Review by New York Times Review
WHO QUALIFIES AS an icon? What deserves to be called iconic? In matters of Hollywood, a designation that originally pertained to religious imagery is now regularly applied to subjects as secular as "Animal House," Sandra Bullock, "Vertigo," W.C. Fields and that scene in the original "Friday the 13th" where Kevin Bacon is stabbed through the neck with an arrow. One army of admirers may think the title ought to go to "This Is Spinal Tap" ; for a different platoon, Judy Garland deserves the title for life. That's why, years ago, the top editor at the magazine where I wrote about movies banned the word "icon" from its pages. More often than not, he said, the writer just means, I think so-and-so is cool. Let me tell you why and how. By way of saying, let me tell you why and how the implications of iconography - or its provocative opposite, iconoclasm - shape each of six books on a theme of Hollywood that arrive in the season of heat, superheroes and blockbuster-size declarations of pop-cultural opinion. I have ALFRED HITCHCOCK: The Man Who Knew Too Much (New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $20) to thank for providing focus. More specifically, I salute the branding savvy of the publishers, who have packaged this small, engaging, intellectually agile study by the cultural scholar and author Michael Wood in a roster marketed as the Icons Series. Others who have gotten the nod include Edgar Allan Poe, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Stalin and Jesus. A whole bookshop, preferably booby-trapped, could be stocked with all the volumes written (saving shelf space for those yet to come) about Hitchcock, whose exquisite understanding of suspense defined his filmmaking career. (In a Hitchcockian world, we who were outside the shop would know of the traps, but the innocent book buyer who happened to enter would not, so that we could roil with pleasurable anxiety until the wrong thing happened to the wrong man.) Wood relies on a reader to know the basics about the director: his Britishness, which he clung to through his years in Hollywood; his famous movies; his close creative collaboration with his wife, Alma Reville; and even his rotund and dour physical profile. And with the confidence that he is among well-read friends, the author - a fellow Englishman transposed to America, and a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton - wanders at a lively pace through intriguing and subtle observations about this great artist, "a frightened man who got his fears to work for him on film." Developing the subtitle of his study, Wood proposes that "in Hitchcock's films, it seems, there are only three options: to know too little, to know too much (however little that is), and to know a whole lot that is entirely plausible and completely wrong." The author, by the way, never whispers the word "icon." Nor does he ever refer to his subject as "Hitch." For that kind of familiarity and self-confidence in all opinions, try KEEPERS (Knopf, $26.95), by Richard Schickel. "I came to know Hitch in his later years, and I am here to testify that no man ever took movies more seriously than he did," Schickel writes - not entirely a compliment. This redoubtable movie critic and historian began reviewing films in 1965, and served as a film critic for Time and Life magazines for 44 years; he calculates that he has seen some 22,590 movies in his 82 years. He has full rights to subtitle his 38th book "The Greatest Films - and Personal Favorites - of a Moviegoing Lifetime." In "Keepers," Schickel thumbs through his notes and comes to a conclusion. "The truth, very simply, is that most movies are lousy or, at best, routine," he declares with characteristic bluntness. (The cumulative footage of 22,590 movies can do that to a fellow.) His plan, therefore, is to linger on movies that have given him pleasure over the decades, domestic productions for the most part, because "movies being movies, they exist, first and foremost, to entertain - especially those made in America." Although he doesn't label them as such, Schickel's personal lists of icons and (even more interesting) false idols are easy for a reader to assemble. Fun, too: With his assertively chatty, you-and-me-pal narrative style and his "Frank Capra told me this, Bette Davis told me that" connections in the business, the veteran takes on all comers. His favorite golden-age movie star? Errol Flynn. The 1939 French masterwork "The Rules of the Game"? "I still don't get it." His favorite movie? "Fargo." And for good measure, the word on the influential film critic Pauline Kael? "Basically a bully, and a relentless one when she sensed weakness. Her trick was to pretend she was telling the brutal truth, which everyone else was too cowardly to do." Raise 'em up, knock 'em down, pilgrim ! Schickel's