In the middle of her otherwise fascinating story about reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, Meryl Gordon’s narrative suddenly flattens. The daily details of Clark’s life during this long period of seclusion are assembled from wan notes to almost-lost relatives, bank statements and legal correspondence, and the memories of the few close friends who received cards and phone calls—but never visits—from Mrs. Clark.

This flattening of narrative occurs because the subject of The Phantom of Fifth Avenue—the youngest daughter from the scandalous second marriage of robber baron William Andrews Clark—had almost succeeded in her desire to disappear. The last published photo of her was taken in 1928 during the honeymoon of her brief, ill-fated marriage. Some longtime members of the household staff in her 42-room apartment on New York’s Fifth Avenue had rarely if ever seen her.

A clearer picture of Clark emerges after she was admitted to Doctor’s Hospital for treatment of advanced skin cancer in 1991, when she was 84 years old. After multiple surgeries, she was successfully treated, but the eccentric Clark negotiated to stay in the hospital and hire private nurses for around-the-clock care and companionship. This set off an unseemly “cash crusade” at the hospital. Over the next 20 years, one of those nurses, who worked 12-hour shifts 365 days a year, would receive from the always generous Clark roughly $31 million, in addition to houses, cars and jewelry. The nurse, who had a genuine if manipulative relationship with her patient, stood to inherit even more when Clark, who resisted acknowledging her own mortality, was finally convinced to update her 75-year-old will.

After Clark’s death, a nasty battle over her $300 million fortune was launched by descendants of her half-brothers and half-sisters, the side of the family she felt had grievously mistreated her mother. This very public dispute led to a cartoonish portrayal of Clark in the media. Extreme wealth and extreme eccentricity do sell, after all.

Through her assiduous research—she conducted more than 100 interviews and plowed through boxes of documents seized during the court battle—and canny analysis, Gordon gives us, yes, Clark’s perplexing eccentricities and the ins and outs of the fight between family members and loyal-but-incompetent friends and helpers. But The Phantom of Fifth Avenue also offers a believable, sympathetic portrait of a vulnerable perfectionist with an artistic temperament, who, as one of Clark’s young helpers would say, was “a very special person from a different epoch.”

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On September 13, 1993, the day Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, several dozen CIA officers quietly gathered at the grave of Robert Ames in Arlington National Cemetery. While most of the world focused on the hope of Middle East peace, those at Ames’ grave paid tribute to an operative who may have made that peace possible, even though few knew what he had accomplished—not the presidents he served, not members of Congress, not even his own family.

The Good Spy is Kai Bird’s engrossing biography of Ames, who served his country for decades in the Middle East. Bird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer (American Prometheus), received no official help from the CIA, but found that dozens of retired operatives, Ames’ wife Yvonne and his children, and Ames’ longtime contact Mustafa Zein were more than willing to tell his story. A devoted family man, Ames was also gifted with sharp intelligence, a love of Arabic language and culture, and the requisite patience and sensitivity that made him a very effective clandestine officer.

This book is not only a fascinating character study of the man himself, but also a window into the skills Ames used to recruit agents and cultivate relationships with key political and military players. It describes in detail the CIA’s relationship with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, including the lengths the agency went to in an effort to protect key leaders of the organization and the ties Ames maintained with PLO security chief Ali Hassan Salameh, a crucial back-channel to Arafat, the PLO’s “chairman.”

Bird also details Ames’ death in the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing, an attack that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. The Good Spy demonstrates anew all that was lost on that tragic day, and the consequences for those seeking peace in a war-torn region.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

John Quincy Adams was devoted to literature, and had he been able to pursue his ideal career, he wrote in 1817, “I should have made myself a great poet.” He did write poetry throughout his extraordinary life, but, from a very young age, his parents strongly encouraged him toward life as a leader in the new republic. His literary skills, however, were not wasted. There were his letters, essays on public policy and speeches, all of which he wrote himself. The best expression of these skills often came in his diary, begun in 1779 and continuing until his death in 1848. It would become the most valuable firsthand account of an American life and events during that period.

