When Evelyn Jephson Flower, a wellborn Englishwoman, married Ewen Cameron, a Scottish naturalist, in 1889, the two honeymooned in the badlands of eastern Montana Territory. Many members of Britain's smart set had taken to visiting the American West on holiday, and some even stayed to set up businesses.
The Camerons joined the settlers, first with the harebrained scheme of raising polo ponies to export to England (many of the horses died in transit) and later as cattle ranchers. It was soon clear these efforts wouldn't pay the bills, and Evelyn took up photography to help make ends meet.
For more than 30 years, she took carefully composed pictures of what she saw around her—the land, the animals, the cowboys, who were soon to disappear, and the immigrant farmers who would eventually replace them. In 1979 Lucey (a sometime photo editor at PEOPLE) discovered Cameron's work, which had been stored in the Montana basement of Cameron's best friend. (While working on a book on women pioneers, Lucey had learned of the cache of some 1,800 negatives, 2,500 prints, letters, manuscripts and 35 years' worth of Cameron's meticulously kept diaries.)
Now Lucey has organized this raw material into a handsome book. Her scrupulously researched text makes it clear that despite the burdens of the pioneer life, it was just the life Evelyn wanted. As she wrote to a niece, "Manual labour...is about all I care about, and, after all, is what will really make a strong woman. I like to break colts, brand calves, cut down trees, ride & work in a garden."
Lucey clearly admires Cameron both as a woman and as a photographer, though she is careful to keep her work in perspective, as a "visual record of the frontier." And yet, she writes of the photos, "the best rise into the realm of art." Most readers will agree as they linger over the fascinating images. (Knopf, $60)
by Gish Jen
This terrific debut novel by Stanford Business School dropout Gish Jen will undoubtedly be compared to Amy Tan's 1989 best-seller, The Joy Luck Club. Both books are written by young (Jen is 35) Chinese-American women. Both are about immigrants coming to know America. Both are wise yet sweet, hopeful yet knowing.
Jen's novel is about Yifeng Chang, a scholar's son who leaves Maoist China to study in the U.S. Nicknamed Ralph, Chang weds a Chinese woman who has already fallen for American ways. They have two daughters; Ralph becomes a professor; Helen keeps house. So far, so perfect. The Changs are the American dream incarnate.
Enter Grover Ding, a glib, self-made millionaire. Seducing both the wife (with romance) and the husband (with promises of wealth), Grover turns the Changs into "typical Americans" by giving them the secrets of American success: " 'You can sell anything if it smells right.' " Soon, Ralph becomes proprietor of Ralph's Chicken Palace, a fast-food eatery of dubious quality.
Jen's novel is full of winning ironies, but it has a bleak side. While the baseball-fan Changs jokingly call themselves "Chang-kees," when they go to a game, people tell them "to go back to their laundry." But they persevere, devoted to xiang banfa—"to find a way"—even if the lesson is hard: "A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so. America was no America." (Houghton Mifflin, $19.95)
by Mickey Rooney
At 18 months, Joe Yule Jr. sang in his parents' vaudeville act; at 10 years he was a film star, "Mickey McGuire," in more than 60 two-reelers based on the Toonerville Trolley comic strip. (Looking up from a drawing board one day, Walt Disney told him, "I'm going to call this mouse Mickey—after you.") He kept the Mickey; his mom chose Rooney later.
Rooney is now 70, and while his later years aren't without interest, it is the first 20, when he and Judy Garland were MGM's big-money babies, that provide the best of this breezy, raunchy, often startling autobiography.
By 1939, the teen Rooney's success—as Andy Hardy and in such films as Boys Town—had made him the nation's top box office attraction. By 21, he also achieved several off-screen distinctions, such as satisfying Norma Shearer's desire to provide him with oral sex and making Ava Gardner the first of his eight wives.
His escapades were famous: On a war-bond tour in the '40s, Rooney woke after a night of boozing to find himself with three other hung-over, naked celebrants: Dick Powell, Jimmy Cagney and Fred Astaire.
The early '40s brought such hits as Girl Crazy and National Velvet. Then, as he outgrew his boyish appeal, Rooney made bad films and took refuge in alcohol and drugs. By 1956, he writes, "I'd been in show business 33 years. I'd made 152 films. I'd earned more than $600 million, of which I had managed to save $2,345.33."
One way or another—"I made appearances at cocktail parties in Florida for $500 a pop, pretending to be an old friend of the host"—Rooney kept working, and in 1979 Sugar Babies, a campy stage show, revived him. It ran eight years, on Broadway and on tour; Rooney made up to $50,000 a week.
Life is good now, Rooney reports; he lives in California's Conejo Valley with Jan, wife No. 8, enjoying "my bunch of loving children—all nine of them—and our menagerie of pets."
Is his book a good buy? For those interested in child stars, yes. For those put off by goofy philosophizing ("What is an orgasm, after all, except laughter of the loins?") or clichés (Gardner had "a bosom that rose like two snowy, mountain peaks"), maybe not.
And Rooney's self-absorption is hard to take. On tour in London, he phones ex-wife Ava, retired there. She has had two strokes, she tells him, and is considering suicide. But come to dinner, please. Rooney accepts. "But I stood her up," he says. "I just couldn't go—I was afraid.... I might fall in love with her again, and she with me." (Villard, $22.50)
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- Sara Nelson,
- Jeff Brown.
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!
