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This is from Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger. I love this word portrait of Taylor. Describing her at age 25, it explains the romantic drama that would follow her for life.

... Elizabeth was an old-fashioned girl. She wanted to be the 1950s-era idea of femininity that her lush beauty promised but her circumstances and commanding personality left no room for. She was born to rule, but she wanted a man's man ...

 

Teaser Tuesday

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This is from Grudge Match by Mike Lupica. Our narrator, Sunny Randall, is a Boston PI. Sometimes I relate to her. 😀

"Tony wants to talk to you," Junior had said at my front door. "And before you say something smart, like you can't never help yourself, it really ain't a request."

"Fortunately my schedule is wide open the rest of the afternoon," I said, "So you're in luck."

Junior turned to Ty Bop. "See that right there? She can't never help herself."

 

 

Teaser Tuesday

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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald really is that good. This is my first re-read in decades, and at first I thought I'd made a mistake picking it up again. The beginning struck me as stilted and silly. But then, suddenly, it took off and became just as beautiful and moving as I'd recalled. It struck the elder Gal differently than it did the adolescent Gal, but it still touched me. 

A passage that resonated with me then and still rings loud and clear is this exchange between Jordan and Nick:

"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver. Well, I met another bad driver. I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honorable, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride."

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."

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Leader of the Pack by David Rosenfelt once again finds lawyer Andy Carpenter investigating a murder. At this early point in the book, we have yet to actually meet Edward Young, but based on this passage alone, I want him to be guilty. I don't know about New Jersey juries, but the following is all this Gal needs to convict.

"So what do you know about Edward Young?" I ask.

"He's a Cardinals fan, which makes him a prick." Since Robby is wearing his Cubs cap, this requires no further explanation. "I keep telling him it doesn't matter where he grew up; he needs to recognize the Cardinals are pure evil."

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This passage from Ted Kennedy: A Life by John Farrell haunts me.

Within Ted's life of privilege, there was tension. When he was nine, his mentally handicapped sister Rosemary was given a lobotomy and vanished from their home. Ted wondered if he, too, might be "disappeared."

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From the start of Ted Kennedy: A Life by John Farrell, there's a push-pull between the comforts of wealth and privilege and the horror of sudden, violent death. When Ted was just 12, his oldest brother Joe Jr. was blown to bits in an in-air explosion during WWII. By the time he was 16, his brother-in-law Billy had been shot by a Nazi sniper and Billy's wife, Ted's sister Kathleen, went down in a plane crash. Then JFK became the oldest son who carried the family standard to new heights and was assassinated. That left Bobby Kennedy as the oldest son, and within 5 years, he, too, was murdered. So the baby, the ninth and last child, became the head of the family at age of 36. Nothing prepared Teddy for this because it was never supposed to be him. He was not suited by personality or propensity. Yet he was now surrogate father to his brothers' 13 children and the hopes of a heartbroken nation were riding on him. The responsibility was crushing. 

I found this observation from Ted Kennedy's youngest son, Patrick, insightful.

What is of interest to people who might study him is the conflict between who he was supposed to be and who he was. I think who he was, was an amazing, authentic person who loved a good time, who loved people, who was gregarious and social and yet, in a way, felt encumbered by a sense of, "I have to be something else and be serious-minded if I'm to be successful, if I'm to be taken seriously ..."

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Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind is told almost exclusively from Scarlett's point of view. That's why this passage stood out to me. Scarlett has announced to the household that she's going to Atlanta to talk to a banker about a mortgage on Tara so they can pay the taxes. Ashley understands that she will come back with the money needed to keep the plantation ... no matter what. 

He remembered the way she had squared her shoulders when she turned away from him that afternoon, remembered the stubborn lift of her head. His heart went out to her, torn with his own helplessness, wrenched with admiration. He knew she had no such word in her vocabulary as gallantry, knew she would have stared blankly if he had told her she was the most gallant soul he had ever known. He knew she would not understand how many truly fine things he ascribed to her when he thought of her as gallant. He knew that she took life as it came, opposed her tough-fibered mind to whatever obstacles there might be, fought on with a determination that would not recognize defeat, and kept on fighting even when she saw defeat was inevitable.

