ReportWire

Tag: old hollywood book club

  • Dolly Parton’s Divine Dogma: “You Better Get to Livin’”

    “I live by my gut, so to speak,” Dolly Parton writes in her new memoir, Star of the Show: My Life on Stage. “The God gut is what I call it. I just seem to know what I should and shouldn’t do because I pray about things like that.”

    Her gut has usually been right. Parton wears many hats: singer, songwriter, philanthropist, entrepreneur, brilliant businesswoman, theme park owner, star of classic films like Steel Magnolias, 9 to 5, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and recent honorary Oscar winner.

    A spiritual, earthy dreamer, who is also funny as hell and sharp as a tack, Parton has arguably crafted her personal brand more successfully than any other celebrity. In her first autobiography, 1994’s Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, she also reveals herself to be a beautifully deep, bawdy and witty writer of prose who, much like Louis Armstrong, recounts her hardscrabble beginnings and the hard luck characters who shaped her with equal parts gratitude and understanding.

    But like fellow beloved and savvy icon Sophia Loren, Parton has the stories she will tell you—and the ones she won’t. This is evident from her enjoyable but lighter trilogy of coffee-table memoirs of the past few years: Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, 2023’s Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, and 2025’s Star of the Show: My Life on Stage.

    Yet all of Parton’s memoirs have one thing in common: they make the reader genuinely feel happy and warm. Parton brings us along for the ride, with Kenny Rogers, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Andy Warhol, Willie Nelson, Tammy Wynette, Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts, Merle Haggard, Miley Cyrus, and a host of Parton’s other nearest and dearest riding shotgun.

    “One of my favorite expressions is ‘Angels fly because they take themselves lightly,’” Parton writes in My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “They don’t think of themselves as angels. They just are…I’m not for a moment suggesting that I am an angel, but I have certainly known some.”

    Parton as a child in Tennessee circa 1955.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

    In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)

    “In the midst of direst poverty and despair,” Parton writes in Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, “the human spirit, especially that of children, will find some hope to cling to, some promise of a better day.”

    Hadley Hall Meares

    Source link

  • Glamour and Grit: Anjelica Huston’s Cultured Coolness

    “Remember,” Anjelica Huston’s father, John, used to tell her, “You can always put your hands in your pockets and walk away.”

    Huston never took the legendary director’s advice. She’s been the scion of a famed Hollywood family, a top model, and an Oscar-winning actress in films like Prizzi’s Honor, The Grifters, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Dead, The Addams Family, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and The Witches. In Huston’s two autobiographies—2013’s A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York and 2014’s Watch Me: A Memoir—she also reveals herself to be an excellent writer whose keen eye for aesthetics and detail would have made her a great fashion editor, travel writer, or gossip columnist as well.

    Her words allow the slightly tough and achingly chic Huston to reveal a strikingly cuddly, softhearted streak, especially regarding children and animals. “For a sophisticated girl,” she notes, “I could be tragically gullible.”

    Her rolodex of experience is impressive. Scan these pages, and you’ll find Huston reminiscing about her encounters with Montgomery Clift, Diane von Furstenberg, Bill Murray, Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, Joni Mitchell, Prince Albert, Josephine Baker, John Cusack, Helmut Lang, Groucho Marx, Diana Vreeland, Huey P. Newton, and Mick Jagger, among others.

    Most of all, Huston’s books show her determination to evolve and defy expectations—a drive that’s both inspiring and timely. In the early 1980s, famed director Tony Richardson cruelly told Huston, “Poor little you. So much talent and so little to show for it. You’re never going to do anything with your life.” Huston’s reaction will resonate with readers everywhere:

    “Perhaps you’re right,” I answered. Inside I was thinking, “Watch me.”

    An Irish Fairy Tale

    “My life was mostly fantasy,” Huston writes of her imaginative childhood. Indeed, in A Story Lately Told she paints a lush, evocative, sensual portrait of a charmed, if lonely, storybook youth.

