Alas, poor Larry: The powder-room school of biography has struck again, this time with the great actor as victim of some trendy sexual outing.
Olivier's career as a young Hollywood star, classical actor, knight, director of Britain's National Theatre and peer of the realm was chronicled encyclopedically (and admirably) in Andrew Holden's 1988 biography, and there is a riveting account of Olivier's turbulent second marriage in Hugo Vickers's Vivien Leigh (also 1988). Now out comes damned Spoto, author of books on Tennessee Williams and Alfred Hitchcock. Spoto's chief contributions to the Olivier portrait are a glimpse of the actor in his feeble but feisty dotage ("My dear, we are not doing f——— Hamlet," he told a nurse who spilled juice on his cheek months before his death) and moving accounts of the devastating illnesses that punctuated but did not halt his later career. Minor tittle-tattle apart, however, the book reads like a rehashing of theater reviews and other material available—without the burden of Spoto's hallmark psychobabble—elsewhere.
The tittle-tattle, though, is new—at least in print. It states categorically that Olivier's first wife, Jill Esmond, was a lesbian and that the Olivier-Joan Plowright marriage cooled in the '80s. But the most salacious segments portray Olivier as a lifelong closet case who emerged intermittently for some slap and tickle with, among others, Danny Kaye. Spoto says, for example, that Kaye once disguised himself as a customs officer in a dark wig and a powdered latex mask so that he could strip-search Olivier at New York's Idlewild Airport.
Whether the century's greatest interpreter of tragedy onstage also added to the gaiety of nations (so to speak) off is of little consequence. But until Spoto bothers to substantiate his declarations—which he chronically fails to do in his 496 notes on sources—the matter remains, at best, one for conjecture. (HarperCollins, $23)
by Rebecca Stowe
Maggie Pittsfield, age 12, wants desperately to be a boy. Then again, she wants to be Michigan's first woman Governor. The tomboy narrator of this funny, sad, ultimately disturbing novel is wise and compassionate beyond her years, like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. And she's as cynical as The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield. But Maggie is very much her own person—all six of them.
It's the early '60s in the wealthy lakeside town of North Bay as Maggie writes engagingly about Mother's tittering bridge partners, her own fears of being fried by the bomb, her fascination with the neighborhood pervert—and also about her six personalities, who've been getting her into more hot water than usual ever since what she calls "the trouble" with Mr. Howard, one of her teachers.
Maggie's six parts—which she keeps in an imaginary chest of drawers—range from the mean "Margaret" to the fun "Trixie" to the puritanical "Cotton Mather." She's aware of them ("I knew when they were going to take over; there just wasn't anything I could do about it") and is terrified she'll be packed off to an institution. As for "the trouble," Maggie never explicitly names it, but it's clearly an obsession. There are disquieting clues—Mr. Howard coming at her with a pointer, her subsequent fear upon seeing her mother wielding knitting needles. Whatever happened is too awful for Maggie to say or even remember.
The more time we spend inside Maggie's fertile and observant mind, the more we care what happens to her. In Not the End of the World, first novelist Rebecca Stowe has created a memorable, beautiful character, quirky and likable, who deserves to survive her demons, and then come back to tell us more. (Pantheon, $18)
by Richard M. Clurman
Re: Why we should absolutely, positively not review this book
Dear Boss:
First of all, Dick Clurman, who as you know put in 20 years at this company as a journalist and an executive, tells everything about the 1989 megamarriage of PEOPLE'S corporate parent, Time Inc., and Warner Communications Inc. Do we really want to tell everything?
Do we want to tell people that the top executives of the two companies enriched themselves lavishly in the deal while Time Inc. shareholders saw their stock plummet and Time Inc. magazine employees suffered through demoralizing rounds of cost cutting and layoffs? The public can't be expected to understand the $200 million compensation package (estimated salary and bonus figures over time) that Steve Ross, the founder and head of Warner Communications, garnered, much less his need for the Italian villas, handy helicopters and yachts he portrayed as vital to making motion pictures and records and keeping up the morale of such stars as Madonna. But then, they didn't understand junk bonds, either.
You have to hand it to Clurman. He gets the history right. He traces the evolution of Time Inc., from its founding in 1923 by Henry Luce as a high-minded temple of print journalism (to be "principally operated in the public interest," Luce, who died in 1967, specified in his will) to the emergence of a new breed of top management in the '70s and '80s who saw electronic media and diversification as the future's golden gateway.
You also must admire Clurman's access, the candor of his sources and the clarity of his prose. This thing is a juicy-read, boss. Clurman's got the inside dope on the wrangling, rationalizing, hand-wringing and bickering that attended the landmark merger of media powers. He shows how Time Inc.'s execs fell over themselves to embrace the swashbuckling dealmaker Ross and the new gospel of conglomerate "synergy"—"the theory that one and one makes more than two," as Clurman puts it. We're still waiting for that.
Clurman predicts that Ross' freewheeling, hugs-and-kisses style would not blend well with the hard-edged pragmatism of Time's N.J. Nicholas Jr., his co-CEO in the merged company, and that the reserved Nicholas would be ousted—as has just in fact come to pass—in favor of the more popular Gerald M. Levin, who made his name at Home Box Office.
Clurman makes it clear that even before the merger, the old clubby and elitist Time Inc. was becoming a dinosaur. He quotes a memo that Andrew Heiskell, Time's first chairman after Luce, wrote in 1970, concluding that "in today's world [Luce] would have been miserable." And that world was many worlds ago. Luce would have hated the truths in this book, even as he would admire the skill with which it is put together. (Simon & Schuster, $23)
- Contributors:
- Ben Harte,
- Carol Peace,
- Ken Gross.
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!
