken community college professor who taunts him for not being better known. “You know what you are? You’re a loser.” It’s a slap in the face, but it lends Lenz the clarity to see that fame isn’t everything. His story is more about self-acceptance than glory, and readers will cheer Lenz as he reaches that realization himself.
A touching, bittersweet remembrance of a workaday career in acting.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0984844203
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Chromodroid Press
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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