    Hadley Hall Meares

    Source link

  • The Bon Vivant: Michael Caine’s Pursuit of the Good Life

    “I was once asked in an interview: ‘How would you sum up your life in one line?’” Michael Caine writes in his 1992 autobiography, What’s It All About?. “And I answered, ‘All my dreams came true.’”

    Indeed, Caine’s life is a testament to the power of hard work and tireless enthusiasm. He rose from his impoverished Cockney upbringing to become a two-time Oscar winner, successful restaurateur, enthusiastic gardener, cook, and star of classics like Zulu, Alfie, The Man Who Would Be King, Dressed to Kill, Husbands and Wives, and A Muppet’s Christmas Carol.

    The expert storyteller has written four memoirs; the absolute must-read What’s It All About? and the subsequent The Elephant to Hollywood (2010), Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: And Other Lessons in Life (2018) and Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over: My Guide to Life (2024).

    A gleeful, globe-trotting name dropper, Caine dishes with gusto and kindness about dear friends and co-stars including Sean Connery, Sidney Poitier, John Huston, Roger Moore, Jane Fonda, Mia Farrow, Rita Hayworth, Laurence Olivier, Liza Minnelli, Noel Coward, Faye Dunaway, Candice Bergen, Sylvester Stallone, Lauren Bacall, Sue Mengers, Elizabeth Taylor, Tom Cruise, Sandra Bullock, Beyoncé, and Vin Diesel.

    Even more entertaining is when Caine recounts his run-ins with the likes of Charles Manson, Gloria Steinem, Shelley Winters, Marlene Dietrich (who once demanded that he dress better: “You look like a bum!”), Brigette Bardot (who threw a loaf of bread at him) and Richard Burton (who growled, after Caine wished him a happy Christmas, “why don’t you go fuck yourself?”).

    A consummate renaissance man, Caine is still curious and hopeful at the ripe age of 92. “I remember,” he writes in Blowing the Bloody Doors Off, “Roger Moore, years ago, saying to me, ‘Cheer up. You’d better have a good time because this is not a rehearsal, this is life—this is the show.’”

    The Boy From the Elephant

    “I started to act at the age of three,” Michael Caine writes in What’s It All About. His first director was his mother, Ellen, who hid in the family’s two-room flat as he delivered his lines. “Mummy out!” he would say, slamming the door in various bill collectors’ faces.

    Nervous at first, the little boy began to enjoy this frequent charade—until a stern Jehovah’s Witness told him he would never get to heaven if he lied. When he asked Ellen where heaven was, she replied, “All I know is that it’s not around here.”

    Here was Elephant and Castle, a notorious slum in South London. Caine, born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite on March 14, 1933, was from pure Cockney stock. His brilliant but uneducated father, also called Maurice, came from a long line of Michlewhites who worked as porters at Billingsgate Fish Market. Ellen, “rosy, cheerful-very funny-and tough as nails,” worked as a charwoman.

    Hadley Hall Meares

    Source link

  • When You’re Smiling: Louis Armstrong’s Sunny Side of the Street

    When You’re Smiling: Louis Armstrong’s Sunny Side of the Street

    “I’ve seen everything from a child, coming up,” Louis Armstrong once said. “Nothing I ain’t never seen before.”

    He wasn’t kidding. In his revelatory 1954 memoir, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, the legendary entertainer recounts his hardscrabble childhood in “disgustingly segregated and prejudiced” New Orleans. Armstrong doesn’t sugar coat the realities of his early life—digging through trash cans outside restaurants to find food he could sell, surviving the violence and chaos that surrounded him.

    But it is the pioneering jazz genius’s overwhelming empathy and humor that make this autobiography a must-read. With what writer Dan Morgenstern (in Terry Teachout’s definitive biography Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong,) calls Armstrong’s “ceaseless fascination with the foibles of human beings,” he vividly paints a picture of the eccentrics who populated turn-of-the century New Orleans. Constantly looking for the good in everyone, for tender mercies and acts of kindness, Armstrong celebrates the sort of generosity he’d eventually be famous for.

    A sensible perfectionist, Armstrong would take New Orleans, and the lessons it taught him, to stages and screens around the world. “When I pick up that horn, that’s all,” he once said. “The world’s behind me, and I don’t feel no different about that horn now than I did when I was playing in New Orleans. That’s my living and my life. I love them notes. That’s why I try to make them right.”

