An unsparing look at the dark side of show business.
Adventures among the stars.
Agent and producer Phillips begins her candid debut memoir by recounting three miserable years as assistant to Judy Garland, “a demented, demanding, supremely talented drug addict,” a self-destructive drunk who lived on a cocktail of pills downed with limitless bottles of liebfraumilch. Enraptured with Garland from childhood, Phillips quickly became disillusioned with the woman she was charged to travel with, minister to, dress, feed, and, most of all, manage to get on stage. Despite feeling exploited and angry, Phillips admits that Garland served as “the lens through which I have seen, lived, and dealt with my life” and gave her “the armor to face the world.” As this sometimes-venomous and often very funny memoir shows, there were many deep chinks in that armor. After leaving Garland, the author became an agent at Creative Management Agency; her first client was 16-year-old Liza Minnelli, Garland’s “brilliant and lovely” daughter. Phillips took her under her wing, starting her on a dazzling career. After seeing her perform on TV variety shows, producers and directors clamored to hire her, and Phillips saw her own reputation rise. Along the way, she signed Robert Redford (“an actor who has both good looks and real ability”), Peter Sellers, David Bowie, and Barbra Streisand, among others. Planning to represent Liza exclusively, she resigned from CMA, where she had worked for 15 years. But Liza suddenly, and without explanation, dumped her, leaving her stunned, depressed, and unemployed. When friends invited her to see a musical production at the Actors’ Studio, she reluctantly dragged herself out of the house. That evening changed her life, and she decided to reinvent herself as a producer, starting with The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
An unsparing look at the dark side of show business.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06577-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
PROFILES
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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