Confused, crazed Christian writes a creepy book so difficult to fathom that I had trouble surviving it myself! With very little about her career, thisConfused, crazed Christian writes a creepy book so difficult to fathom that I had trouble surviving it myself! With very little about her career, this autobiography hops and skips through marriages, pets, and a whole bunch of stuff that we either don't care about or that makes no sense.
Jennifer O'Neill seems like a sweet-hearted person, but to marry NINE TIMES (including one guy she knew was gay and divorcing three times after she became a born-again Christian) shows a gigantic flaw in her personality. This memoir only makes her look bad--it's not the inspiring Christian life story that she wants to try to turn it quickly at the end. Instead it's a depressing, incomplete mess of a book that shows her making bad decisions over and over, some that are so incredible that you can't believe she's willing to admit to them on paper.
Not only is her daughter sexually abused by one of her husbands from age 11 to 14, but when the daughter reports it to a counselor O'Neill doesn't believe her child and spends years split from her abused daughter in order to support her pedophile husband. The author only finally accepts the truth when the creepy ex moves on to other marriages and abuses another wife's daughter. Then, this mindless cover girl actress allows her son to go live with the creep and defends it! Simply insane.
Another is her defense of driving after drinking, speeding and being stopped by a cop for DUI, then complaining about media coverage and claiming the thing to learn is "it is extremely inadvisable to talk back to an officer, especially one with a bad temper" (see her blame-shifting there?).
Then O'Neill "accidentally" shoots herself in one of the most difficult-to-believe scenarios I've ever read. The cops didn't believe her either and because (she says) she won't testify against her husband (because he'd get thrown back in jail--yes, she married a criminal), SHE gets charged with illegal gun possession and complains about it. If you're confused by reading all that, know that the entire book is like it.
I could tell you dozens of misguided decisions listed in the book that would make any normal person wonder what's wrong with Jennifer O'Neill. But to then have her come on in the last few pages and claim her faith in Christ has consoled her despite her anger at God for still allowing problems in her life proves that this woman has no idea that she is the cause of most of the bad things that have happened.
There are a few glimpses of light where she seems to get it. She falls madly in love very quickly, even admitting to "a string of engagements" that she doesn't detail here, writing, "The problem was within me. I didn't have the self-respect and spiritual grounding to wait for the right time and the right commitment before having sex." Okay, but why did that not actually occur to her until long after she had become a born-again Christian and divorced a few more men that she had jumped in bed with?
I'm somewhat grateful that she is now very pro-life, saying when she got pregnant by a rich boyfriend who wanted her to get an abortion, "I was told in the seventies that a pregnancy was just a blob of tissue in my uterus up until three months gestation...deep down I knew I was wrong when everyone was saying it was all right. Nothing in the world could ever make me opt for that choice again." The problem is that most readers will consider her attempts hypocrisy to tell others to not do what she did despite becoming rich and famous.
I had hoped this would be the story of the woman at the well who was married multiple times and encounters Christ; instead we get a defense of a lifetime of horrible choices and making excuses even after her commitment to Jesus instead of being the up front, honest believer she claims to be. At one point she writes, "I am not an unintelligent person, but I was certainly acting like one." I'm not sure about the first half of that statement but to the last half I'll say, "Amen."...more
Disturbing and misguided memoir written by a liberal elitist who looks down on just about everyone she meets. It's filled with stories about other ricDisturbing and misguided memoir written by a liberal elitist who looks down on just about everyone she meets. It's filled with stories about other rich and famous people, slamming a wide range from John F. Kennedy to John Wayne! This woman really thinks highly of herself but fails to give us much insight into her delusional elitism.
It starts off wrong by telling us that she grew up in a "rather middle class home" in Milwaukee. Um, you mean the five-bedroom house, which includes the maid's quarters (yes, she had a maid)? Maybe the two automobiles they owned during the depression when others had none? Or the fact that as a married adult she admits she had never made a bed before? Or maybe it was the rich acres of land with mansions that her doctor daddy moved to on Lake Michigan or in Los Angeles? Or their lake vacation home? This all sounds middle class, right?
So you know from the start that she's dishonest and has a warped view of the world. She was raised a rich WASP girl and that attitude never left her. She one of those types that acts like she's a direct descendant of those on the Mayflower and has a haughty attitude toward commoners beneath her.
By the time she started a Hollywood career (not from any talent or training but from what she says were her good looks, claiming "I was flattered") all the famous were trying to bed her (Kennedy, Howard Hughes) but she insisted on remaining a virgin until marriage.
She ended up in her early 20s marrying an older, Jewish, and ultra-rich Broadway lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, who cheated on her while she was pregnant with their first child but she stuck with him for years. I wonder why--oh, that's right, she likes older men with lots of money, just like her daddy.
Then the second baby came (along with a cook, housekeeper and nanny!), and Livingston admits, "If I were in the same circumstances today, I'm not sure whether I would continue that pregnancy." You read that correctly--she says she probably would have aborted the baby that became her second child. What a loving, caring mother to say such a thing in a book that her adult daughter will read!?
Once My Fair Lady opens (to which she takes a bit of the credit for its creation!), the couple is propelled to the upper stratosphere of New York City high society, including the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Jackie Kennedy. Livingston hilariously complains about the huge mansion on their rented summer estate, writing, "I earned a Ph.D. in keeping house, planning menus, picking the correct wines, as well as keeping everyone happy--a daunting task!" I'm sure it is difficult to juggle all those bank accounts, parties, and servants working for you.
There are a few surprisingly blunt revelations about the ultrarich, some that are difficult to believe. She claims that on the night of JFK's inauguration, he showed up totally alone and without Secret Service at the house of a closeted gay writer and spent an hour in the middle of the night with their group (including Henry Fonda's wife); then she later says she saw the President walking the streets of New York City alone in the dark in 1962. Seriously?
A theme is that Kennedy wanted her, she refused to let him have her. She writes about dozens of men in high-powered positions that wanted to bed her, though in most cases she refuses to name names. Nancy at times goes out of her way to even tell us the celebrities that didn't try to sleep with her but hinted at it (like William Faulkner) in an absurd attempt to communicate how F-able she was.