    Little Louis

    “Mayann told me that the night I was born there was a great big shooting scrape in the Alley and two big guys killed each other,” Armstrong writes in Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans.

    Until the day he died, Louis Daniel Armstrong believed he was born on July 4th, 1900. But according to Teachout, he was actually born on August 4, 1901, to William Armstrong and a 15-year-old Mary Ann Albert (whom Armstrong called Mayann).

    Armstrong was raised by his beloved paternal grandmother, Josephine, in a New Orleans ward teaming with mayhem and music. “There were churchpeople, gamblers, hustlers, cheap pimps, thieves, prostitutes, and lots of children,” he writes. “There were bars, honky-tonks and saloons, and lots of women walking the streets for tricks to take to their ‘pads’ as they called their rooms.”

    The people-pleasing child, proudly wearing his white Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, would move to an even tougher part of town with Mayann and her sister, Mama Lucy, when he was five. Armstrong’s love for the hard-drinking, humorous, big-hearted Mayann (whom Teachout believes was occasionally a sex worker) and the values she instilled in him radiate from every page.

    “Whether my mother did any hustling, I cannot say,” Armstrong writes. “If she did, she certainly kept it out of my sight. One thing is certain; everybody from the churchfolks to the lowest roughneck treated her with the greatest respect. She was glad to say hello to everybody and she always held her head up.”

    Armstrong held his own head up even when he roamed barefoot through the streets, looked after by an extended community, and soaking in everything he saw and heard. The famed Funky Butt Hall was on the corner where he lived, and though Armstrong was not allowed in, he became enamored with the revolutionary blues and jazz that was percolating within as he listened from the sidewalk. “As I grew up,” he writes, “I observed everything and everybody. I loved all those people and they loved me. The good ones and the bad ones all thought Little Louis (as they called me) was OK.”

    Silver Lining

    At only eleven years old, Armstrong was selling newspapers and singing in a quartet in the fabled red-light district of Storyville. “Singing at random,” he writes, “we wandered through the street until someone called to us to sing a few songs. Afterwards we would pass our hats and at the end of the night we would divvy up.”

    Hadley Hall Meares

    Source link

  • The Enigma: Diana Ross’s Unstoppable Drive

    The Enigma: Diana Ross’s Unstoppable Drive

    “I believe that I am better emotionally equipped to handle a performance than an intimate business meeting or a one-on-one encounter,” the legendary Diana Ross writes in her 1993 memoir, Secrets of a Sparrow.

    This may be the understatement of the century. The iconic singer, and star of famed films including Lady Sings the Blues (which got her nominated for a best actress Oscar) and The Wiz has long had a reputation for being a “diva,” someone whose infamous demands were outshone only by her magnetically joyful talent.

    Secrets of A Sparrow is a lyrical, at times frustrating biography, long on poetic platitudes but short on specifics. There is an undercurrent of defensiveness which runs throughout—understandable when one remembers the systemic racism, sexism, and persecution Ross faced as she rose her way to the top. “It seems that with every achievement, with every move I have made, no matter how great or small, someone was always there to try to bring me down,” she writes.

    Though Ross reveals few secrets, not even touching on her reported romances with Smokey Robinson, Ryan O’Neal and Gene Simmons, her character emerges in ways she may not have intended. Ross comes across as a misunderstood, curious genius: sensitive, brave, anxious, oblivious, and utterly unknowable. “My separateness, my aloneness, has always been here and is here now,” she writes, “a recurring theme that has continuously run through my life.”

    Diana Ross performs at The Point Theatre in Dublin, March 10 2004.ShowBizIreland/Getty Images.

    Her Eyes on the Prize

    “My story has often been referred to as classic ‘rags to riches,’ but in truth, that description doesn’t fit me at all. For starters, the Rosses were never raggedy,” Ross writes in Secrets of a Sparrow. “I was brought up to have ideals, to believe that anything was possible, and that hard work was part of that.”

