In 1966, Linda Eastman was one of 56,000 teenyboppers screaming her way through the Beatles concert at Shea Stadium in New York City. That may have been the last time she saw the music scene from the bleachers. By the next year she was a working photographer, getting close-ups of the Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, the Rolling Stones and The Who. She got so close up to the Beatles that in 1969 she married Paul McCartney.
In McCartney's pictures from the age of psychedelia, we see the giant stars of late '60s rock at the height of their game: Mick Jagger when time was on his side, Jerry Garcia before he started looking like Santa Claus, and Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison and Keith Moon (looking angelic in a white-lace cravat) before death jumped them offstage.
McCartney's written accompaniment to her pictures is artless, but her photographs are a sigh-inducing record of the flower-child rock stars who sometimes really Were children. Saluting the camera with a bottle of Southern Comfort, Joplin looks like a high school girl trying to play Big Mama. Pete Townshend, already at the head of a head-banging band when McCartney photographed him in 1967, was just an awkward and lonely-looking kid.
McCartney's head-on shot of a dour and puffy Brian Wilson, taken during a New York City meeting between the Beach Boys and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, confirms that things could sour in the California sun. And in her long section of Beatles shots, there are a few that tell you about the tensions that would pry the group apart.
But the main tone here is fond remembrance. At 25, Paul McCartney recorded "When I'm Sixty Four." The joke at the time was that nobody could imagine him anywhere near that age. Now that he's a 50-year-old family man, it's hard to remember sometimes that he was once 25—until you open this book. (Bulfinch, $40)
by Neil Sheehan
In 1989, a year after publication of A Bright Shining Lie, his Pulitzer-prizewinning account of America's disastrous involvement in Vietnam, Sheehan returned to the country where he had been a war correspondent in the '60s. What Sheehan found he records here in just 131 pages, albeit with the same diligence and insight he brought to his massive, earlier study.
Whether he is visiting Hanoi's understaffed, outdated hospitals or touring the last site of the once-secret Communist headquarters in the south—thatched huts that housed 500 to 600 intelligence and operations people—the facts accrete to give haunting resonance to the question Sheehan first asks upon his return: "Why in the name of God had we bombed a country as poor as this?"
At first surprised to find "a lack of animosity everywhere we went in the North," Sheehan learns through his talks with peasants, politicians and his own guide-interpreter that this friendliness has less to do with America than with Vietnam's long-standing conflicts with China. While both France and the United States have left indelible marks on the country, it is China that Vietnamese regard as the ultimate threat to their independence.
In the south, Sheehan's most compelling interview is with Nguyen Van Linh, the general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Often referred to as Vietnam's Gorbachev, Linh has steered the country toward economic reform since 1986. Now in his late 70s. he survived imprisonment under the French, manhunts in the south during the American conflict and postwar political struggles. His very existence seems living testament In a people whose ingenuity, guile and resoluteness forced a superpower into a painful reexamination of itself.
Convinced when he first arrived in Vietnam nearly 30 years ago that "we were in the right war in the right place," Sheehan on his return seems continually struck by a sense of wonder that he could ever have held that once-cherished conviction. (Random House, $17)
by Dave Barry
by Peter Tasker
Maybe it was the sushi. But somewhere between Miami and Mount Fuji, syndicated columnist Dave Barry seems to have mislaid his usually reliable, Pulitzer-prizewinning sense of humor. For the most part, this account of the three weeks Barry and his family spent in the country that gave us sumo wrestlers and midget cars is about as funny as watching one of those behemoths trying to squeeze into a tiny Daihatsu.
In Does Japan (Random House, $18), Barry-san takes aim at the predictable targets—among others, geishas, Kabuki, bowing etiquette and all those wacky things they actually eat! While there are a few chuckles en route—the name of the "health drink" Pocari Sweat, T-shirts bearing nonsense messages such as Circuit Beaver—generally the book just seems forced and padded. To quote Barry's description of his sightseeing trip to Mount Fuji on a densely foggy day: "I was there but all I could see was the tiny bit of it right around me, and even that wasn't very clear."