Want to learn behind-the-scenes stories regarding her film work? You won't find any here. That's especially disappointing with her Disney movies basically ignored (looking down her nose at Walt by calling him "quite provincial in his own life and tastes"). She spends more time describing every outfit she wore socially than she does her career. There are instead many things in the book about others, including full chapters about her husbands' backgrounds, but so little about herself admitting to any of her own flaws or errors (beyond hinting that she wished she had given up her virginity sooner to wolves like JFK!).
For some reason the author insists on pushing her liberal Democrat propaganda on readers throughout the book. Her political affiliation is mentioned often, and conservatives are smeared--including her father; Ronald Reagan, in a tacky swipe at how unhappy his daughter Patti was at their school; and John Wayne, who she quotes as making an insensitive comment about FDR's handicap then tells us how much she loved working with the western star!
When Kennedy is assassinated, the author admits she "started cursing the conservative southern politicians with their right-wing agenda and their hatred for our Democratic president." Huh? Most politicians from the south at the time were left-wing racist Democrats, and the man who killed Kennedy was a leftist socialist who once defected to Russia and passed out pro-Fidel Castro leaflets in New Orleans just months before JFK was killed!
Then she boasts of supporting Bill Clinton twice, though is concerned about his lothario ways and says his sex with an intern is what cost Al Gore the 2000 election. She then mentions Democrat Congressman Tom Lantos sexually harassing her at a dinner party, putting his hand up her skirt and placing her hand on his crotch. Before she is willing to place blame on fun-loving liberals, she inserts an unfounded rumor about a Republican Senator and some gossip about conservative Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor regretting giving the 2000 election to George Bush. This woman will stop at nothing to distort history and avoid seeing that leftist political stances and supporters like Harvey Weinstein lead to mistreatment of women.
She even ridiculously goes out of her way to says she agrees with one of Barack Obama's most insulting, bigoted, and insidious statements attempting to abridge First and Second Amendment rights: that less-educated white people in rural Pennsylvania "cling to guns or religion." (Obama later repeated the phrase regarding Trump supporters.) How ignorant and hypocritical these supposedly highbrow, overeducated people are!
She then backs her anti-rural insults in writing at length about her rich second husband Alan Livingston, another rich older guy who was the head of Capital Records, Jewish and raised in Pennsylvania in a town with what the author calls "a largely uneducated populace." This bigoted woman uses her pen to diminish others beneath her, yet she is guilty of the very intolerance she accuses others of. Meanwhile, Livingston's career allows her to mingle with Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, Princess Grace, and even Bozo the Clown! (Believe it or not, her second husband created Bozo.)
BTW, the only great sections of the book deal with the fascinating Alan Livingston, who first put out records of The Beach Boys and Nat King Cole as well as helping to create Bonanza on NBC and being the only guy who believed in the Beatles to bring them to America. It's too bad that when the man suddenly dies it's unclear what happened because she rushes through his illness yet finds time to brag that she was awarded his posthumous Grammy.
She does, however, waste a couple dozen pages on her leadership of Hollywood women's charities. Instead of providing any real stories, it's all about bickering and bitterness toward insecure show business elites that are always trying to one-up each other.
The writer's contempt includes anyone serious about their Christian faith. For some reason she insists on detailed sections that mock followers of Jesus, though she was raised Lutheran before her parents turned Universalist, while at the same time she uses the text to righteously defend the Judaism of her two non-practicing, non-religious husbands! Her anger, which is justified in the stories about the anti-Semitic treatment of the men when they were young, should also be equally directed at those who condemn Christians, such as Jewish parents that abandon children who marry outside the faith.
What is her religion? Late in the book she uncovers that she is a follower of EST--that creepy authoritarian mind control group that is often called a cult. Why didn't that surprise me?
But she saves the final surprise for chapter 99 (out of 100) when she states it's "possible that I am a direct descendent of a king of Sweden!" Her snobbery knows no bounds when she adds, "I have to share a secret. All my life, people have treated me differently, beginning with my beloved father who always made me feel treasured. Does it surprise me that I might actually be a princess?"
This is the delusional core of her thoughts of grandeur. Nancy Olson Livingston represents all that's wrong with hypocritical left-wing elitists, who think nothing of pushing for tax money from average Americans to be used for pet highbrow social causes that they don't want to give up their own wealth to pay for.
Nancy Olson was a rich brat from birth and just got worse in adulthood; this book simply proves that she never learned what middle America is really all about and is still acting like a princess....more
This is a serious fan book that's not very well written but is packed with inside stories about Doris Day. The author was the actress's private assistThis is a serious fan book that's not very well written but is packed with inside stories about Doris Day. The author was the actress's private assistant for three years, even living in Day's home for some of that period, and those that are fans of Doris will have their eyes opened to the truth about the falsely-nicknamed "girl next door."
The author was a novice newspaper writer with little training from Indiana and a major Day fan that made many trips to California just to catch a glimpse of the star. The book details how Doris was friendly to fans and welcoming to what could have been perceived to be stalkers, eventually trusting and hiring Barothy.
The writer's no-nonsense, unemotional Jack Webb style of writing takes some getting used to. These are just the facts, ma'am, and often what you think is the start of an interesting story falls flat because Barothy chooses to include all sorts of minor details, such as insignificant dates and errands, and few punchlines.
Normally this would be a three-star book but it's elevated due to the amazing amount of great specifics regarding all sides of the actress. It's certainly not just gushing about Day (though there is a lot of that) but it gives readers a fully rounded view of the star's weaknesses. As much as you want to champion Day for her work with animals, the 11 dogs that she has at home are overwhelming and Day seems to treat them better than her human employees.
I still love her movies, but the woman was kind of a bossy slaveholder that paid little and expected 24-hour service. Day is also shown to be extremely insecure, very immoral, and often cold to family or friends she claims to love. She has a surprisingly large number of affairs, including one with a guest star from season five of her TV show who is very famous and had a wife back east (my guess is it was Peter Lawford, but the name isn't given in the book).