declarations are models of gravitas compared with the pronouncements flung with aggressive bro swagger by Adam Rockoff in the horror of it all: One Moviegoer's Love Affair With Masked Maniacs, Frightened Virgins, and the Living Dead ... (Scribner, $24). The author is a passionate fan of the horror genre in all its forms, the bloodier and more gruesome the better. To him, the whole genre is iconic! Previously, Rockoff wrote "Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986"; he also wrote an adaptation of the exploitation film "I Spit on Your Grave." He really really really loves the stuff, and has since he was a kid. He is a proud "fear junkie," and a connoisseur exacting enough to specify that Tom Savini's "makeup effects in 'Friday the 13th' are iconic." For good measure, he frequently reminds readers that he is also a solid citizen, i.e., married, with two small children. He dedicates his book to Grandma Gladys. This is a good place for me to disclose that I do not like horror movies. I hate slasher pics. I am a confirmed gore sissy. And that's O.K. We do not share the same tastes, but I am genuinely interested in hearing about the fine points of Rockoff's fervor. Except that the man won't stop shrieking with disdain, middle finger raised at those who are not members of his clubhouse. "The Horror of It All" twitches with manic, foulmouthed, bloggy energy about the pleasures of getting "freaked ... the [expletive] out." Rockoff revels in his list of slasherdom's "greatest kills." He is prone to the one-upmanship of negative compliments: Gary Sherman is one of the horror genre's "most underrated directors"; "Event Horizon" is "a criminally underrated film." But I can tolerate the fanboy grammar. In my business, I'm used to it. What wears this sissy out, though, are the trollish provocations spouted in the name of iconoclasm. Rockoff hates film critics - no big surprise there - and pours vitriol on the "pompous blowhards" Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, mostly because they, too, had the audacity to dislike slasher films. He "can't stand the French": He went to Cannes once, and declares that "it stunk of fish and looked like Massachusetts." Also, "Alien" is "boring" and a "snoozefest." The blood on the floor is mine, from biting my lip in exasperation. But before I reach for a mop, I might as well sweep up the shards of bitterness left on the ground by Stevie Phillips in her disgruntled showbiz book, JUDY & LIZA & ROBERT & FREDDIE & DAVID & SUE & ME ... : A Memoir (St. Martin's, $25.99). The title hints at some of the problems. Who are these people? And who is "Me"? Well, two names we know at first sight: That's Judy Garland (an icon!) and her daughter Liza Minnelli (an icon's daughter!). The bemused reader learns that Phillips, now 78, is a former talent agent and producer who began her career working with Freddie Fields and David Begelman when those two once-powerful agents left their even more powerful Hollywood boss, Lew Wasserman, to open their own shop. Judy was their client, and Liza was a teenager in 1960 when Phillips, then a "Mad Men"-era gal around the office, got a leg up on her career climb as a kind of minder and body woman to Garland, watching her take pills and covering up suicide attempts. Later, Phillips represented Minnelli. Robert is Robert Redford, whom Phillips signed as a client in the mid-1960s. Sue is the late, colorful agent Sue Mengers, who also joined the agency, by then called C.M.A. In the guise of love and admiration for Garland, Phillips trashes her former idol repeatedly with every sad tale of bad behavior she trots out. Then again, while alternately preening and justifying, she also dumps on her own New York City upbringing (her father was "a vain, vile-tempered man," her grandfather "a world-class philanderer"), runs roughshod over two of her three ex-husbands and disdains Begelman, with whom she had an affair - as did Garland. Ensnared in an embezzlement scandal in the late 1970s, Begelman committed suicide in 1995. Decades after the fact, Phillips feels compelled to note that "'revolting' is the only appropriate word to describe sex with David." The same word applies to too many parts of this memoir, as the memoirist feeds on the (iconic!) fame of others. The character slashing here might make even horror fans go, Ick. There is a way, though, to do a memoir right. Candice Bergen shows how in A FINE ROMANCE (Simon & Schuster, $28). Readers of "Knock Wood" will not be surprised: The self-possessed, witty and down-to-earth voice that made Bergen's first memoir a hit when it was published in 1984 has only been deepened by life's surprises. And the actor who, for the decade between 1988 and 1998, created the influential (iconic!) television sitcom character Murphy Brown freely shares her surprise, first at finding love and marriage