Award-winning biographer Fred Kaplan, whose subjects have included Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle, draws heavily on Adams’ diary and other writings to bring our sixth president vividly to life in John Quincy Adams: American Visionary. Because his presidency is usually regarded as unsuccessful, Adams’ place as a visionary and prophet is often overlooked. Kaplan’s book emphasizes how Adams’ vision and values have stood the test of time.

Adams was an outstanding diplomat in Europe, as well as president, senator, secretary of state, Harvard professor and, for the last 16 years of his life, a member of the House of Representatives, the only former president to serve in Congress. He spent his years there eloquently proposing and defending his reform agenda, which included, most prominently, opposition to slavery.

A dominant theme of Adams’ life, following the lead of his Founding Father father, John Adams, was the importance of a “social compact” that united the country’s inhabitants. In a speech in Boston in 1802, he emphasized the centrality of a union based on values expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and to “perpetuate this union is the first political duty . . . of every American.” It was this pledge to union, despite the controversial compromises needed to create the Constitution, that guided his life.    

Although Adams’ presidency is often considered a failure, it is hard to place all of the blame on him. The supporters of Andrew Jackson, who won the popular vote but lost to Adams when the election was decided in the House, vehemently opposed his legislative proposals. Even some of his political friends felt that Adams’ vision— which included a federally supported national infrastructure, a regulated banking system, an important role for the federal government in scientific and cultural initiatives—went too far.

This important book combines solid research and wisely selected excerpts from Adams’ writings with an engaging narrative about a man who made significant contributions to our national life.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From the Duke boys’ car named the General Lee on the “Dukes of Hazzard” TV show to his appearance on a U.S. postage stamp, Robert E. Lee has come to “embody and glorify a defeated cause,” Michael Korda asserts in a monumental new biography, Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee.

Korda, a former publishing executive and author of many books, including a popular biography of U.S. Grant, exhaustively explores Lee’s life and times, probing the Southern general’s personality, his political and religious views, and the brilliant military strategies that catapulted him into the position of commander of the Confederate armies. The book traces Lee’s life from his relationship with his father, the famous light cavalry leader, Light Horse Harry Lee, to his college days at West Point—where he graduated as one of the top three in his class. When the Civil War began, his early battles in the Virginia mountains showed Lee how difficult the coming war would be and how to put into practice the lessons he learned from studying Napoleon at West Point.

Accompanied by 30 maps of battles and dozens of illustrations, Korda’s deftly painted portrait depicts a man whose strength of conviction established him as a great leader just as it caused him to make painful decisions. When Virginia seceded, Lee resigned his commission as Colonel of the 1st Regt. Of Cavalry, painfully bringing to an end his 36-year career, because he “would not participate in any Union attack against the South.” Korda illustrates Lee’s complexity as a Southerner who disagreed with secession and disliked slavery, but would fight to defend his beloved state of Virginia.

Lee emerges from Korda’s biography as a “fallible human being whose strengths were courage, his sense of duty, his religious belief, his military genius, his constant search to do right, and his natural and instinctive courtesy.”

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s a sad truth about the history of Hollywood that many once-legendary Golden Age names and faces have lost their luster, their stardom dimming over time. Not so with “The Duke,” who, 35 years after his death, remains a towering figure. John Wayne: The Life and the Legend, by noted Hollywood biographer Scott Eyman, tells us why.

Yes, there have been many books on the subject. Some examined Wayne’s films and/or staunchly conservative politics, some were written by those who knew him, some boasted estate-sanctioned memorabilia. Eyman’s take is nonetheless eye-opening and astute, bolstered by access to the archives of Wayne’s production company and a host of interview sources, and the fine way he utilizes oral histories and other research materials. Then there’s the author’s cinematic acumen, which he displayed in previous work on filmmaker John Ford, who famously worked with Wayne.