Namely, if you're expecting this to be about a virginal good girl you'll be disappointed. At the same time Day did things for fans that I can't imagine any other star doing. The woman ate Saturday breakfast at the same cafe to greet any strangers there to see her and she'd at times answer her own gate for those that stopped by her house.
The end of the book comes quickly and is a bit shocking. The author could have fleshed out her own feelings regarding suddenly being cut off by Day for warning the actress about another married liaison. But Barothy moves on quickly and wraps up the book on a positive note, never forgetting the good times of Day....more
A few fascinating insights into celebrity handling, mixed with long dull sections about the author's Louisiana teen years or his love of beauty pageanA few fascinating insights into celebrity handling, mixed with long dull sections about the author's Louisiana teen years or his love of beauty pageants. This is not the typical memoir and is so poorly organized that Edwards seems to have written ADHD, hopping back and forth between dates and people. At the same time he totally avoids some major subjects and comes across as an older version of flighty Ross Mathews.
The guy has 5 or 6 big names that he's dedicated to and shows how relatively easy it is for a gay man to squeeze his way into the inner circle of celebrities. Women like Donna Summer, Farah Fawcett, and Cindy Crawford seem memorized by his queen-like humor, allowing him into their inner sanctum without any vetting! If this book proves anything it's that very flamboyant gay men have had no trouble making it in show business for the past forty years.
His high school sections are a whole different (and distracting) side, where he name-drops classmates throughout. At times this seems like his own personal tribute (or slams) of those in his home life. He needed to cut out about fifty names of people none of us have heard of.
Meanwhile, his stories of the famous are incomplete. How can he be roommates with Ali Landry, help guide her career, and then not mention her brief marriage to Mario Lopez? The writer is from Louisiana and can't stop talking about it but never mentions its most famous Hollywood product, Britney Spears? Or how can he be so close to Donna Summer but ignore her faith, which was the main focus of her final years? Some of the stars have so little written about them but he tells us that they are his closest friends and spends decades helping them.
Throughout he writes like he's a shady queen, going overboard to praise some (Pia Zadora and off-key British singer named Matt Cardle, who does the worst version of First Time Ever I've heard) while calling out people he hates (former teachers and Faye Dunaway). He uses a lot of trite phrases and politically incorrect humor. The book's title, while amusing to him and a few of his favorite famous ladies, is (to be honest) dumb.
He throws in some typical homosexual tropes (that he was born that way, had his traits since birth, would never have chosen it) but he shows ignorance when he says things like, "All gay men love women" or "I've had these feelings all my life." I doubt that he recalls his birth or infant years, and I know plenty of gay men that have a deep hatred of a women and only hang out with men.
The book does have some great career advice, so it should have cut all the bland private life stuff and expanded all the things he learned from dealing with famous people. He leaves so much out that he admits, "I could write another book just about the strange occurrences I've encountered in Hollywood." Hey, Miss Thang, why didn't you just enter those stories in THIS book? ...more
Over-written, over-stated, overly feminist diatribe that wrecks what could have been one of the best "making of" books by turning it into a male-bashiOver-written, over-stated, overly feminist diatribe that wrecks what could have been one of the best "making of" books by turning it into a male-bashing distortion of data and Hollywood. This author has a giant agenda and huge chip on her shoulder, using almost one-fourth of the pages to try to prove that the movie business is anti-women and that men are horrible bruts. Namely, she detracted from the real story of filmmaking by inserting her own biased, bigoted opinions that made me see things in the movie that actually make me like it less.
There's no overstating how much jaded Aikman turns this into pure propaganda. She chose her "facts" carefully to make it appear that women never get major roles, never are asked their opinions on movie set, always suffer from male slobs that are after only one thing, and that's not talent. While many of those things are true, there's no sense of perspective here because the author ends up bashing just about every guy involved or not. She doesn't get to the root of why men are hired more or paid more (because male moviegoers are less willing to put down money to watch females and women are willing to watch either). The writer paints a picture of men in America as all being sexist pigs (even the liberals) while women are all wonderful though "forced" into taking a back seat or being silenced. She is as guilty of stereotyping and mistreating a gender as she accuses men of.
Hers is a false narrative that fails to show a true full picture of society and movie history. But why are so many pages devoted to her distorted feminist views in a book about the making of Thelma and Louise? Everything is overdone, her writing style is pushy and aggressive, the quotes and statistics are forced down the reader's throat with no context or balance. For example, the movie does semi-okay at the box office (4th at the box office earning only $6 million the first week) but it's not a major hit, yet Aikman wants us to believe that everyone in the country is talking about it and influenced by it. "The only people who could tune it out must have been holed up in monasteries under mandatory vows of silence." HUH? I was teaching college media at the time and can assure you that this movie was a minor ripple in middle America that was not a main topic of conversation, perceived as an outlandish spoof that (if anything) made women look bad.
When she gets to the backlash the film receives the author then starts to demean those criticizing the film instead of understanding rational viewpoints that maybe a movie about two adult females shooting, killing, robbing, having random sex, escaping police and ultimately killing themselves are not the great role models the author wants them to be. She'd ask: Would I say that about Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis movies? Yes, I would. Many of us in the real world don't see things as stereotypically distorted as liberal New York City "journalists" do.
If we could cut out the crap this would be 4 or 5 stars, a great example of a "making of" historical record. But instead, Becky Aikman kills this book herself by sending it off the cliff....more
For all the media hype about how revelatory and blunt this memoir is, Rebel Rising is deadly dull though most of the first third of the book. Not untiFor all the media hype about how revelatory and blunt this memoir is, Rebel Rising is deadly dull though most of the first third of the book. Not until page 102 (out of 323) does she even finish high school! That's after opening sections that mention two of the biggest red flags when reading any autobiography: pregnancy and animals (in her case seeing a fertility specialist at 40 and her family raising show dogs). Trust me, these sections are really just a distraction for those that want to hear about what she's famous for.
It isn't until halfway through the book that you get to her modern career. As much as Rebel (real name Melanie) wants to boast about her smarts, her acting and singing talents, her young "athletic" large body, and her ability to wow a crowd, none of it impresses. At times she resorts to male-bashing, typically about her dad who she considers mentally ill, though her mother is equally guilty for caring more about the pets than the kids. Some male celebrities get slammed too, though she oddly loves Brad Pitt the same way Rosie O'Donnell loved Tom Cruise.