with the French filmmaker Louis Malle; then at giving birth to their daughter, Chloe, now 29; then at the phenomenal success of "Murphy Brown." Bergen addresses challenge and loss, too. The success of the TV show kept Bergen and her daughter apart from Malle for stretches at a time; he didn't like Los Angeles, and one can only guess that marital and parental adjustments were even more difficult than the author - honest yet discreet about the privacy of others - lets on. Then, 15 years into their marriage, Malle died of what Bergen reveals was a brain inflammation. Grief hit mother and daughter hard. Bergen faced a post-"Murphy Brown" career re-evaluation. She fell in love with the real estate developer and philanthropist Marshall Rose, a widower, and in 2000 she married him. Her mother died. Bergen tells all this with aplomb and a sense of humor. She is also plain-spoken. Much has been made of the fuss-free way in which she has written about her weight gain in recent years. "Fat holds your face up; my skin is stretched to the max. Wrinkles don't stand a chance." But she is equally forthright about her experience with antidepressants, psychotherapy, Botox and the changes that accompany aging. "In my 60s, I seem to have gotten somebody else's hair. I think Golda Meir's." She conveys her particular challenges as a mother - and those of Chloe as the only child of such a famous couple - without crowding her daughter. And she is revelatory in her contemplation of finance. "I have made a lot of money," she declares with no coyness. "Most of this is the incomparable TV Money. Nothing like it." Then again, "the first year of 'Murphy,' they paid me peanuts, in part because I was far from their first choice for the role; they'd wanted the younger, juicier Heather Locklear." As a fictional newswoman, Murphy Brown was iconically brassy. As a memoirist, Candice Bergen is flesh-and-blood classy. That leaves one final icon up for consideration, a biggie. Indeed, Orson Welles loomed so large - in talent, in contradictions, in girth - that, in the end, his multitudes could not be contained. When he died, he was still working on a project that has been called "the greatest home movie that no one has ever seen." As of today, the work remains mostly unseen, for reasons as outsize as the man himself. And in ORSON WELLES'S LAST MOVIE: The Making of "The Other Side of the Wind" (St. Martin's, $26.99), the journalist Josh Karp applies enthusiastic scholarship, with vivid narrative writing and just the right touch of can-you-believethis-stuff ? marvel, to chronicle what did and didn't happen, and why. The extensive endnotes and bibliography are reassuring, considering the boost Karp gets out of recreating historically important dialogue - and even offhand comments - among real people. What a mad tea party it was among those Frank Marshall, at the time the project's line producer, would call "volunteers in service to Orson Welles," or Vistow. Welles, who also wrote the screenplay, began working on the movie in 1970, having returned to Hollywood after years of European self-exile. He continued to shoot, on and off, for some half-dozen years to tell the story of the last day in the life of an aging movie director, played by John Huston. The day on which he dies, drunk and a possible suicide, is his 70th birthday, July 2 - which is also the anniversary of the day Ernest Hemingway shot himself in the head. Did the movie emerge from autobiographical impulses? Did Welles ever really want to finish it? No answers are forthcoming, and that's beside Karp's point. We've never seen "The Other Side of the Wind," Karp says, for reasons that "involve everything from the Iranian revolution and runaway egos to greed, petty long-held grudges, bad accounting, corporations based in Liechtenstein, complicated ownership disagreements, self-destructive behavior, and an ever-expanding list of individuals who believed they had a legal, financial, moral or artistic right to the film itself." Along the way, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, George Lucas and Clint Eastwood passed on trying to complete it. Word is, another attempt is underway right now. "Who do I have to [expletive] to get out of this picture?" Welles reportedly said, five years into the making of the thing. That's how icons talk when they're just humans. LISA SCHWARZBAUM, a former critic at Entertainment Weekly, is a freelance journalist.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 31, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
