Donald Spoto's sympathetic life of Ingrid Bergman is one of those rare biographies by a writer who actually admires his subject. Born in 1915 to a Stockholm camera salesman, Bergman was orphaned at 14. She married young, to Petter Lindstrom, a Swedish dentist. According to Spoto, Lindstrom dominated his talented wife, micromanaged her acting career and criticized her weight. When she left Lindstrom for the equally overbearing Italian director Roberto Rossellini, the scandal so violated postwar America's puritanical mores that she was denounced on the floor of the Senate and exiled from Hollywood for almost a decade. She bore Rossellini three children (son Roberto and twins Ingrid and Isabella).
Spoto glosses over the sticky matter of the films Bergman made in Nazi Germany. He's generous with anecdotes (Alfred Hitchcock's invaluable advice to the actress: "Ingrid, fake it!") but is reluctant to speculate about undocumented events like her reputed affair with Gary Cooper. Still, Spoto's portrait is otherwise so detailed that by the end, we feel we know Bergman: an artist dedicated to her craft, an unaffected, passionate woman shaped and buffeted by the men she loved and by the times she lived in. (HarperCollins, $27.50)
by Isabella Rossellini
Bergman's daughter Isabella Rossellini's memoir gives an even more loving and private view of her parents' lives. With a gift for finding the anecdote that renders a character precisely, Rossellini describes how her organized, practical mother carefully separated framed photos of her living friends from pictures of the dead and how her "lazy" yet dramatic father liked to lounge in bed and listen, at Sunday lunch, to tapes of race-car engines.
When Rossellini free-associates about her modeling and acting careers or offers opinions on everything from underwear to life after death, Some of Me seems mannered, as coyly withholding as its title portends. But when Rossellini writes about others (she tells a powerful story about her aunt's harsh pronouncement over the tomb of Anna Magnani), the book's charm grows. Some of Me is lavishly illustrated with photographs: formal and informal family portraits, glamor shots from the author's modeling days—and one heart-stoppingly intimate snapshot of Roberto Rossellini zipping Ingrid Bergman's dress. It alone is worth the price of their daughter's impressionistic self-portrait. (Random House, $29.95)
by Peter Mayle
Damn Peter Mayle. Damn the former children's books writer for waiting until he was nearly 50 to publish, 4 Year in Provence (1989), making us wait all those years for the easygoing wit and dead-on satire he shows yet again in his fourth novel for grown-ups. The MacGuffin of this one—an art-world rip-off—gives Mayle room for an engaging gallery of rich people and even richer food, and he sends his self-consciously chic jet-setters (including a ringer for The New Yorker's energetic editrix Tina Brown) flitting between New York City and the South of France as casually as the rest of us run down to the 7-Eleven for a Dr Pepper. Mayle is becoming an American Evelyn Waugh: In a world of people who say things like "Silly old colon. Such a bore," he at once deflates the pomposities of his "social mountaineers" and makes us wish for their problems. "What a pain butlers were," notes one of Mayle's rascals, "when they weren't yours." Quite. As in his two Provence memoirs, Mayle writes about French food so lovingly that he virtually establishes a lip-licking new literary genre—call it dinnerotica. But no matter how heavy the meals, Mayle's touch is always deliciously light. (Knopf, $23)
by Valerie Grosvenor Myer
Sometimes portrayed as a quiet maiden aunt devoid of spunk or gumption, Hollywood's favorite 19th-century novelist emerges as a stubborn iconoclast in Myer's bracingly unsentimental biography. Sharp-eyed, tart-tongued (at least in letters to her beloved sister Cassandra), Myer's Austen resents her status as a poor relation. Though she receives at least two proposals, the pretty daughter of a country clergyman resists the temptation to marry for money. Instead, she channels her energy into relationships with family and friends and into the novels that she regards as her offspring. (After receiving copies of Pride and Prejudice in January 1813, she reports to Cassandra, "I want to tell you that I have got my own darling child from London.") Poignant and evocative (Jane, we learn, "chose to lie on three chairs" during her final illness—she died at age 41—"so that her mother could have the sofa"), this is one biography truly worthy of its subject. (Arcade, $25.95)
by Matthew Hall
Beach Book of the Week
HE MAY BE CRAZY, BUT BILL KAISER IS a tough villain to hate. An electronics expert with the conscience of Robin Hood and the warped smarts of Hannibal Lecter, Kaiser is on a crusade to right what he sees as the wrongs in New York City's social fabric. His targets include a greedy real estate developer, a U.S. senator who supports the demolition of a landmark building, and less powerful blights like the neighborhood drug dealer. And when Kaiser cons his way into the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital and befriends emotionally scarred nurse Sharon Blautner, whose husband and young son were killed in a car accident 18 months earlier, he takes on her battles as well—much to her terrified dismay.