That's my girl! Doing whatever it takes to keep a roof over the heads of the 13 people who depend on her.

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Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin--that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.

Yes, I'm spending the waning days of summer with Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. I haven't read it in years and it's good to spend time with my old friends in Atlanta and The County. Everything ties together so beautifully. It's well written, meticulously plotted, and highly entertainingly.

It's also beyond problematic. Maybe it's because I was raised in The Land of Lincoln, but I have never understood the fetish for the Confederacy. The Southerners were the least patriotic people in our history. They fucking fired upon the American flag, people! (No wonder those rioters on January 6 were carrying Confederate flag.) There is nothing "noble" or "brave" about them, regardless of how many times Melanie says it.

Then there's the language. I can throw "fuck" around with the best of them, but I never use really obscene words, like racial epithets. The way blacks are referred to on these pages makes me shudder.

Which is not to say I'm not enjoying the read. I don't like Scarlett, but I get her -- and at times I am her. Melly, Miss Pitty, Rhett, Ashley, Pa and Miss Ellen ... I feel like I know them all and I've missed them. When I put it down, I tell myself it won't be long until I can pick it back up and get back to them. Is there any higher compliment for a book?

And I think GWTW important. I don't think we should ever forget how popular these words and concepts once were, and question why for some convoluted reason The Glorious South and its culture are still celebrated today.

 

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The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family by Ron and Clint Howard. This is an engaging book by a pair of brothers about their family. The older brother is now an Oscar winner who is known to all as Opie and Richie Cunningham, and the younger brother is a staple at Comic Con because of his role as Balok, a citizen of The First Federation in a seminal episode of Star Trek. This makes the details different of their lives but the family vibe is universal. 

Here's how Ronnie remembers the moment he fell in love with filmmaking. He's 5 years old on a movie set.

Yul Brynner's character, Major Surov, intimidates the hell out of his captives by taking a bite out of the shot glass from which he is drinking vodka. Yul, with his shaved head and severe features, looked convincingly fearsome in his Soviet officer's uniform. But he was a kind and gregarious man who noticed that I was fascinated by the scene and didn't want me to get any dangerous ideas. So, between takes, he invited me to sit in his lap. He held the prop glass to my face.

"Taste this, Ronny," he said. "This is sugar, not real glass. It's pretend, for the movie. You would never bite real glass." He encouraged me to chomp on a little shard. It tasted just like rock candy.

"Whoa," I thought, "this is amazing."

 

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Once Upon a Time by Elizabeth Beller. A biography of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. One thing I envy about her was her ability to raise just her right eyebrow. I can't do that. If I had that talent, I hope I could use it as expressively as she did.

... Once, while she was about to dig into a slice of pizza, Carolyn heard a colleague berating Narcisco Rodriguez, a new young designer for the woman's collection from behind one of the screens during a fitting. Carolyn stepped into the area of the scuffle. She looked at the pizza in her hand. She looked at the face of Narcisco's adversary. She looked back at the pizza. Then raising that eyebrow, looked back at the adversary. Did this person want to stop berating her dear friend or did she want this piece of piping hot, dripping cheese pizza on her face? The colleague fled the scene and thereafter treated Narcisco with due respect.

 

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Once Upon a Time by Elizabeth Beller. 25 years after Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy died in a plane crash, her life is being re-examined. This 350-page tome is the highest profile of the books and articles. I wondered why. I think for most of the public, it's promise unfilled. If she'd lived, she'd be 59 now. Perhaps we're all wondering what she would have done with her life. Author Bell offers this explanation.

There is an interesting disconnect between the pictures, which though archival, seemed fresh and of the time I was living, and the articles, which seemed somehow from another era, which they were. The end of the century, the millennium, the last days of the fax machine, the world before 9/11 and, crucially, the full force of the internet. But there was something else that seemed odd: a compulsion to be dismissive of and even disparaging toward Carolyn that appeared to be the flip side to the obsessive attention she attracted.