Both father figure and mentor, Ford gave Wayne the role that made him a star. In these days of revolving-door “stardom,” it’s sobering to realize that by the time Wayne made the superlative Ford-directed Stagecoach, he’d been working for more than a decade, with some 80 movies to his credit. He was 32.

Born in 1907 with the memorable moniker Marion Morrison (and weighing in at 13 pounds), he was seven when the family relocated to California from his birthplace in Iowa, eventually settling in Glendale. When his parents separated, Wayne chose to stay with his pharmacist father; a younger brother lived with their mother (who would always favor the baby of the family). 

At that time several movie studios were based in Glendale and the young Wayne —called Little Duke (the family dog was Big Duke), a now-famed sobriquet later shortened to Duke—sometimes watched as crews shot on local streets. He was attending the University of Southern California on a football scholarship when he got work as a film double and extra. Then came a summer job at Fox, working props. Bit parts followed. A Fox studio head rechristened him John Wayne—though he would always be Duke to friends.

Well read and personable, the early Wayne was also a looker. Catching sight of him in the Universal commissary, Marlene Dietrich whispered to an associate, “Daddy, buy me that.” He had seven children and three wives, all of them Latinos. As his dear friend and co-star Maureen O’Hara put it, “he was really marrying the same woman every time.” There were affairs, including one with Dietrich, during those marriages.

He wasn’t perfect, and he knew it. He was especially ashamed of the fact that he didn’t serve during World War II. (Eyman details his many reclassifications during wartime.) But Wayne had many admirable traits—including loyalty to longtime friends and a diehard commitment to his fans and to the image he had shrewdly constructed. 

Nowadays acknowledged as a great (yes, great) actor, his performances in Red River and The Searchers and The Quiet Man, etc., have been scrutinized by scholars and delighted movie lovers the world over. His career had peaks and valleys and in-betweens, but through it all he was ever-professional. The first on the set, and the last to leave, he was a trouper up to the end—while battling cancer during the making of his final film, The Shootist. As the saying goes, and as this book demonstrates, they don’t make ’em like that, anymore

Mohandas K. Gandhi was born and raised in India and is best known for his work there as a world-renowned social reformer, political thinker, religious pluralist and prophet. If his life had followed the traditional path for someone of his family and caste, he would have remained in India, served in a prominent position and been unknown to most of the world. But as the noted scholar Ramachandra Guha demonstrates in his eminently readable and exhaustively researched Gandhi Before India, the 20 years that Gandhi spent in South Africa before his return to his home country in 1914 were fundamental to his success.

It was in South Africa that Gandhi invented what he named “satyagraha” or the “force of truth in a good cause,” the techniques of mass civil disobedience in which those in authority are shamed by nonviolent protesters willing to suffer beatings and imprisonment to attain justice. As he was about to leave South Africa for good, Gandhi called satyagraha “perhaps the mightiest instrument on earth.”

Nothing in Gandhi’s life had prepared him for the intensity of racial prejudice in South Africa. He went there, for what he thought would be a short time, to represent a prominent businessman in a lawsuit. He won the case and was asked to stay longer to help defeat a bill that would keep Indians, who were coming to South Africa in increasing numbers, from registering to vote. In his autobiography, Gandhi writes: “Thus God laid the foundations of my life in South Africa and sowed the seed of the fight for national self-respect.” His biographer speculates that it may have had more to do with the actions of the ruling class of white men.

Guha’s research took him to archives around the world, where he found many previously unknown or unused documents, including private papers of Gandhi’s friends and co-workers. As a result, Gandhi Before India presents the most complete portrait we have of a very human Gandhi during this period. Perhaps most importantly, we learn that Gandhi had a real gift for friendship. His closest friends in South Africa were two Hindus, two Jews and two Christian clergymen. Each was courageous and impressive, no one more than Gandhi’s devoted Jewish secretary, Sonja Schlesin, a steadfast supporter of his work.

Guha takes us through the negotiations Gandhi conducted with government officials, and we see how skilled he was in this arena. A strategist of slow reform, he proceeded incrementally, protesting by stages, preparing himself and his followers systematically rather than spontaneously rushing into confrontation. It was only when petitions, letters and meetings with authorities had failed that he chose to demonstrate.