She has been Dan Quayle's nemesis on TV's Murphy Brown and the irascible Shirley Schmidt on Boston Legal. She has been the so-called sister of ventriloquist's dummy Charlie McCarthy and was married to the iconic director Louis Malle. Yet in her second memoir (following Knock Wood, 1984), Bergen emerges as Everywoman, equally comfortable in ratty sweats or vintage Versace, playing Scrabble or attending the Oscars. Placing the late-in-life birth of her daughter, Chloe, at the epicenter of the past 30-plus years, Bergen revisits times that brought her unimaginable success onscreen and unspeakable heartache off. She comes across in ways one would imagine, sparkling and sophisticated, but also in ways one would not. She is as bawdy as she is beautiful, as gutsy as she is fragile, as savvy as she is sensitive. Bergen expresses her fierce adoration of Chloe, her sheer delight in her second marriage to financier Marshall Rose, and her brazen acceptance of the indignities of aging in an industry that prizes youth. A disarming and refreshing read.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Actress Bergen performs a beautifully entertaining and down-to-earth reading of her memoir, which is as heartwarming and stirring as her performance. There is tenderness in her voice as she reads the first letter that her late husband, Louis Malle, wrote to her, and wonderment when she recounts traveling with him. She speaks with candor about widowhood, motherhood, remarriage, and aging in a society driven by appearance, all of which are conveyed effectively by Bergen's signature gravelly voice. Most endearing of all is Bergen's delightful sense of humor-dry and self-deprecating-sparing herself little dignity as she describes her fears during childbirth, her passion for food, and her "skewed sense of moral superiority to women who are intensely self-disciplined when it comes to food." She sounds on the verge of laughter as she recounts the pranks on the set of the television show Murphy Brown. Bergen's memoir is a charming blend of joy, sentimentality, and unabashed honesty that is augmented by Bergen's skillful and heartfelt performance. A Simon & Schuster hardcover. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Bergen reads her own work in this delightfully honest, open, and humorous memoir, a follow-up to her Knock Wood. The author bares her soul, revealing the merging of her personal and professional lives. Writing about her nontraditional marriage to French film Louis Malle, motherhood at age 39, early widowhood, and remarriage, Bergen presents glimpses of her work including a behind-the-scenes look at her hit television series Murphy Brown and nursing Malle through his final illness. The author excels at both writing and narrating. Her skill with timing and inflection makes for a fascinating, compelling audio experience. VERDICT Of interest to fans of the author and Murphy Brown, as well as anyone who enjoys contemporary memoirs. ["This is witty and poignant, touching upon the many phases and challenges of daily existence": LJ 2/1/15 review of the S. & S. hc.]-Laurie Selwyn, -formerly with Grayson Cty. Law Lib., Sherman, TX © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Award-winning actress Bergen continues the story begun in the best-selling memoir, Knock Wood (1984). This second installment of the author's autobiography focuses on the three great loves of her life: her two husbands and her daughter. When she met her first husband, French director Louis Malle (1932-1995), "[s]parks decidedly did not fly." Less than a year after their first awkward introduction, however, the two were married. The showbiz woman who "dealt strictly in commerce" was soon immersed in a world of elegance and high art alongside a dynamic man she affectionately calls a "cultural commando." During the early years of her marriage, Bergen struggled with ambivalence over whether or not to have a family. At age 39, she gave birth to a daughter, Chloe, who would in time become even closer to Bergen than the globe-trotting Malle. Her stalled acting career took off shortly afterward when she was chosen to play the lead in the iconic TV series Murphy Brown. By the early 1990s, the show would inspire a "family values" controversy for its fearless portrayal of a hard-driving career woman who becomes an unwed mother. Bergen admits that the success strained relations with her husband. At the same time, it also helped her to carve out her professional identity as a comedian while giving her the "weight" and "self-definition" she needed to define the boundaries of home and family. Her golden life ground to a temporary halt when Malle was diagnosed with a rare and fatal brain disease. Within three years of his death, however, Bergen met her next husband, billionaire New York real estate developer Marshall Rose. More settled than the peripatetic Malle, Rose not only offered the actress entree among the New York City social elite, he also brought her the next great challenge of her life: learning how to appreciate a life genuinely lived in tandem.A glamorously bittersweet showbiz memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