I so get this. The same could be said about her mother-in-law. In real-time articles abut JBKO, you can track the evolution of the American Woman through the last half of 20th century. In 1960, during the Presidential campaign, Jackie was contrasted with Pat Nixon ... and not favorably. Jackie was considered unrelatable to the average American housewife, with her Social Register pedigree, high-maintenance hair, soft voice and expensive clothes. Her ability to give speeches in French, Italian and Spanish was a boon to her husband in ethnic neighborhoods, but many journalists looked at her as pretentious, over-educated and "not American enough." Then as First Lady and First Widow, we were proud of her. Suddenly her style, dignity and education reflected how we wanted to see ourselves. I believe it was DeGaulle who said, "She taught the world how to behave." When she married Onassis, the press turned on her again. Flighty, shallow, money-grubbing. After he died and she went from Jackie O to Jacqueline Onassis, she was praised again as a woman who worked, even though she didn't have to, because being busy gave her life purpose, as a mother who shepherded her kids safely through a high-profile and challenging childhood in the public eye. Yet when you look at photos of her, from the 1960s to the 1990s, she looks contemporary. Her clothes could be worn today. Her expression is inscrutable. It's as though America kept changing but Jackie was always true to herself.

So I guess I personally wonder less what her daughter-in-law would have done with her life than how we would have dissected and analyzed it over 30 years in the public eye. CBK had a rough time with the press at the beginning. Would they then have come around and lionized her, perhaps as a style icon, advocate or mother? Did Carolyn possess the inner steel it took for Jackie to be Jackie even with the unrelenting scrutiny? I hope this book provides answers.

 

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Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death by MC Beaton. My girl Agatha kinda has the blues. She's a little bored in retirement and her next door neighbor/former fiancee James is pointedly ignoring her. As she has a lonely breakfast of black coffee and cigarettes, she bargains with God. If only James would notice her again, she'd do anything. Even give up the smoking James loathed.

The doorbell rang. Perhaps He had heard her prayer. She stubbed out her cigarette.

"Last one," she said loudly to the ceiling.

She opened the front door. Mrs. Darry was standing there.

"I wondered if you could do me a favor, Mrs. Raisin."

"Come in," said Agatha bleakly. She led the way to the kitchen, sat down, and gloomily lit another cigarette.

Mrs. Darry sat down. "I would be grateful if you refrained from smoking."

"Tough," said Agatha. "This is my house and my cigarette. What do you want?"

"Don't you know you are killing myself?"

Agatha looked at her cigarette and then at Mrs. Darry. "As long as I am killing myself I'm not killing you. Out with it. What do you want?"

Except for the fact that I hate smoking, Agatha is my id.

 

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The Hollywood Daughter by Kate Alcott. We meet our narrator in New York City, 1959. The daughter of a Hollywood publicist, she went away to college in Vermont now works for Newsweek. She is about to get a mysterious opportunity to go home again.

In a leisurely fashion, I opened the fancy envelope. It was an invitation, yes. Engraved. But no, not to a wedding.

Jessica Malloy (indeed, me) was cordially invited to attend the 1959 Academy Awards at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles as a guest. Nowhere on the invitation did it say who was doing the inviting – just a cool request for an RSVP because attendance is limited.

I smoothed the polished surface of the invitation with my hand, letting it be, for a moment. Aladdin's lamp. The broken gutters and moldy carpet of my shabby apartment building disappeared.

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Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall is historic fiction, set in Toronto in the recent past, before abortion became legal in Canada.

It's 1980. Nancy, a sheltered girl just out of her teens, accompanies a cousin "in trouble" to get an illegal abortion. It's a harrowing experience with pain and blood and the girls end up taking a cab to the nearest ER. Nancy is left alone in the waiting room while doctors scramble to save her cousin.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Nancy says. She doesn't plan on answering any of this doctor's questions, either.