From the novel's jolting opening scene on top of a Manhattan skyscraper through its explosive climax, Hall puts Kaiser and Blautner through a palm-sweating pas de deux that is both scary and seductive—and absolutely irresistible. (Little, Brown, $23.95)
by Theo Wilson
Long before sensational trials were broadcast on Court TV and synopsized nightly by Geraldo Rivera, the country depended on pad-and-pencil reporters like Theo Wilson for their scandal du jour. A five-foot-tall fireball who once hailed a cab to cover a story 200 miles away (she had no driver's license), Wilson spent more than four decades, mostly at the New York Daily News, tenaciously covering the trials of Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Patty Hearst and other high-profile defendants. Many readers consider her the greatest trial scribe who ever lived. Sadly, Wilson, who was 79, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on Jan. 17 while preparing for a TV interview and died the next day.
Keenly observant, she conveyed the distinct flavor of every trial she covered, a talent on full display in her summation of the surreal, circus-like prosecution of Charles Manson (during which "one woman juror wore a different wig nearly every day," she wrote and occasionally "looked exactly like something out of Madame Butterfly"). But what shines through Justice, Wilson's only book, even more than her love of writing on deadline, is her love of what went on after deadlines: the hours of eating, drinking and hashing it out with other dedicated newsroom types. Wilson was irked by the "flash and trash" journalism that replaced her hard-bitten style of reporting, but what she missed most was the late-night camaraderie with her ink-stained pals. (Thunder's Mouth, $22.95)
by Rosemary Altea
Most of us have enough trouble returning phone calls, e-mail and faxes. But popular British medium Rosemary Altea seems to have no problem staying in nearly constant communication not just with the living but with the souls of the dead. She regularly channels messages from her spirit guide Grey Eagle, a 19th-century Apache shaman, and from the departed loved ones of the celebrity clients and ordinary people who flock to her for comfort and psychic healing.
In her new book, Altea tells of seeing auras, having visions and meeting restless ghosts. She recounts sufferings in her past lives and abusive relationships in this one. She even promises that our pets' spirits survive after death. Altea apparently assumes we believe she has the power she claims. Readers who do will be reassured that dear departed ones are watching over them, closer than they imagine. (Eagle Brook/Morrow, $19.95)
>Jerry Seinfeld
LITCOM
INVISIBLE AUTHORS LIKE ANONYMOUS (Joe Klein) last year and Thomas Pyn chon this year wrote bestsellers, but Ted L. Nancy has taken the art of self-nonpromotion one step further: His book has been plugged on Larry King Live and The Tonight Show even though he may not exist.
What he does have is a sein from on high: Jerry Seinfeld is talking up Letters from a Nut (Avon, $15), a collection of prank letters that are the literary equivalent of a Bart Simpson phone call to Moe's Tavern to ask for Seymour Butts. (Sample: a note to a baseball-card company asking if they want a collection of Mickey Mantle's toenail clippings.) The book's agent, Dan Strone, claims he has never met Nancy—there's no phone-book listing for him either—and deals only with Seinfeld, who wrote the introduction and whose name is featured on its cover. And some of the letters sound suspiciously like Seinfeld plots. In one, Nancy asks a department store if he can have one of their mannequins because it's a dead ringer for a deceased neighbor—shades of the time Elaine found a mannequin that looked just like her. "Ted's just a guy I'm helping out," Seinfeld told PEOPLE. "I'm a comedy facilitator." Claiming he discovered the missives at a pal's house, he added, "I'm not Ted L. Nancy. When would I have the time to do that?" How about during those months of reruns?
>Cal Ripken Jr.
CAL-LIGRAPHY
IF CAL RIPKEN JR. CAN PLAY in every baseball game for 15 years, 39-year-old Stephen Serio figures he can stand in line for 24 hours to get Iron Cal's autograph on his new autobiography The Only Way I Know (Viking, $22.95). Still, six cups of coffee and four Cokes after he began waiting at a Towson, Md., Borders bookstore, Serio is feeling the strain. "I'm nervous, my hands are sweating," he admits. Serio's son, Nicholas, 12, gives his dad a determined look. "Cal never gives up," Nicholas says, "and neither do we."
Ripken, 36, arrives at 12:10 a.m.—looking fresh and sounding upbeat after playing all three hours and 46 minutes of his 2,368th consecutive game, a victory over the Yankees. "I'm usually so wired after the game that this seemed perfect," he says.
"Cal's different from the other players," declares David Jennings, 33, who keeps a shrine to the Baltimore Orioles' No. 8 at his York, Pa., home. "He cares about the fans." Ripken retires 16 felt-tip pens as he signs all 2,000 books, demolishing the store's record. At 3:10 a.m. he cheerfully greets the last fan in line, 3-year-old Ryan Belton. Says the boy's mom, Daphne, 35: "I'd like Ryan to have a hero, and Cal's a real live one."
- Contributors:
- Francine Prose,
- Kyle Smith,
- Michelle Green,
- Cynthia Sanz,
- Alex Tresniowski,
- Todd Gold,
- Jane Sims Podesta.
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!
