Martin’s star quality prevails.
Affectionate but not airbrushed portrait of the Broadway diva who got her first big break with a naughty Cole Porter song but flew into legend in a children’s classic.
Davis (Van Johnson: MGM’s Golden Boy, 2001, etc.) draws upon a full shelf of oral histories he collected from various theater artists to tell the story of Mary Martin (1913–90). A stage-struck Texas girl who didn’t let a teenage marriage (or the resulting son, Larry Hagman) stand in her way, she was undeterred even by a humiliating 1935 rejection from theater impresario Billy Rose. In a moment worthy of Busby Berkeley, Martin told her mother, “I’m going back to California and I’m going to have a career.” She copped leads in several tepid movie musicals, but the camera did not love her. She turned to Broadway, which loved her from the moment she did a striptease while singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in 1938. Her signature roles, in South Pacific, Peter Pan and The Sound of Music, were more demure, but she established an intense rapport with the audience in whatever she did. Clearly a Martin fan—indeed, he spent some time with her on the ranch in Brazil to which she more or less retired in the ’70s—Davis summons scores of anecdotes and testimonials demonstrating that she could be warm, generous and supremely professional. He also acknowledges that she could be controlling and temperamental, most notably during tryouts for the flop musical Jennie in 1963. Micromanaging every aspect of her career, second husband Richard Halliday irritated and frequently outraged nearly everyone in Martin’s life, including her semi-estranged son Hagman. In addition, Davis reports, Halliday was a mean-tempered drug and alcohol abuser and a closet homosexual. As for Martin’s alleged romances with Jean Arthur and Janet Gaynor, the author declares that the exact nature of those relationships is “unknown.”
Martin’s star quality prevails.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8061-3905-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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