"Your friend is lucky to be alive." Dr. Gladstone pauses, lowers her voice. "Listen to me carefully, Nancy. I don't actually want you to say anything specific. But if I'm on the right track, I need you to give me some indication that that's the case so I can provide the right treatment for your friend ..."

Teaser Tuesday

 

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Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans by Kenneth Womack. This book was compiled using the diaries of the late Mal Evans, the Beatles confidante, bodyguard and roadie beginning with their early days at the Cavern Club.

By 1967, the Beatles had stopped touring so his job as "tour manager" had morphed into something else. Mal was an executive at Apple Corps, but he felt he was becoming marginalized by his beloved Beatles. He was drinking and drugging more, his marriage was in trouble, and he was self-reflective in his diary.

"Fear is knowing the right answer," he observed, "while hoping it's the wrong answer." But it also occurred to him that the concept of fear might be something even more problematic, that "fear is not even knowing the right answer." Had his moral compass become so broken that it was too late to reorder his misplaced priorities?

 

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Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans by Kenneth Womack. This (gulp) 590-page book was compiled by using the diaries of the late Mal Evans, the Beatles confidante, bodyguard and roadie beginning with their early days at the Cavern Club.

Mal memorably demonstrated his loyalty and value to the pre-international fame Lads in 1963 when he drove them home to Liverpool from London (more than four hours). Mal was behind the wheel of a crappy van whose windshield shattered, and he was facing cold, fog and wind head on.

John later recalled, "Mal had a paper bag over his head with just a split in it for his eyes. He looked like a bank robber." Meanwhile, John, Paul, George and Ringo huddled together in the rear of the van, sharing a bottle of whiskey, stacked one atop the other to generate much needed warmth. "And when the one on the top got so cold it was like hypothermia was setting in, he'd get his turn on the bottom and we'd warm each other up that way, swigging the whiskey. It was, in Paul's words, "a Beatle sandwich."

 

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Kick: The True Story of JFK's Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth by Paula Byrne. Kathleen Kennedy was the sibling closest to JFK when he was growing up. I've been fascinated by her ever since I saw a photo of then-Senator Kennedy reading in his apartment, and on the wall were multiple framed photos of the same young woman, his deceased sister, known to all as "Kick." As one who has always suffered from brother envy, I was curious about their bond and his enduring devotion.

Kick was the fourth child and second daughter of Joe and Rose Kennedy. She was vivacious and confident and, while in her late teens, she took pre-War London by storm when her father was FDR's Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Her life was glamorous, short and tragic -- almost Shakespearean in how pointless her death at age 28 ultimately was.* My favorite part of this book is when Byrne reprints Kick's own letters. Like this one to a friend:

One thing to be sure of: Life holds no fears for someone who has faced love, marriage, and death before the age of 25.

 *Like JFK Jr. level pointless.

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Fairy Tale Interrupted. RoseMarie Terenzio's memoir of life as John Kennedy Jr.'s personal assistant and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy's friend. Here's how she recalls working for John Jr. in the run-up to the Sotheby's auction of his mother's belongings.

While John acted as though the auction was not a priority, I was fielding numerous calls and requests -- not just from the media but from people wanting to attend the event or get a catalog -- yet I didn't have any information. I didn't even know that the brown paper shopping bag he asked me to take to the home of his sister Caroline had been filled with $2 million worth of jewelry. If I had, I would have killed him.

 

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The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout. Inspector Cramer, Manhattan homicide, simply cannot believe what our narrator (and my fantasy boyfriend), Archie Goodwin, has gotten himself into.

I’m not surprised at Wolfe. With his ego, there’s no one and nothing he wouldn’t take on if you paid him. But, I’m surprised at you. You know damn well the FBI can’t be bucked. Not even by the White House. And you’re hopping around pecking at people’s scabs. You’re asking for it and you’ll get it. You’re off your hinges.

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My Name Is Barbra by Barbra Streisand. Page 510, on her boyfriend Jon Peters.

Jon grabbed him by his necktie so hard that the guy's shirt ripped down the back. (Must have been an expensive shirt. The guy sued Jon and settled for $7,000.) I was upset. Why did Jon have to overreact like that?