    Diana Ross was born in Detroit, Michigan, on March 26, 1944, the second of six children. Her mother, Ernestine, named her Diane, but a mistake on the birth certificate changed the name to Diana. Ross describes herself as an unstoppable force, a “small waiflike child with vibrant energy, vital, curious, full of piss and vinegar, and wildly excited to be alive.”

    Hadley Hall Meares

    Source link

  • Two Survivors: The Scandalous Saga of Lana Turner and Cheryl Crane

    Two Survivors: The Scandalous Saga of Lana Turner and Cheryl Crane

    “Even to this day when my mother and I refer to the tragedy in conversation, we euphemize it as ‘the paragraph,’ because no press mention of us seems to be complete unless it includes a paragraph about what happened that Good Friday 1958.”

    So writes Cheryl Crane, daughter of movie star Lana Turner, in the amazingly frank and compassionate 1988 autobiography Detour: A Hollywood Story. On April 4, 1958, 14-year-old Crane killed Johnny Stompanato, her mother’s abusive boyfriend, who had ties to the gangster Mickey Cohen. The story became a media sensation. YetCrane’s chronicle of her life as Hollywood princess turned exploited killer is about more than “the paragraph;” it’s filled with so much searing honesty and graceful forgiveness that it almost boggles the mind. (Crane is an accomplished author: she also co-wrote the celebratory coffee table book LANA: The Memories, the Myth, the Movies in 2008).

    While Crane paints Turner, the glamorous star of films including Ziegfeld Girl, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Imitation of Life, in an often-unflattering light, her tone doesn’t emulate the bitter memoirs of other stars’ children. “Mother was never intentionally cruel to anyone,” she writes, “though sometimes it may have seemed to me that she was.”

    Lana: The Lady, the Legend, The Truth , Turner’s own highly enjoyable—if carefully curated—1982 autobiography, bears this assertion out. In it, Turner recounts her seven tumultuous marriages, numerous tragic miscarriages, and reckless choices. The actor, who died in 1995, comes across as a fundamentally good-hearted, but woefully gullible romantic, someone who bought into the Hollywood star system hook, line, and sinker. But Crane emerges as the true star, a woman who refused to let “the paragraph” define her life. “It’s been a long, hard journey for her,” Turner writes of Crane, “but she’s made it—made me proud, too, to be her mother.”

    The Sweater Girl

    Julia Jean Turner was born in Wallace, Idaho, on February 8, 1921. In Lana: The Lady, the Legend, The Truth, Turner bluntly describes her rootless, hardscrabble childhood, speculating that the trauma of the 1930 murder of her charming gambler father, Virgil, may have led to her many obsessive love affairs. 

    Turner’s mother, hairdresser Mildred, tried valiantly to raise her daughter, but had to leave her with an abusive foster family when money got tight. (Mildred immediately pulled her out when she learned of the abuse—which would become something of a theme in the Turner family—but the damage was already done.) In 1936, the duo took a mud-covered jalopy to Depression-era Los Angeles. 

    Determined to be seen as ladies, Mildred and her daughter would pour over etiquette books by Emily Post and read Vogue cover to cover. According to Turner, she was discovered sipping a Coke with friends at the Top Hat Café by Billy Wilkerson, the infamous founder of The Hollywood Reporter.

    Turner was quickly cast in the 1937 film They Won’t Forget as a sexy murder victim, wiggling down the street suggestively in a tight sweater. The objectification of the role mortified the young teenager, but it caused a sensation. Turner—now rechristened Lana—became a sex symbol overnight. 

    Seemingly addicted to romantic drama, Turner palled around with the equally voracious Ava Gardner and carried out a stream of high-profile relationships with the likes of Tyrone Power (her true love), Artie Shaw, Howard Hughes, Frank Sinatra, Victor Mature, Robert Stack, and (allegedly) a married Clark Gable. Brutally honest about some relationships and mum on others she unabashedly discusses her love of partying, which gained her the moniker “the nightclub queen.”

