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From 1926 to 1941, Sweden’s famed export made 24 Holly-wood films, all of which are detailed in Mark A. Vieira’s Greta Garbo: A Cinematic Legacy. Featuring 250 photos, many never before seen (including an unretouched portrait of Garbo at 36), the book utilizes newly available MGM documents and articles of the day to examine the career that enshrined Hollywood’s ultimate woman of mystery.
When not writing about movies, Los Angeles-based journalist Pat H. Broeske likes to watch them.
Throughout U.S. history, presidents and vice presidents usually have not been close to each other. One has all the power of his office; the other does not. That invariably leads to many opportunities for misunderstandings, slights and mistrust. The mix is especially difficult if the president is an elder statesman and the symbol of victory in World War II, known to the public as being “above politics,” and the vice president is an ambitious young politician with a reputation as a ruthless campaigner.
Such is the situation Jeffrey Frank explores in Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage. “There was never a real breach, there was, rather, a fluctuating level of discomfort,” he writes. Dwight Eisenhower’s attitude toward Richard Nixon ranged from “mild disdain to hesitant respect.” Yet their relationship continued—especially through the marriage of Nixon’s daughter, Julie, and Eisenhower’s grandson, David—until Ike’s death in 1969, shortly after Nixon was elected president.
Exactly how their coupling as a political team began is something of a mystery. No one present in the Chicago hotel room where Nixon was chosen by Republican Party leaders seems to have a clear memory of what happened. Eisenhower seems to have taken a back seat in the selection process. Until his own nomination, Eisenhower did not realize that he would need to name a vice-presidential candidate. Three years later, when he was asked about his role in the VP choice, he replied that he wrote down the names of five or six younger men he admired, including Nixon, and said to Republican Party leaders that any of them would be acceptable to him.
The two men barely knew each other, but Nixon understood that any hard partisan campaigning would be up to him while Ike remained, as much as possible, above the fray. This was to remain the pattern throughout their two terms in office, and it affected how the public regarded them. In addition, Ike used Nixon for such unpleasant tasks as firing his chief of staff, Sherman Adams, who had become the focus of a scandal.
Nixon pointed out much later that Ike was “a far more complex and devious man than most people realized.” This first became apparent to Nixon during the initial campaign when reports of a “Secret Nixon Fund,” supported by millionaires, came to light, and Eisenhower did not rush to the defense of his running mate. It was not until the generally positive reaction to Nixon’s nationally televised “Checkers” speech to explain himself that Ike expressed his support.
Frank devotes a revelatory chapter to the circumstances surrounding the speech. Shortly before he went on the air, Nixon was told that “all of Eisenhower’s top advisers” wanted him to end his remarks by submitting his resignation to Ike. Nixon came to understand that this “suggestion” was what Ike also wanted. Nixon refused, and after that neither man felt he could completely trust the other.
Nixon craved Ike’s approval, though, and the maneuvering between the two men to achieve their individual objectives runs throughout the book. Once in office, Ike made lists of other men who would make good vice presidents, and raised questions—both publicly and privately—about Nixon’s suitability for the presidency. In 1955, even before Eisenhower had decided to run for re-election, he proposed that Nixon accept a cabinet position in a new administration. And in 1956, he did nothing to stop the effort to replace Nixon on the Republican ticket.
This lively narrative touches on various personalities whose relationships with Nixon were particularly important. He became close to John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, who tried to give Nixon a larger role in the administration. Nixon was the one major official at the time who made a special effort to meet regularly with black leaders. He had been on friendly terms with Martin Luther King Jr. for several years when, in 1960, during the run-up to the presidential election, King was arrested after a civil rights demonstration and sentenced to prison in Georgia. Yet when Coretta Scott King contacted both presidential campaigns for help, it was John F. Kennedy who returned her call and helped to obtain her husband’s release. Nixon said he had “frequently counseled with Dr. King and [had] a great respect for him,” but he did not want to make what he called “a grandstand play.”
Anyone interested in U.S. politics will enjoy Jeffrey Frank’s absorbing tale of two very different men and their turbulent relationship.
Throughout U.S. history, presidents and vice presidents usually have not been close to each other. One has all the power of his office; the other does not. That invariably leads to many opportunities for misunderstandings, slights and mistrust. The mix is especially difficult if the…
Charles Dickens is inextricably tied to the children he “fathered” in his fiction—Oliver Twist, Pip, Little Nell. In real life, the beloved writer sired 10 offspring (possibly 11, if unconfirmed reports of a child with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, are true), nine of whom lived into adulthood. Those children are the focus of Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, an engaging work of Dickensiana that arrives at the tail end of the year-long celebration of the author’s bicentennial.