Some of the book gets confusing because she'll be in the middle of a story at age 14 when she skips ahead 20 years. There are also some big gaps, where she alludes to something but gives no specifics (such as being a teen extra on a TV show in Australia). Then she mixes up writing in present tense about her childhood with past tense about some of her adulthood. And that cover photo? Look closely, it's one of the worst photoshopped jobs ever.
She also makes the modern grammatical error of capitalizing "black" but not "white," even in the same sentence! And the irony, for those who want to claim black should be in caps due to a "shared culture" of the race in America, is that she is making the reference to people in South Africa, not in the U.S.! (Columbia Journalism Review defends using caps for black "in recognition of an ethnic identity in the United States" even when it's wrong from a language standpoint.) This is purely political, not proper English, and publishers should be ashamed.
Wilson writes about how shy she was, how she spent years eating lunch alone in the school library to avoid others, and how mean her father was. Yet what transformed her around age 14 was that her dad supporting her silly rap phase, taking interest in her by praising her, going to the gym together, and allowing her to listen to his tapes How to Win Friends and Influence People. Rebel will probably claim it has more to do with her mother forcing her take drama class, but that happened after her dad started the change.
In one of the oddest transformations in celebrity teen history, this wallflower overnight takes the words of the "win friends" tapes to mean she should do wild and illegal things in order to stand out and get attention; thus begins her new image as class "rebel" where she locks a teacher in a closet for a few hours, smokes fake cigarettes, and has wild parties. She gains popularity (she claims) and is on her way to her new image.
I guess what we're supposed to learn from Rebel Wilson's book is that if you want to be happy, don't accept who you are, find ways to hurt others in order to make yourself feel better about yourself, put down men, support all women including those that mistreat you, and spend lots of money to lose weight so you're not the real you. Oh, and of course, always rise from your past to become a rebel in order to avoid being the real you.
Or did I miss the point of the book, Melanie Bownds?...more
Five-star life story from a one-star actress/author who doesn't seem to understand that she is responsible for all the things she blames others for.
WFive-star life story from a one-star actress/author who doesn't seem to understand that she is responsible for all the things she blames others for.
What starts as a somewhat shocking history of bad parenting, death and abuse transitions to sudden acting success and sleeping around with dozens (if not hundreds) of guys--including some very big names. There probably are few people in the world who can say they have slept with George Clooney, Rob Lowe, and Dodi Fayed, but Claudia Christian has! (And if you want to know, Fayed gets the best reviews!).
Then in her 30s the book quickly devolves into a dull rehash of her struggles with drinking, slamming AA and suddenly discovering a bizarre Sinclair Method where she pops a pill every time she wants to drink and limits her intake through self-control.
This could have been a fantastic book in the hands of an objective writer. There are many twists and turns in her life and probably more tragedy than I've read in any other Hollywood memoir. But by the middle of it you realize that the author is not seeing that she's making all the wrong choices and is causing many of her own problems. Christian has no morals, breezes through life based on her looks and sexual openness, and then when things fall apart as she ages she starts to blame her parents, her lovers, and her alcohol. In truth she is the major problem but at no point does she ever connect the dots to see it.
Her hypocrisy is laughable as she preaches about drinking being no different than smoking or eating sugar (she even wrongly states that sugar has no impact on alcoholism--do some basic research honey!), condemning those in AA that eat donuts but then in order to "cure" her alcoholism she simply gets addicted to Naltrexone. And she calls it a "cure" despite the fact that it's simply an addiction substitute she needs to be on the rest of her life in order to continue to drink! It's like a placebo that allows her to believe in self management but bottom line is that she's still drinking and still taking a drug.
This is typical Hollywood mindset--a mentally-damaged actress with a critical parent (her mother stole her boyfriend from her!) believes "the universe" brings her things that she says yes to. Rich men, cocaine, lots of sex, flying around the world--all involving her giving up her body to anyone from low level technicians on a movie set to one of the richest men in the world wanting her baby. Then when she gets pregnant she rejects "the universe" and has three abortions blaming her lovers for pressuring her. So much for a liberated, independent female!
This book is non-stop irresponsibility and blame-shifting. It's disgusting that she claims to have wanted the babies but buckled to the men pushing her to abort. In one case that defies logic, her boyfriend doesn't get her a legal abortion in America but instead flies her to Italy where it's illegal and has it done in a back alley in the middle of a vacation before she starts work on a movie. Why would this supposedly intelligent woman agree to that?
When she doesn't blame men she blames "the monster" inside her that talks her into bad choices. Again, failing to accept her own responsibility for bad decisions, she claims it's "genetic" that she gets hooked on drinking since her grandparents drank a lot. Total hogwash and bad science--any genetic predisposition to sensitivity to certain outside stimuli does not take the place of personal responsibility for your own choices.
For much of the book she claims no belief in God, even slamming AA for pretty much requiring it, but then she flips near the end to call out to a vague higher power as she tries to find a solution to her drinking problem. I was waiting for her to actually step up and claim a solid belief but she doesn't believe in anything other than her crafty self and that monster that supposedly lives inside her.
I did enjoy her throwing a few co-stars under the bus and her Corbin Bernsen masturbation story while doing a movie love scene is almost too hard to believe (pun intended!). Her relationship with Dodi Fayed is surprising and ongoing, right up until his death. I wish there would have been many more details about the famous people she encountered and knew, but many of them just get a one-sentence aside--there are enough big names dropped here that it deserves an index.
In the end the book is an unsatisfying attempt to make a C-list actress look like a big star, and she comes across as proud of her alcohol addiction. It's bizarre. But I've read enough of these memoirs to know that Claudia Christian is just an average California Playboy-posing performer who fails to believe in objective moral truths and won't trust in anyone but herself. How unfortunate....more
Oddly mishandled "memoir" that's has little to do with the author's Hollywood life or marriage to Hugh Beaumont and more to do with a mother who reallOddly mishandled "memoir" that's has little to do with the author's Hollywood life or marriage to Hugh Beaumont and more to do with a mother who really doesn't need a book written about her. There's so little to this autobiography and it's so meekly written that there aren't enough real stories to sustain it. Unless you are a Beaumont fan due to Leave it To Beaver and want a few scraps about his life, you should skip this.
