As the director of such memorable movies as High Noon, From Here to Eternity, Oklahoma! and Julia, Zinnemann has worked with many of Hollywood's most intriguing personalities, from Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra to Jane Fonda and Sean Connery. Don't expect to learn much about them in this book, though. Zinnemann never gets much more revealing than saying of Spencer Tracy, "As a person he often seemed troubled and not at peace with himself" and noting that Montgomery Clift "was supersensitive and therefore enormously vulnerable." In fact, anyone not enthralled with details of film stock, lenses and the logistical problems of filming on location might find the most enjoy able part of this dry volume to be its generous sampling of stills from the director's marvelous films. He doesn't even warm up to discussing his 57-year relationship with his wife, Renée, much more passionately than to say that after he met her when he was an assistant director and she was in the costume department for the 1935 Cooper—Ann Harding film, Peter Ibbetson, "one word led to another; 50 years later we are still married."
Born in Austria in 1907, Zinnemann came to the U.S. in 1929 and now lives in London, but his English is still a bit uneasy. He uses "wish-dream," for example, for "daydream." His book reads smoothly otherwise, though, and if it lacks spice, it does offer a portrait of a likable, old-fashioned film artist with a shrewd eye and ear for a good story and a remarkable ability to judge talent. If the only thing this book accomplishes is to inspire people to see more of his films, it will have performed a noble task. (Scribner's, $29.95)
by Kingsley Amis
British novelist Amis made his name in 1953 with the brilliantly comic Lucky Jim and has maintained his reputation with, among other fictions, Stanley and the Women and The Old Devils. Memoirs, however, does him little credit, despite the sparkle of its prose. (In 1966, arriving by train in Czechoslovakia: "At the frontier, I watched unbelieving as a steam locomotive with a red star on its front chugged out of a 24-year-old Yugoslav movie and a squad of lesbians, in blue uniforms to match their chins, barged in to do the documentation, holding well back on the affability.")
Amis does offer chapters on his background (middle-class) and education (Oxford), but this is no conventional memoir. His intent, the preface notes, is a series of sketches of individuals he has known "more or less well." A more intimate account, he adds, "would hurt a number of people...and I have no desire to cause pain."
Readers may wonder what Amis would write if he did wish to cause pain; a savage testiness rises from almost every page. ("Most American literature is a disaster.... Freudianism has probably been instrumental in fewer deaths than Nazism or Marxism, though it is surely one of the great pernicious doctrines of our century.")
A few dear friends, such as the poet Philip Larkin and the journalist Robert Conquest, are recalled with touching fondness, but most writers fare poorly. "The results of American literary elephantiasis can be seen in curiosities [such] as Saul Bellow's reputation." Dylan Thomas: "A very bad poet...who has helped to get Wales and Welsh poetry a bad name." Malcolm Muggeridge—"the laziest television interviewer I had ever been submitted to"—is the subject of a vulgar anecdote featuring drunken impotency. (That Amis also failed sexually with the same woman, moments later, makes the story even less engaging.)
The Amis tone is most evident in an appalling passage about a black woman who served briefly as his family maid in Princeton, N.J. He says she "would not help with the children [and] had to be paid in advance." Amis was impressed by "her...old nigger minstrel style, full of 'If that don't just 'bout beat everything!' with eyes and teeth to match, or 'M'm-h'm, ain't it the truth, Mr. Amis!' "
Mr. Amis has written a very nasty book. (Summit Books, $25.00)
by Jim Ryan
Seems like only 12 years or so ago we were congratulating ourselves on what a together decade we were running, and now Village Voice and L.A. Weekly cartoonist Ryan comes along with this acerbically funny kiss-off, subtitled "Life in a Dumb Decade." The funniest pure joke is a sketch of a beggar, in dark glasses and holding a tin cup, with a sign around his neck saying BLINDED BY CLACKERS. But there is considerably more pointed humor, too, with Ryan lampooning the self-righteous, self-centered obsessions of the '70s, from Woodstock to casual sex. Flower children may want to wilt at Ryan's insistence on antihippie jokes, but then maybe his values were skewed by events of the '80s. (Harmony, paper, $7)
by Maeve Binchy
The author of the enchanting Circle of Friends has not cast the same spell with her current collection of short fiction. Indeed, the title work, a series of stories about the passengers on a weekly bus trip from Dublin to a small Irish hamlet, is tritely predictable.