The borrowed title is ironic, for what Gottlieb shows us in this family portrait is that while the elder Dickens may have professed to expect great things from his children, in most cases he jettisoned those hopes somewhat prematurely. It is never easy to be the child of an accomplished parent, and Dickens was one of the most famous men in the world. The impatience he displayed when judging his children’s accomplishments, his refusal to give them a chance to come into their own in their own good time, must have been frustrating, particularly for his sons (given the times, and the less conditional affection he seems to have shown his daughters, the two girls may have suffered less).
Only two of the Dickens children achieved a level of accomplishment that would have pleased their father. Henry, second youngest son, went to Cambridge, became a lawyer and judge, and was eventually knighted for his services to the Crown. Kate, younger of the two surviving girls, became a much admired painter. Yet, as Gottlieb shows us, success is relative. The writer’s eldest and namesake, Charley, would prove himself as a publisher after his father’s death, and Alfred had a measure of success in Australia. Walter and Sydney died in their early 20s, too young to judge where their lives might have led. Mamie, most adoring of their father, became something of a religious eccentric. The peripatetic Frank died in Illinois, of all places, while the youngest, Plorn, lived in relative obscurity Down Under.
It is true that a number of the children were undermined by drink and profligacy (traits perhaps inherited from Dickens’ father and siblings, if not from the abstentious and prudent writer himself). But Gottlieb raises an important question: How would the Dickens children, particularly the boys, have fared if their father had been more patient, helping them finding their places in the world, rather than shipping them off to unsuitable careers and inhospitable climes? The man who imagined great life-arcs for the characters in his fiction seems to have had little imagination when dealing with his own offspring’s lives.
Charles Dickens is inextricably tied to the children he “fathered” in his fiction—Oliver Twist, Pip, Little Nell. In real life, the beloved writer sired 10 offspring (possibly 11, if unconfirmed reports of a child with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, are true), nine of whom lived…
Many have proclaimed Winston Churchill the greatest statesman of the 20th century. His determination and inspiring speeches played a key role in saving Britain and even Western civilization in the darkest hours of WWII. He was a complex man: demanding, insensitive, ruthless, yet at times generous and apologetic, with a natural affinity for children and animals. He was interested in science and technology but in many ways remained an upper-class Englishman of the late 19th century. He is, in short, a biographer’s dream.
The first two volumes of William Manchester’s biography of Churchill were widely acclaimed. Manchester died in 2004, but not before tapping award-winning journalist Paul Reid to finish the third volume in the trilogy. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 covers Churchill’s first days as Britain’s prime minister (and his return to the office in 1950), the Second World War, the beginnings of the Cold War, the writing of his memoirs and his death.
When Churchill became prime minister in 1940, he had prepared for the moment in many ways for six decades. Yet it is important to remember that his selection was not a popular choice. He was aware of his reputation for changing sides on issues and his history of questionable strategic judgments, so he moved quickly toward reconciliation as he made his choices of War Cabinet officers. In the early days of the war, he reached out many times for help from the United States and received nothing but a sympathetic ear. Even after the U.S. entered the war, it was Churchill who made special efforts to keep the “Big Three” working, more or less, together.
Churchill had no fondness for war. He hated the carnage and regarded the glorification of war as a fraud. But, the authors write, “War’s utility was altogether another matter.” Churchill once told his private secretary, John Colville, that those who say that wars settle nothing were talking nonsense because “nothing in history was ever settled except by war.”
As the authors put it, “Churchill did not simply observe the historical continuum; he made himself part of it. . . . He did not live in the past; the past lived on in him.” This third volume of Manchester’s trilogy took almost 20 years to write, but the narrative never falters. It is a triumph and definitely worth the wait.
Many have proclaimed Winston Churchill the greatest statesman of the 20th century. His determination and inspiring speeches played a key role in saving Britain and even Western civilization in the darkest hours of WWII. He was a complex man: demanding, insensitive, ruthless, yet at times…
Diana Vreeland launched herself at Harper’s Bazaar with the column “Why Don’t You?”: “Why don’t you rinse your blonde child’s hair in dead champagne to keep its gold, as they do in France?” Such love for the superficial and luxurious may have been out of step with the austerity of the 1930s, but it foretold the direction of much of 20th-century American fashion. As fashion editor at both Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue—where she was an early promoter of “youthquake” trends in the 1960s—and later as curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, Vreeland’s professional influence was as eccentric as her personal style.