The main issue is the lack of any stories of substance and the insistence on everything revolving around memories of her pastor father (who died when she was a teen) or her homemaker mother (who did nothing of any significance). At one point Doty talks about the "drama" that surrounds she and her kids showing to her mother's house, locked out, wondering where the woman was, and I was hoping for a suspenseful conclusion--but instead they simply waited in a cabin on the property until the mother came home. End of story. That's drama? Even a later car accident lacks any suspense.
Doty was a minor actress heading to Hollywood in the middle of going to Hamline in Minneapolis, and she mentions a few movies she made but there are no specifics. The most important man in her life is Beaumont, but during most of their marriage he was also getting bit parts and when he finally got Leave it To Beaver she suddenly decides that they don't have much in common anymore, divorcing him. Again, no story to it or reasoning behind it.
The only thing I learned about Beaumont is he had never been north until he married the author, he fell in love with the northern Minnesota woodsy lifestyle, they bought two wilderness homes, with the last being an island near Grand Rapids, Minnesota. It wasn't a "tree farm" as stated in some of his bios nor does Doty ever mention that Beaumont became a "minister" as is reported in some summaries of his life. His summers in Minnesota years apparently came before and during the sitcom, not in his retirement, but once they two split there are no details about Beaumont in the book. Nor about their children, one of whom I talked with and he wasn't very positive about his parents!
As a matter of fact, she misleads the reader to think that the couple divorced soon after Beaver was finished in 1963, but looking it up online they stayed together until 1974! There is nothing in this book about those additional years and she summarized her final four decades into just a couple of pages that of course mostly dealt with her feelings about her parents! How frustrating that what's called a "memoir" skips half of the author's life.
It is way too short, not well written, too focused on a dull mother, and too many asides mentioning Jungian psychology, which she gets so into that she becomes a psychologist herself and marries one, living together in Mankato, Minnesota. She uses the Jungian approach to determine that her first marriage failed because it was the father-daughter relationship she was looking for after her dad died. That may be, but glib psychoanalysis without substantive support stories makes for a very dull book....more
Syrupy-sweet memoir that reads more like a Disney press release than an expose of Annette's life. It's very cutesy but there's little in it that will Syrupy-sweet memoir that reads more like a Disney press release than an expose of Annette's life. It's very cutesy but there's little in it that will surprise people. She had pretty much the perfect life with a family that thought she was the perfect girl. And of course she was hand-picked by Walt Disney.
The book is so perky and tries so hard to be positive that she comes across as the precursor to Mary Tyler Moore's Mary Richards character. She's got a smile on her face and spunk, not letting anything get her down. There are very few dark times here until the end of the book, where she lies to hide her MS and then lets the world know the day before a tabloid is going to run the story. After that she is showered with awards and the book quickly ends. But this was written almost 20 years before she died!
It's worth a glance if you are nostalgic for the original Mickey Mouse Club or the beach movies, but otherwise this heart wishes that she would have had more substantive stories to share....more
Weird little book (literally tiny and short) that was praised in some other memoirs, this great actress whips up a light humorous take on moving from Weird little book (literally tiny and short) that was praised in some other memoirs, this great actress whips up a light humorous take on moving from Hollywood to Paris. But along the way she fails to complete many stories or fill in serious details that the reader will want to know.
Basically it's one jokey chapter after another, with punch lines that you won't understand because she doesn't elaborate or assumes we know what French quirks she is talking about! There are a few minor interesting movie business stories, but I really didn't care about her take on women's fashion, bathtubs, centigrade vs. Fahrenheit, and especially what every Frenchman has--a liver that is supposedly coddled.
If you are traveling to the country you might want to read it before you go, but the references are 60 years old. I came away still thinking that the French remain similar to this book--weird....more
Overly detailed and uninspiring history of Jodie Sweetin's drug and alcohol abuse. Think Brady Bunch star Maureen McCormick's horrible history only thOverly detailed and uninspiring history of Jodie Sweetin's drug and alcohol abuse. Think Brady Bunch star Maureen McCormick's horrible history only this is all about the bad stuff with none of the good stuff. It's a pretty disgusting story. It was written only months after she had become sober (again) and it was the wrong time for her to tell her story. Fifteen years after its publication I'm unsure if she is still this crazy of an addict, but this book does nothing for her credibility.
Sweetin claims to want to inspire others but this book does the opposite. While it's refreshing that a star would share detailed negative stories that most want to hide, she does it non-stop right up until the final pages. There's no real break (other than her months pregnant) and I couldn't wait for it all to stop. The conclusion is ridiculous as she once again tries AA and writes a letter to her baby promising to stay sober--which she had proven she was impossible of following through on.
She reveals in the middle of all this that she was adopted and her birth parents were both drugs addicts, her dad jailed for it and died of it. As a baby she lived with her birth family for nine months before being given away to a relative by marriage, so her adopted dad is actually also her uncle. This is the first book I've read that has a valid reason for saying that the celebrity was living her parents' addiction--but it isn't because of a gene that's in her body. It's because both of her birth parents were addicts that were using throughout the pregnancy. No wonder Jodie goes wild for the taste of any mind-altering substance.
She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on drugs and rehab (at one point paying $65,000 a month for a rehab facility) but all of it was thrown away to where she was broke. Nothing could stop her and for the most part her two husbands and adoptive parents were enablers. There is no real ending to all of it beyond her trying to live clean for her new child. She should have waited another decade or two to tell her story. There's nothing sweet about it....more
Oh, sweet Anna Lee. How difficult it is to rate this book because if it were from an author in her 60s it would deserve one or two stars for failing tOh, sweet Anna Lee. How difficult it is to rate this book because if it were from an author in her 60s it would deserve one or two stars for failing to tell enough stories while just skimming over major career highlights. But this book is from a woman that was in her early 90s (almost finished before she died and it had to be completed by her son). So I'll give it three stars, but in terms of a memoir it's minimal--more like a quick look at her IMDb list and tossing in a few asides, mostly about her time entertaining troops in World War II. There are even times when it seems like she's going through a list and admits she doesn't remember anything about making a certain film or TV show.