    “How I’d love to dress up and go dancing with a handsome dark man,” she writes. 
    “Ciro’s was a favorite haunt…the headwaiter would spring forward-— ‘Ah, Miss Turner . . .’ and escort me in. I had a special table right by the stairs so I could watch the comings and goings. I’d head straight there, never glancing right or left. And then, when I was seated, I’d give the room a long casing, bowing to this one or blowing that one a kiss. Silly, I guess, but fun.”

    Star-baby

    It was into this heady atmosphere that Cheryl Crane was born on July 25, 1943. Her father, Stephen Crane, was a magnetic, slightly shady actor and gadabout whose marriage to Turner was already falling apart. To make matters worse, Cheryl was in danger because her blood was incompatible with her mother’s RH factor blood. “My birth was a life and death struggle that swayed in the balance for nearly two months,” Crane writes. “That was me all over.”

    Hadley Hall Meares

    Source link

  • The Contrarian: Marlon Brando’s Paradoxical Life

    The Contrarian: Marlon Brando’s Paradoxical Life

    “If I hadn’t been an actor, I’ve often thought I’d have become a con man and wound up in jail.”

    So writes the iconic Marlon Brando in his 1994 autobiography, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, co-written by Robert Lindsey. The smoldering star of A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, The Godfather, and Last Tango in Paris, Brando redefined what it meant to be an actor and a star.

    Yet the man behind the star is a much more slippery affair. Songs My Mother Taught Me reads in part as an apologia from a charming, brilliant, curious, deeply eccentric man who claims he used to be angry, used to be bad to women—without offering much proof of his professed transformation. 

    Brando refused to write about his wives or his eleven children, and uses pseudonyms for the romantic partners he does discuss—meaning that we don’t hear about his alleged relationships with the likes of Richard Pryor, Shelley Winters, Christian Marquand, and Ursula Andress. Though he can’t resist admitting to a quick affair with his friend Marilyn Monroe—whom he believes was murdered. 

    But then again, who knows what Brando really believed? As his longtime secretary told William J. Mann—author of the overly sympathetic but beautiful written biography The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando—Brando was a “master manipulator” who “did not tell the truth if a lie would suffice.” It’s an assessment Brando would have agreed with.  “I’m good at telling lies smoothly, giving an impression of things as they are not and making people think I’m sincere,” he writes. “A good con man can fool anybody, but the first person he fools is himself.”

    Bud 

    Marlon Brando Jr. was born April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska. His parents were larger than life: the vivacious, beautiful bohemian Dorothy and Marlon Sr., a handsome, womanizing traveling salesman and “card-carrying prick” whose “blood consisted of compounds of alcohol, testosterone, adrenaline and anger.”

    Brando viscerally described a gut-wrenching, neglected childhood centered around his beloved mother’s torturous alcoholism. Brando and his two older sisters would spend hours searching for their mother, who disappeared frequently during benders, only to return home to give family life another go. “Sometimes alcohol sent her into a crying jag,” he writes. “But initially it usually made her happy, giddy and full of mirth, and she might sit down at the piano and sing to herself, and we often joined in.”

    Called “Bud” by his family, the sensitive, curious Brando was already acting out in kindergarten due to his unstable family life.  “I was the bad boy of the class and had to sit under the teacher’s desk,” he recalls, “where my primary activity was staring up her dress.”

    As the family moved around, ending up at a farm in Libertyville, Illinois, the increasingly angry, defiant Brando was left to his own devices. Obsessed with rhythm, he wanted to become a drummer, and became a self-proclaimed master of “pranks,” which he brags about with juvenile relish. After being fired as a teenage usher in a movie theater for refusing to wear a shirt under his hot jacket, he stuffed the air conditioning system with rotten broccoli and limburger cheese. 

    Fed up with the sixteen-year-old Brando’s bad attitude, his father sent him to his alma mater: the Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota. But Brando could not be tamed. “I did my best to tear the school apart and not get caught at it,” he writes, in what could be a manifesto for his life. “I wanted to destroy the place. I hated authority and did everything I could to defeat it by resisting it, subverting it, tricking it and outmaneuvering it.”

    Hadley Hall Meares

    Source link