Rail-thin with severe black hair and a distinctive, crane-like profile, Vreeland’s style developed as compensation for her perception that she was unattractive. In the insightful new biography Empress of Fashion, Amanda Mackenzie Stuart shows how Diana’s debutante mother rejected her “ugly” daughter in favor of her more conventionally pretty sister. This hurt Diana, but she did not allow it to shape her life. Reinventing herself as “The Girl”—immaculate, stylish and positive—led to five decades of fashion-forward professional success.
Stuart uses Vreeland’s vulnerable roots to create a sympathetic portrait of Diana, and also to explain her notorious lies about her background, such as her stories about growing up in Belle Époque Paris instead of New York City. She believed in telling the best story possible; if that meant gliding over the hurt of being an unloved daughter, so be it.
Diana Vreeland’s life story is oddly inspiring. Why don’t you give a copy of Empress of Fashion to your favorite fashionista this holiday season?
Diana Vreeland launched herself at Harper’s Bazaar with the column “Why Don’t You?”: “Why don’t you rinse your blonde child’s hair in dead champagne to keep its gold, as they do in France?” Such love for the superficial and luxurious may have been out of…
Still selling out stadiums, arenas and small halls after more than 30 years, Bruce Springsteen continues, night after night and album after album, to deliver rollicking performances and straight-ahead rock and roll, as well as biting songs that both celebrate the glory of being born in the USA and indict our misguided political and social policies.
Roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair as you travel with Peter Ames Carlin down Springsteen’s thunder roads in Bruce, his captivating biography of The Boss. Drawing extensively on interviews with Springsteen himself and his family and friends—including the final interview with his beloved friend and saxophonist Clarence Clemons—Carlin chronicles Springsteen’s life from the day he got his first guitar to the teenage Bruce’s conversion to rock and roll the night he sat spellbound watching Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1957.
As a teenager, Springsteen had already developed into a hard-working rock guitarist, driving his bands to play tighter and tighter sets. His doggedness paid off when one of his early bands, the Castiles, snagged a semi-regular gig at Cafe Wha?, New York’s famous rock venue. Carlin moves rhythmically from these formative years through Springsteen’s glory days, when he moved from the shadows of Asbury Park to the light of international fame, and into Springsteen’s latest tour and his new album, Wrecking Ball.
Carlin also plumbs Springsteen’s darker moods, his craving for a better understanding of his father, whose vacant stares during Springsteen’s youth troubled him more than his father’s lectures or criticisms, his deep passion for music and his desire to give his fans the very best performances he can give them.
Because this admiring, yet unflinchingly honest portrait of The Boss allows Springsteen to speak in his own words and convey his own ideas about music and life, this definitive biography leaves all other Springsteen books in the dust of its roaring engines, taking us into the shadows of the man that rock critic Jon Landau once called “the future of rock and roll.”
Still selling out stadiums, arenas and small halls after more than 30 years, Bruce Springsteen continues, night after night and album after album, to deliver rollicking performances and straight-ahead rock and roll, as well as biting songs that both celebrate the glory of being born…
In one of the most disturbing scenes in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the saintly Marmee says to her daughter Jo, “I have been angry nearly every day of my life.” Eve LaPlante’s new biography of the “real” Marmee—Louisa’s mother, Abigail May Alcott—provides ample reason for her fictional counterpart’s daily rage.
LaPlante, herself a descendant from the Alcott family tree, traces Abigail May Alcott’s life from early childhood through death. We hear about Abigail’s relationships with her siblings, including her older brother, who would become a famous progressive (it is because of him that women were admitted into Cornell, for example). We learn about Abigail’s love of writing, her chronic bad health and her love match with philosopher A. Bronson Alcott. The last of these was, in LaPlante’s view, the cause of much of the trouble in Abigail’s life.
The Alcotts were perpetually in debt and moved more than 30 times. LaPlante’s chapter titles, often pulled from Abigail’s writing, reveal her subject’s despair: “Sacrifices Must Be Made,” “A Dead Decaying Thing,” “Left to Dig or Die.” Into this disheartening scene came Louisa, a daughter LaPlante convincingly argues had much in common with her beleaguered mother. Louisa vowed early on to become rich, pay off her family’s debts and give her mother a comfortable room. The strain between Louisa’s parents very much shaped her passion to write for money, which was why she wrote Little Women in the first place.
The narrative about Marmee’s life will be of interest to anyone who enjoys mother/daughter stories, American history or literary studies. Readers of the last category, however, may find that in fact, this “untold story” is already familiar, and may take issue with some of the author’s interpretations, particularly her obvious distaste for her subject’s husband. Still, the long and vital quotations from primary documents (some of them newly uncovered) and LaPlante’s careful research more than compensate for the book’s limitations. Especially as we move into the winter season, when many of us will cue our DVD players to the opening scene of Little Women, Marmee & Louisa is well worth a read.