Anna--born Joan Boniface Winnifrith--and her coauthor attempt to paint the actress as a proper gentle woman who naively allowed men to take advantage of her and worked until her dying day to make up for the money her men misspent. In truth the picture that comes through is of a somewhat naughty woman who traded her desire for love in exchange for being a responsible mother. It was shocking to read that she sent three of her five children off to live with others at different times--one to an orphanage while Anna was making movies in Hollywood!
It's difficult to understand the thinking of any film star, and in this case this daughter of an Anglican minister decided to become Catholic while at the same time sleeping around and cheating on her husbands. We get long chapters on her flying from country-to-country in World War II, having affairs and being away from her family for a few months. While it's refreshing that the actress admits to her sexual dalliances, to do it at the cost of ignoring her children seems disgusting, not to mention the hypocrisy of her continued claims of allegiance to Catholicism.
One of the most revealing things about the book is how many movies she made when young. However, the projects she is best known for simply get a few paragraphs. Her Sound of Music appearance gets only a half-page mention. Do these authors not realize we want to hear all about her being in one of the most famous movies of all time?
Once she gets to General Hospital late in her career Anna claims to be just about penniless from an abusive and lazy second husband who wasted her movie earnings, and a much older third husband who doesn't have health insurance. There are a few details about her work on the soap opera but not enough to satisfy any fan.
There are a few surprises--she met a lot of famous people along the way, including her childhood friend Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as experiencing a fire that destroyed her life's accumulated possessions, and her decision to leave her successful film career to move to Montana to become a wild west housewife for that crazy second husband. Then her sudden late-in-life inability to use her leg without any prognosis is a shock.
But overall, there aren't enough stories to sustain a fully fleshed-out memoir. This is written the way idealistic Lila Quartermaine would spin positive. So in Anna's memory I will give her more credit than due for simply surviving life with a positive spin on very difficult years, some of which she brought upon herself due to her bad choices. It's almost as if she lived a real-life soap opera....more
Very little in the book is going to be interesting to American moviegoers. Caron was a rich kid in Paris, living in a family mansion with at least fivVery little in the book is going to be interesting to American moviegoers. Caron was a rich kid in Paris, living in a family mansion with at least five servants, when World War II began. Suddenly they were outcast from the city and struggling to live with only two servants. Yes, you read that right. Caron wants empathy for having to let go of some servants while managing to live a life that left her unaware of the atrocities being done to the Jews.
After the War she becomes an elite ballet dancer, is swept away to America and is made the leading lady of her first film: the Oscar-winning An American in Paris. I wish we all had such hardships.
While she tries to make us feel sorry for "struggles" she went through, in truth she had a golden life, married three times, had a two-year affair with Warren Beatty, and alludes to a few other love affairs while married and being flown around the world. BTW, why does anyone like Warren Beatty? He has been named in dozens of memoirs I've read as a lover who cheats, scum who should have long ago been silenced by the #metoo movement. Even Caron seems to admire him simply for his charm, despite his cheating and constant control. Why are liberals willing to put up with rich guys that publicly claim to be pro-feminism but actually abuse and manipulate females?
Much of the book is about Europe, movies I've never heard of, and attending social events she goes to with internationally known names. She acts a bit like royalty, and of course meets a number of royal title holders.
However, not enough of the book is about the projects we know her for. She tells quite a bit about her first film but beyond that it's just a couple pages about some of her other famous movies. I'm glad she gives us a few tidbits about Father Goose, my favorite film of hers, but then she manages to get one of the plot points wrong. This isn't the only error--her producer-husband wants to hire Steven Spielberg after his "black-and-white" TV movie Duel, but go watch clips...it's in full color!
Most disturbing is her inability to stand up to her husbands and boyfriends, who negatively influence her choices. She learns too late in life to not give her power to men when it comes to her career.
Much of the book is just too boring for an American audience and Caron misses opportunities to share real stories. She doesn't pull punches with a few directors and co-stars, including Beatty, but a 272-page-book needs more than a third of it being about things U.S. audiences will care about. Thank Heaven for some of Leslie Caron's movies, but not for this simplistic memoir....more
Sloppy, messy, scoff-inducing book that's filled with mistakes and absurd claims by the author. It's an unsatisfying attempt to pull together all the Sloppy, messy, scoff-inducing book that's filled with mistakes and absurd claims by the author. It's an unsatisfying attempt to pull together all the major things written about the star and her shows, but it doesn't work under Herbie Pilato's horrible writing skills.
I could go page-by-page and tear this apart. His inept writing is due to being overwhelmed by the incredible amount of secondhand resources he compiles but the author also insists on inserting self-assured conclusions about things he knows little about. He puts thoughts in the minds of Mary and others to try to explain her feelings or actions, but often fails as a writer to give any proper notations to explain his conclusions.
There are a few inclusions that are interesting or somewhat unique. A few paragraphs honor That Girl as the series that birthed The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but Pilato needed to do interviews with Marlo Thomas and others involved in That Girl (one of the biggest flaws in the book is the lack of fresh interviews). There's also a funny aside where one performer admits that Moore looked nothing in person like she did on screen (when I met Moore that was the first thing that hit me--her deep undereye gauges and imperfect face were so different from her photos with heavy makeup and her well-lit TV appearances).
The mistakes in the book are laughable. He has the wrong title for one of the books he quotes. He misspells the last name of one of the biggest TV programmers in CBS history. He says that Mary Richards was from "Rosenburg, Minnesota" when in truth it was Roseburg.
Then he includes all sorts of stuff that has nothing to do with Mary Tyler Moore, such as biographical asides of people she worked with and bizarre statements about "coincidences" that were no such thing!