"Dinner in Donnybrook," one of a quartet of stories gathered under the heading Dublin 4, traces a far more interesting journey, that of Carmel Murray, a woman who is recovering from a breakdown brought on by her husband Dermot's infidelities. Binchy's chronicle of Carmel's plans for revenge against Dermot and his current mistress has an astringency and wisdom reminiscent of Edith Wharton.
The other Dublin-centered stories, all of which begin with great promise, do not so much build as meander to a bewildering close. On balance, The Lilac Bus is a bumpy kind of ride. (Delacorte Press, $20)
by Nicholson Baker
There's really only one question to ask about this novel, which is one long phone conversation between strangers, culminating in telephonic sex. Is it "literature" about pornography or is it merely pornography with literary pretentions? Anyone's answer will depend, to some extent, on which passages he chooses as evidence. Like the author's previous novels, The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, it is a free-associating rumination on modern life, garnished with sly cultural references and piercing observations. But it also includes long sections in which the participants relate sexual exploits and fantasies so detailed yet unbelievable that they might have been lifted from the pages of Penthouse.
Abby and Jim are two 30ish professionals who live in two unnamed large cities on either coast. Meeting via an Adult Party Line, they like each others' voices and are switched to a private "back room" line. Then, for 165 pages (which translates into many hours of conversation) they tease, flirt and get to know one another; meanwhile, of course, they're also exposing themselves, figuratively and literally. By the time they get around to mutual masturbation, we're supposed to believe this is not an anonymous encounter: The two actually like each other. "You are smart and funny and aroused and delightful," Jim says. "We're actually talking...you get it, you understand, you have a complicated response to things."
But the subtleties that make this book exceptional—Baker's perception of the different levels of intimacy expressed by "Bye" and "Goodbye" (19), for example—are drowned by the aggressive erotica. Less a study of pornography than an example of it, Vox is not what the author does best. It's as if Baker—whose earlier books garnered critical acclaim but scant sales—has turned cynical. This novel is being talked about, all right, but as trash, not literature. Like his characters, Baker is looking for love in all the wrong places. (Random House, $15)
by Edward Villella with Larry Kaplan
This memoir by former New York City Ballet dancer Villella might as well be called Controlling Father because it is largely about the demanding and difficult NYCB cofounder and choreographer George Balanchine, Villella's boss and, he says, surrogate parent for most of his career. Like other dancers (notably Gelsey Kirkland in 1986's Dancing on My Grave), Villella both adored and feared "Mr. B," and his book is an attempt to analyze their relationship. Unlike Kirkland, though, Villella takes a conciliatory tone—as if, nine years after Balanchine's death, he still wants to win the great man's approval.
As dancers go, Villella—now artistic director of the Miami City Ballet—was always unusual. An athletic kid from Queens, N.Y., Villella tended to get himself into trouble if left home alone; his mother kept him out of trouble by dragging him along to his sister's dance classes. But when he began to show some aptitude, his working-class parents were horrified. Ballet was no profession for a boy, they said, and their relationship with him soured further when he quit college to study dance and perform. But that rejection only further fueled Villella's passion to succeed. "Maybe I thought my parents would forgive me if I became a star," he writes. That he managed to do just that at the esteemed NYCB is particularly amazing because he was shorter and more athletic than the Balanchine ideal. He was also rebellious, dating women in the company (a practice of which the protective—and jealous?—Balanchine vocally disapproved), studying with outside teachers and performing on Broadway and TV.
It hardly takes a balletomane to appreciate Villella's perseverance. (While in physical pain, he continued to perform, and eventually needed hip replacement surgery.) Understandable too is his struggle against authority, wonderfully illustrated by an encounter in which Balanchine tries to make him wear a humiliatingly unflattering costume. But the long descriptions of specific ballets (Prodigal Son was his most famous performance) and use of technical terms can be offputting to the uninitiated. Still, given that dancers are notoriously single-minded about their art, it makes sense that the behind-the-scenes portions of this memoir—Villella's two marriages, the births of his three children, his reconciliation with his parents—should be sketchy. Villella gives the impression that those things mattered to him less than the pas de deux he performed—onstage with ballerinas or backstage with his mentor. (Simon & Schuster, $23)
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Jeff Brown,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Sara Nelson.
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!