In one of the most disturbing scenes in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the saintly Marmee says to her daughter Jo, “I have been angry nearly every day of my life.” Eve LaPlante’s new biography of the “real” Marmee—Louisa’s mother, Abigail May Alcott—provides ample reason…
When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, many of his fans and friends mourned the loss of the brilliant writer, whose fiction and essays wove filaments of energetic, staccato and sometimes lumbering prose around clever and piercing insights about contemporary society. As the details of his death began to emerge and critics began to publish studies of his life and writing, so did details of Wallace's life-long battle with depression, mental illness, addiction and self-abnegation.
In the first biography of Wallace, New Yorker writer Max (The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery) exhaustingly chronicles the details of Wallace's life from his happy and ordinary childhood in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, where his father taught philosophy and his mother taught English, his love of, almost addiction to, television, his tennis successes in high school and his terror at leaving home to enter Amherst—which he decided to attend so he wouldn't have to face any more college interviews—to his on-again and off-again college career, interrupted by episodes of depression, and his faltering rise to success and recognition as a writer.
Max points out that as a high school junior Wallace experienced an unforgettable moment when "he clearly saw the danger of a mind unhinged, of the danger of thinking responsive only to itself . . . . [H]e would derive a lifelong fear of the consequences of mental and, eventually, emotional isolation." In spite of the flashes of brilliance in his writing, Wallace could never grow beyond the menace and threat of his own restless, anxious mind, and even the novel for which he is most praised, Infinite Jest, baffles readers with the labyrinthine excess of a soul lost in the funhouse. Although it rose quickly on the bestseller lists, the novel received a mixed response from critics; the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani famously called Wallace's novel a "big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, reminiscences and footnotes . . . arbitrary and self-indulgent." Much the same could be said of Max’s bloated and uneven biography.
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story offers unsatisfying readings of Wallace's own writing, but Max provides a sympathetic portrait of a writer who struggled to show the world what it meant to be a human being—though he never managed to live up to his own expectations for the task.
When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, many of his fans and friends mourned the loss of the brilliant writer, whose fiction and essays wove filaments of energetic, staccato and sometimes lumbering prose around clever and piercing insights about contemporary society. As the…
Cary Grant was the embodiment of grace and perfection. And, my, but he looked good. But beneath the suave demeanor was a man of darkly troubled complexities. As Cary Grant: The Biography details, the former Archibald Leach was forever haunted by his English childhood and his relationship with the mother who wound up in an asylum. Marc Eliot, who previously penned the musical sagas of Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles, relies largely on previously published books and articles for source material. He makes good use of Grant’s own interviews and the memories he shared on the lecture circuit. And Dyan Cannon’s divorce testimony is an eye-opener. Wife number four, Cannon was 35 years younger than Grant who ruled the roost as if he were, well, her daddy. (He once locked her in her room to keep her from wearing a short skirt in public.) Less convincing, but no less entertaining, are recycled accounts of Grant’s alleged relationship with western star Randolph Scott. If this really happened, Grant truly should have won the Oscar he craved. Pat H. Broeske is the co-author of Howard Hughes: The Untold Story, which would also make a terrific holiday gift.
In 1825, when John Quincy Adams became the sixth president of the United States, he appeared to be as well prepared for the job as anyone could be. A son of the nation’s second president, he was well educated at Harvard; as secretary of state, he wrote what became known as the Monroe Doctrine; and as a U.S. senator, he broke with his party and supported the Louisiana Purchase. Despite this illustrious background, he proved to be the most ineffective president in early American history.
His presidency failed in part because of his own missteps (his inability to relate to the ordinary citizen) and partly by the efforts of his political opponents (primarily supporters of Andrew Jackson). Still, his independence and political courage were remarkable, especially his post-presidential opposition to slavery. Harlow Giles Unger captures the many sides of Adams and his era in the superb John Quincy Adams. A key source is the diary that Adams kept from the age of 10 until his late 70s—14,000 pages in all.
First elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1802, Adams was regarded as such a nuisance in his home state that his colleagues elected him to the U.S. Senate to get rid of him for at least six years. Instead, Unger writes, Adams began to shock “the nation’s entire political establishment with what became a courageous, lifelong crusade against injustice.”
On his first day in the House of Representatives (the only president who went on to serve in that body), Adams presented 15 petitions calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. It was a stunning breach of decorum in a body forbidden by its rules to speak of abolition. In a famous case, he later defended 36 Africans who had been prisoners on the slave ship Amistad.