Try this one out: "The pilot for The Dick Van Dyke Show was filmed on January 20, 1961, the same day as President John F. Kennedy's inauguration. JRK's subsequent Inauguration Ball was directed by Bewitched producer/director William Asher, who was also married Elizabeth Montgomery, that show's star. This was one of a number of eerie life and career overlaps between Mary and Montgomery." HUH? What eerie overlap? There is none! Read it carefully--MTM's shooting the pilot had zero to do with Asher or Montgomery. The book is filled with these kind of oddball mistaken connections that truly are meaningless.
He'll also make bold statements that are patently false. The "Van Dyke (show) proved to be one of TV's first sitcoms for grown-ups." Totally wrong--what about The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy (whose first years were about four aging adults), December Bride or I Married Joan, Our Miss Brooks or Love That Bob, Mister Peepers or Life with Elizabeth (you get the idea!). He wrongly slams Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver as being less realistic, then tries to say the Van Dyke Show was also more realistic than Bewitched! Duh! There was zero reality on that fantasy sitcom about a witch that can move things with her nose! Hey, Herbie, the Van Dyke Show was more realistic than I Dream of Jeannie, The Munsters, Addams Family, and Gilligan's Island too!
As I said, it's a mess. In the hands of a skilled TV historian and writer this could have given true perspective to Mary Tyler Moore's impact on media and society; instead, what we get is an error-filled mishmash of warped praise that is about as big a failure as Moore doing a Breakfast at Tiffanys musical on Broadway....more
Fascinating real-life version of the TV show Euphoria, filled with lots of young teen drugs and sex. It's very well written, though at times hard to bFascinating real-life version of the TV show Euphoria, filled with lots of young teen drugs and sex. It's very well written, though at times hard to believe, and once she's out of her teen years Fox rushes through adulthood, failing to draw mature conclusions about her constant need for attention, affirmation, and substance highs.
I had no idea who Julia Fox was other than a few recent tabloid clips of her with then-boyfriend Kanye West, so I started with the last chapter to see if she mentions him and was impressed by how much detail there is about their short relationship. She not only confirms was a crazy guy he is, but was smart enough to not sign an NDA, and that impressed me to go back and read the whole thing. By the way, can people please stop calling Kanye West a "genius" because this book alone contains enough to prove he's anything but.
What Down the Drain ends up being is a non-stop commentary on a rebellious wild child who is ignored by parents and begging for love from a abusive man. She literally can't be by herself and gravitates to everyone evil. Fox's dad pays no attention to her threats of suicide and her mother simply hates her. And this all is happening by the time she turns 14 when she goes off on her own sleeping her way around the city, doing drugs, stealing from everyone, and flying back and forth to her grandpa's place in Italy.
Her teen years alone take up over half the book and were engrossing because they paint a picture of New York City dwellers as being horrible, selfish, money-wasting, addicted numbskulls--and she just becomes one of them. There isn't one redeeming character in the whole book, from boyfriends' parents to the cops to celebrities to the mental health workers. Everyone in New York City appears corrupt, including her father whose main gift to Julia is agreeing to share his pee with her so she can pass drugs tests!
Tens of thousands of dollars is spent on drugs but she has no income and has dropped out of high school--so she steals, hocks items, becomes a sugar baby for a rich guy, and does whatever illegal things she can, even into adulthood. She consumes so many substances that it's difficult to believe she has such amazingly detailed memories when it comes to the times she almost died or partied too hard or went unconscious. While she's a good storyteller you have to assume some of this is inaccurate because of how out of her mind she was at the time.
When Fox hits her adult years she continues to act like a child and her addictions worsen, no matter how many times she goes to AA or NA or tries to find new friends. Everyone she knows is a terrible drug abuser, many of them are jailed and a number die of overdoses. Toss in her time as a dominatrix (with a NYC cop as a regular customer!) and stripper, and this woman is in need of redemption. She actually prays to God at one point when stopped in a car with heroin and promises to turn her life around if she is let go--but she doesn't honor that either. Julia Fox had plenty of chances to change or know the truth and continued to reject everything positive.
The flaw of the book is that her redemption never really comes. Even when she gets married and is pregnant, deciding to keep the baby after already having a number of abortions, she discovers she has simply picked another abusive distant cheating man as a husband. All men are shown to be disgusting pigs that don't fear physically beating up women, but the lesson I learned is that women are so stupid that they allow men to abuse them over and over instead of just leaving or calling the police. Yes, the one time she did file charges it ended up making her look bad, but that's because Fox never used her energy or resources to do it right. Instead she was drugged out of her mind and using her remaining brain cells to screw around with total losers, then wondered why no one took her charges seriously.
She skips past entire adult years and rushes through stories about her films or photography work. At one point she claims to be "hood celebrity" who has started many fashion trends, but she's not much of anything beyond a sad feeble woman who made a whole lot of bad choices. And while that makes for a terrible person, it does result in an interesting, though unredeemed, life story....more
Like most Streisand movies, this memoir is dramatically flawed by the over-indulgence of her gigantic ego. Filled with attempts at false humility, claLike most Streisand movies, this memoir is dramatically flawed by the over-indulgence of her gigantic ego. Filled with attempts at false humility, claiming she dislikes her voice or looks or talents (beyond acting, which she seems incredibly proud of despite making some major career errors), she claims to base this book on "facts" when in truth she is manipulating every story to make herself a goddess who should be worshipped. It's all kind of sickening and tragic because there are so many good behind-the-scenes stories here that are destroyed by her verbosity and selfishness.
I could go through every chapter and pick it apart, but to dare to publish a 900-page autobiography is ridiculous. The Funny Girl section is over 130 pages alone! And two-thirds of it is just her rambling about very detailed conversations from over 65 years ago. There's almost 100 pages on the yawner Yentl. She also alludes to some love affairs but rarely says that she even slept with anyone else.
You want to know about her clothes or what she ate? Well you'll be happy because the book is bloated with that kind of unimportant detail. Lots of it. Added to all the absurdity that there is no index or footnotes, and Streisand's claims of only being interested in "facts" make her difficult to believe when she doesn't actually provide any proof of her many over-the-top contradictions to popular history of her works. Most of it is her spewing lop-sided opinions based on cloudy recollections. She even critiques her own movies, finally seeing them after decades of refusing to watch herself, and she decides that For Pete's Sake and The Main Event are pretty good. So much for her taste.
