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.

Book Review: Armageddon in Retrospect

(Hardback in good condition. Bought for $7.95 at the Bucks County Bookstore, Doylestown, PA) Still more Vonnegut as I continue on my quest to read all of his miscellaneous posthumously published pieces. This collection has the common theme of the horrors of war and what it does to normally good people. This has ten short stories, one long non-fiction piece on his experience as a prisoner of war during the fire-bombing of Dresden, a letter written to his family as he waits to be transported back to the States, his last written speech (given at Clowes Hall in Indianapolis by his son Mark after Kurt's death), and an introduction by Mark.

The terror and devastation of warfare hits the hardest in his nonfiction piece, Wailing Shall Be in All Streets. The litany of death and destruction is truly stunning. My favorite story was Guns Before Butter wherein three American POWs scratch out recipes in notebooks for all the foods they'll eat when they get home. Their 60-ish German guard is also made a fully realized human being. While Spoils, Brighten Up and Just You and Me, Sammy depict Americans who cross over the line into greed and plunder. The sci-fi story Great Day was confusing to me. The premise of soldiers from 2037 time travelling back to combat their 1918 counterparts didn't quite make sense. Was it for show for a 21st century world without war? It wasn't made clear. The Commandant's Desk imagines a world where the Cold War turns hot and Americans occupy Eastern Europe and Russia after conquering the Commies, turning out to be just as harsh and cruel as any other victorious invading army. The final title story is a weird fantasy on the Devil and Armageddon, dripping with irony.

Tivoli: A Short Story

We had found Tivoli the night before, searching for someplace to eat dinner before the opera in the next town to the south in the Hudson Valley area. The performance of the rarely-performed Oresteia by Taneyev was at a college campus as part of an arts festival (here's my review), but there were no nearby restaurants. So our weekend guest who was seeing the opera with us found a number of culinary choices on his Smartphone. We drove for maybe 20 minutes on Route 9G before the turnoff to the tiny town which contained a cluster of city-style eateries including the Japanese one we finally settled on, an avant-garde theater company, and a used-book store in what looked like a broken down old house.  

Used Book Evocations

Last week I was grocery shopping on 37^th Avenue. Occasionally, there will be a guy with a thick European accent selling used books outside the Met supermarket. His stock is usually crap, spread out over several tables. Pulpy romances, self-help lessons, forgotten lowest-common-denominator best-sellers of decades ago, coloring books, action-oriented sci-fi. He only charges $1 or 50 cents, but even at those cheap prices, there’s never anything I want. This time I actually found something interesting—Alan Furst’s Kingdom of Shadows, a spy novel set in 1938 Paris. The hero, Nicky Morath, a former cavalry officer with the Hungarian army, undergoes numerous adventures smuggling refugees out of Nazi-occupied countries, obtaining fake passports, raising covert funds for the resistance, providing mistresses for German officers (everything has a price in Paris).