By contrast, Silent Thunder (Kodansha, $20), the debut novel from British-born, Asia-based financial strategist Tasker, offers the kind of intimate view of Japanese society few foreigners ever achieve—as well as leaner, meaner writing and more chills than the name-brand authors.
Tasker, recently voted Japan's No. 1 analyst by the financial community there, takes readers into boardrooms and bedrooms, mountain hideaways and love hotels as he spins this intricately plotted thriller. His appealing detective Mori, bounced off the consensus-oriented fast track for youthful political activism, undertakes what seems to be the routine investigation of a finance functionary's suicide. But before long it starts to look like murder, part of an elaborate conspiracy by an elite secret society, Silent Thunder, to manipulate world financial markets and restore Japan toils glorious samurai past.
As Mori races the clock to save his kidnapped girlfriend and abort the scheme, Tasker offers a pungent view of Japanese society, from the herds of salarymen in their funereal suits to the exotic "soap-girls" ready to fulfill any fantasy for a price. Liberally laced with eroticism and violence, Tasker's Tokyo has a disembodied, miasmic feel, like a world floating in space between yesterday and tomorrow.
>Linda McCartney
NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: WHY PAUL WAS BAREFOOT
JUST A FEW YEARS AFTER Linda McCartney got into rock photography, she was ready to get out. As a close friend of some of the stars she was photographing, she saw the dirty underside of the music business. "Artists were not getting their due," she says. "Jimi Hendrix was miserable because he wasn't getting paid. He wasn't getting any of his royalties." As for the Doors: "There were a lot of repulsive people hanging around them, trying to win their friendship by saying, 'Hey, I've got this drug or I've got that drug.' "
The daughter of a New York City attorney, Linda Eastman met Paul McCartney in England in 1967. Before they married in 1969, she witnessed the making of The White Album and got her first close look at John Lennon. Instead of the confident figure she expected, Len-non was "totally nervous. I think the pressure had finally gotten to him."
Today the McCartneys spend most of their time on a large estate in Sussex. She might like to photograph scruffs like Nirvana, she says, but not Madonna or Michael Jackson. "It's not that I don't like them, but I like casual people. I don't like all the glamor."
Probably nobody knows better than Linda that Paul isn't dead, despite the flurry of rumors that blew up for a while in the late '60s. She can also explain why Paul is barefoot on the cover of Abbey Road (a picture that led to speculation that Paul's fans were being tipped to his demise through a look-alike who was shoeless to resemble a corpse). In her new book she includes a photograph that shows Paul wearing sandals as the Beatles lined up at the curb before the cover shot was taken. "It was such a hot day he just kicked them off," she says, "so he could walk across the street and feel the pavement."
>THE BEST LINE W.C. FIELDS NEVER SAID
FROM NICE GUYS FINISH SEVENTH: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings and Familiar Misquotations, by Ralph Keyes (HarperCollins, $18): "W.C. Fields's best remembered saying is 'Any man who hates dogs and children can't be all bad.' Fields didn't say it. These words were said about Fields by Leo Rosten, as he introduced the comedian at a 1939 Masquers banquet in Los Angeles.... Rosten, then a young social scientist studying the movie industry... later called it 'one of those happy ad libs God sends you.'... In November, 1937—nearly two years before the Masquers banquet—Harper's Monthly ran a column by Cedric Worth about a New York cocktail party which took place in 1930. This party was dominated by a man who had a case against dogs. After leaving, Worth found himself in an elevator with a New York Times reporter. As the elevator made its way to the ground, the reporter observed, 'No man who hales dogs and children can be all bad.'... Few remember [the reporter's] name. Yet most of us have heard of W.C. Fields. This is why Fields so often gets credit for someone else's words. He probably always will."
- Contributors:
- Richard Lacayo,
- Lisa Shea,
- Pam Lambert.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