This is an engrossing look at a major figure of the 20th century during a pivotal period in the development of his influential philosophy.

On a humid night in Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16, 1966, 24-year-old Stokely Carmichael exhorted his audience of 600 to start proclaiming “Black Power.”

“All we’ve been doing is begging the federal government. The only thing we can do is take over,” he told the crowd. After several years of organizing sit-ins, demonstrations and voter registration drives, Carmichael had come to believe that African Americans would never achieve justice until they had the capacity to rule their own lives. His speech and the reaction to it significantly changed the course of the modern Civil Rights movement.

Between 1966 and 1968, Carmichael was more vilified than Malcolm X (who was killed in 1965) had been. The FBI trailed him; politicians accused him of treason; and the Justice Department came close to charging him with sedition.

Carmichael’s complex life and legacy are the subject of Civil Rights historian Peniel E. Joseph’s engrossing and enlightening biography Stokely: A Life. The author makes a strong case that his controversial subject, more than any other activist of his generation, shaped the contours of Civil Rights and Black Power activism. Carmichael’s extraordinary journey took him from involvement in early nonviolent sit-ins to serving as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, from which he was eventually expelled, to his role as honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party, from which he resigned.

Carmichael also became an outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and in 1969, he left America for permanent residence in Guinea. There, he changed his name to Kwame Ture and became an ideologue for a revolutionary pan-Africanist movement.

Joseph makes us keenly aware that despite his historic successes, Carmichael made serious errors in judgment and had numerous large and small political failures. He admired both Malcolm X, with whose ideas he identified, and Martin Luther King Jr., who became a good friend. The morning after Carmichael’s Black Power speech, King urged the younger man to stop using that slogan, but was rebuffed.

This nuanced biography helps us understand a key player in the Civil Rights movement and illuminates the different approaches to social justice within the movement.

The 1920s were a decade of profound social change, nowhere more visible than in the rise of the so-called flapper. These rebellious young women shingled their hair and shortened their skirts, used makeup and drugs and stayed out dancing until dawn. They chose to live experimental, emotional lives—with mixed results—as Judith Mackrell reveals in her fascinating and compulsively readable new group biography, Flappers.

The book focuses on six women—Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Tamara de Lempicka—whose lives offer countless intersecting points of entry into the flapper phenomena. Diana Cooper and Nancy Cunard were upper class Brits, stunned into independence by the World War I and the opportunities it gave young women to live and work outside the stifling family home. Cooper’s brief stint as an actress overlapped with American Tallulah Bankhead’s London stage career; while fellow American Josephine Baker found lasting fame dancing on the Parisian stage. Zelda Fitzgerald—the patron saint of flappers—was the muse for her husband Scott’s literary portrayal of the modern woman. And Polish-born Tamara de Lempicka captured the flapper’s hectic glamour in her stunning art deco paintings.

Each of these women experimented with love and art, rebellion and freedom. As thrilling and dynamic as their young lives were, each struggled with the shadow side of independence. They were a first generation of women seeking lives outside the home—there were no roadmaps for their life-journeys. Baker’s dancing and de Lempicka’s painting brought these two women lifelong financial and creative independence, while Bankhead’s career as the theatrical face of the flapper gave her a meteoric success in the 1920s that failed to age well. Cunard’s and Fitzgerald’s stories are perhaps the saddest, a testament to how the flashy evanescent 1920s faded into the long slow depression of the 1930s. While Cunard’s activism against racism and fascism embodied the political spirit of the 1930s, she (like Fitzgerald) struggled with mental illness for the rest of her life.

Lady Diana Cooper had the happiest after-life as a former flapper, and she particularly appreciated the 1960s: the next decade when young women put on short skirts and sought sexual and artistic freedom.

Mackrell’s fabulous Flappers lovingly captures the manic glitzy dream girls of the 1920s, paving the way for their feminist granddaughters.