Book Review: I Said Yes to Everything

(Picked up for $2 at the Broadway Flea Market) Life seldom goes in a straight line. Lee Grant's zigzagged for several decades and she documents the journey in a breezy, fun, thoughtful 450 pages (I got a beautifully beat-up paperback.) In her early 20s she rocketed to success with a memorable supporting role s a shoplifter in Detective Story on Broadway and garnered an Oscar nomination for the film version starring Kirk Douglas. Not long after she was blacklisted by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee for speaking out against the Committee at the funeral of a fellow actor who was hounded by them. She re-emerged in the 1960s on the thrice-weekly prime time soap Peyton Place, winning an Emmy. An Oscar for Shampoo and two more nominations (for The Landlord and Voyage of the Damned) followed. But the realities of aging and a bad case of stage fright and not being able to remember lines pushed her towards directing docs and features for film and TV, resulting in a second Oscar (for HBO's Down and Out in America.)  Grant is brutally honest on the status of actresses in Hollywood. Unlike in Britain where mature ladies such as Vanessa Redgrave, Dame Maggie Smith and Dame Judi Dench can continue starring well into their 80s, American women are thrust aside at the first sign of wrinkles. Grant chronicles her battle with aging, not out of vanity, but out of the necessity to keep working. That's another reason she was so mad about the blacklist, it robbed her of 12 youthful years of working in movies and TV. 

The book is also valuable in its detailed history of the blacklist. She gives the true history of the events covered in the TV movie Fear on Trial.

We also get plenty of info on working for her paycheck in Valley of the Dolls, Airport 77 and The Swarm, her two marriages, her daughter Dinah Manoff (Tony winner for Neil Simon's I Oughta Be in Pictures) and her adopted daughter, an affair with Burt Bacharach and juicy gossip on Liza Minnelli's wedding (the guests were kept waiting over an hour while Maid of Honor Elizabeth Taylor sent her assistant to get the right shoes.)

I interviewed Grant on the phone for my bio of George C. Scott (She played his wife in the NBC mini-series on Mussolini). She was very forthcoming and full of insights on working with Scott who was withholding of emotions until his wife Trish Van Devere arrived on the set late in the filming. The last film I saw her act in was David Lynch's super weird Mulholland Drive. It was a cameo with Ann Miller and the ladies were shot through a screen door. Miller played a landlady and Grant was a nutty tenant. At the time I thought, why is Lee Grant, such a great actress, doing such a nothing role? Now I understand. It was a farewell to acting in Hollywood in a crazy, surrealistic takedown of Tinseltown, the place where Grant was victimized and ultimately triumphed.