Eloquent, irritating and fiercely committed to his work, John Quincy Adams lived an extraordinary life, and Unger tells his story convincingly in this compelling narrative.
In 1825, when John Quincy Adams became the sixth president of the United States, he appeared to be as well prepared for the job as anyone could be. A son of the nation’s second president, he was well educated at Harvard; as secretary of state,…
In his acclaimed biography, The Beatles, Bob Spitz delivered an intimate and enduring portrait of four rock stars who changed the course of popular culture. Now, timed to coincide with Julia Child’s 100th birthday, Spitz offers an admiring portrait of the woman who became a rock star in her own world, changing forever the way Americans think about food and cooking.
Drawing deeply on Child’s diaries and letters, Dearie exhaustively—and exhaustingly—chronicles her life from her rambunctious childhood and her socially active days at Smith to her early adult life in government service, her whirlwind romance with Paul Child, and her rapid rise to becoming the television star without whom the Food Network and the passion for celebrity chefs might never have developed.
As Spitz points out, Julia Child wasn’t a natural when it came to the kitchen. In November 1948, an extraordinary meal in Paris changed her life, and she enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu, gaining the skills she needed to prepare everything from sauces to soups to soufflés. In 1961, she published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and though critics called it a monumental work, it was not until Child promoted the book on the “Today” show that it began flying out of bookstores and ended up on kitchen counters around the country. In 1962, Child’s energetic personality and her love of teaching landed her before the camera for her groundbreaking public television show, “The French Chef,” where she cultivated an audience with her down-to-earth ways, her off-color humor, her lack of concern for perfection and her devotion to making sure that everyone—even the unskilled—could cook the dishes she prepared.
As Spitz so cannily observes, Child was determined to stand at the center of her own world. The story of her emancipation runs parallel to the struggles of post-war American women who were frustrated that the demands of being a perfect hostess and a perfect wife kept them from pursuing other dreams and desires. In Julia Child, these women had not only a role model who steered them from beans-and-franks casseroles to Sole Meunière but also a fiercely independent woman who lived above the rules of both the kitchen and culture.
In his acclaimed biography, The Beatles, Bob Spitz delivered an intimate and enduring portrait of four rock stars who changed the course of popular culture. Now, timed to coincide with Julia Child’s 100th birthday, Spitz offers an admiring portrait of the woman who became a…
The advance buzz for Barack Obama centers on the diary entries kept by Genevieve Cook, who was the one-time girlfriend of the man who would become the 44th president of the United States. Obama was 22 at the time, a recent graduate of Columbia University, living in New York and searching for his place in life. The diary entries, excerpted in Vanity Fair prior to the book’s publication, are intriguing because they reinforce the image of Obama being cool and aloof. Indeed, the 18-month relationship collapses under the weight of inertia as Obama decides to move to Chicago to become a community organizer. The rest, as they say, is history.
While Cook’s often-whiny diary entries are juicy, they represent only a fraction of what makes Barack Obama a great book. Author David Maraniss, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, uses his skills as a journalist to uncover new details about Obama and his ancestors. The book traces the Obama family tree back to his great-grandparents in Kansas and in Kenya. It follows Obama as a young boy as he hopscotches across the globe from Hawaii to Indonesia, and then as a young man attending college in Los Angeles, and later New York. The chronicles of this circuitous journey only reinforce how remarkable a story it is that Obama ended up in the White House.
Barack Obama fills in the blanks of Obama’s own memoir, Dreams from My Father, because Maraniss is such a thorough reporter and researcher. The author of a memoir has a singular perspective, and can be selective with the particulars, while a biographer strives to find all the facts. Obama’s book creates the frame for the portrait. Maraniss’ book connects the dots.
What is fascinating about Barack Obama is that it ends before Obama enters politics. In fact, the protagonist doesn’t appear until the seventh chapter. Maraniss explains that he took this approach to delve deeply into Obama’s background and discover what shaped his character: Growing up as a biracial child with no father and a mother who was often gone; raised by white grandparents who struggled with their prejudices, the future president faced many challenges. “It helped explain his caution, his tendency to hold back and survey life like a chessboard,” Maraniss writes. As Obama finishes his fourth year in office, some say he is even more of an enigma. Barack Obama is a book guaranteed to bring more clarity to his story.
The advance buzz for Barack Obama centers on the diary entries kept by Genevieve Cook, who was the one-time girlfriend of the man who would become the 44th president of the United States. Obama was 22 at the time, a recent graduate of Columbia University,…
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