It should have been cut apart and edited down dramatically then split into two books. The actress goes on and on about all sorts of nothings as well as repeating her simplistic self-centered mantras. All details point toward the same message: Streisand is totally absorbed with herself and no one else. And this was from the start, where as an unknown and untrained performer she bossed around every director, producer, and writer so that she quickly earned a well-deserved reputation for being impossible to work with before most of us had ever heard of her.
I think Streisand was her own worst enemy. She was best when she had to perform for strong leaders who had differing views from her instincts. Her work began to fall apart early in her career when she insisted on total creative control and made some really horrible role choices, but many of her fans kept praising her for some really bad stuff. She does have a chapter where she chides herself a bit, asking What Was I Thinking?
This is also true of her view of how she photographs: the cover picture is certainly not one of her best, her claim to only having one good side is absurd, and Streisand has little good to say about What's Up Doc, where she is at her peak of beauty and on-screen charm. It simply is the one of the best films she ever made if not the best (and included a couple of her greatest vocal renditions ever) yet she uses only 7 pages of the book on it, much of it negative! The actress ended up selling her 10% of the What's Up Doc gross back to Warner Brothers before it premiered because she thought the movie was going to be a flop! Ha! It ended up being the biggest box-office hit where she starred as the lead. So much for Barbra's understanding of the industry.
I'm glad she reveals some of her real secrets in the book, such as cheating on her first husband with her co-star of Funny Girl on Broadway. But even then she turns the story into her victimization because of how her fellow actor responded when she broke off the affair. The entire text is filled with her self-admitted negativity and complaining about everything, while also packed with praise and reviews from others. She says that at her core she is totally insecure and at the same time unstoppable at wanting complete control. This woman has big issues but she is never the real victim and fails to see that everyone around her is suffering due to her rude and demeaning nature.
She has the audacity to say regarding those people who directed her early shows, "they didn't understand the way I worked." No, Barbra, at 20 years old you didn't understand the way others worked and never took a moment to respect anyone except those few people who acted like your lowly servants. And that has continued for over sixty years.
A perfect example is how she is constantly late, dramatically late, frustratingly late to her commitments. She admits it about 25 times in the book! Yet she demands that others who serve her to be there on time and when she's a director of her own projects she suddenly is no longer late. Total selfishness and a person who does not deserve any admiration.
If you think she stands for liberal causes and equality for the disenfranchised, think again. Barbra Streisand is the one creating the problems by setting herself and her opinions about all others, only praising those who act as her slaves. She is the ultimate out-of-touch leftist Democratic entertainment industry elitist, saying all the right things but living a lifestyle that mistreats those beneath her. Instead of true tolerance she has zero tolerance for anyone who doesn't match her very warped view of life and she fails to see things from anyone else's viewpoint.
The end goes on and on, it gets to a point around page 700 that you just want her to shut up. A CliffsNotes summary of this book can give you the highlights, otherwise you have to trudge through her distorted, mentally ill mind in order to get to the good stuff. After reading this you realize that despite her defensive attempts to make her sound loving, people who worked with Streisand were not the luckiest people in the world....more
Revisionist history, with the actress looking back at her life and obviously filtering it through an adult creative-writing lens.
Her headline-making Revisionist history, with the actress looking back at her life and obviously filtering it through an adult creative-writing lens.
Her headline-making discovery about her father only makes up a small part of this book. Some of the writing is incredibly awkward and overdramatic as she attributes lengthy thoughts and feelings to things that happened within a matter of seconds many decades ago. Then she starts blaming others for her bad decisions (such as not reporting a vague recollection of a childhood assault by a young friend) while claiming she was selfless, when in truth many of her choices were very self-centered and her parents weren't as bad as she wants us to believe they were.
This would have been a more interesting story if written as a biography by an outside party; instead, we get high-school level prose mixed with self-revelation statements gleaned from too much therapy. The story could have been told in a straightforward manner that would have allowed us to draw our own conclusions; instead, Washington includes a lot of unnecessary retrospective inner thoughts that are difficult to believe and an attempt to shift blame while making her look heroic.
Most frustrating is her need to continually push the race card, as if she personally dramatically suffered from her skin color (which we discover is very mixed and partially white). In truth she seemed to have it pretty good compared to many struggling Americans of any color. But she insists on saying things like, "Even today, there is the inevitable code-switching and double consciousness required for survival as a (b)lack person in American." Right, that's how she made it so far and earns more than 99% of the people in the country? And why she capitalizes the b in black but doesn't capitalize the w in white?
Then there's her politically correct way of making innocent any black male caught in a crime. "Due to the biases of the justice system against African American men, the absence of a criminal record among the men in my father's family was rare. He had taken pride in being a statistical anomaly." She is looking back at discovering that her dad was pleading guilty to tax evasion and drug dealing, and that she as a teen wrote the judge begging for her dad's leniency because his "costs were now also mine to bear." First, go back and check factual history about who commits crimes; second, stop blaming the "system" of holding accountable people who do wrong; and third, you don't deserve a "get out of jail free" card because of your skin color or that it's an undue burden on your family.
She has an abortion without thought or guilt, though in another spot she gets on her knees to pray to God before filming a movie scene. She campaigns for her new pals the Obamas. She tells a bit about making her movies. She talks about how uncomfortable campaigning for an Oscar is. And mentions celebrating her birthday with Oprah. You know, all the things normal, everyday people that have suffered terribly go through.
She proves herself to be a bit of a racist but as I compared her life story to mine and others I know, other than her parents' deceptions she had it better off from the start compared to most people. Her real problem is that she is looking at life with her head stuck under thick water, when it's time for her come to the surface and see the real world....more
Rehashing stories and details that are published elsewhere, this verbose book of 556 pages (plus almost 80 more pages of notes at the end) is filled wRehashing stories and details that are published elsewhere, this verbose book of 556 pages (plus almost 80 more pages of notes at the end) is filled with speculation and the author's conclusions not always based on facts. It certainly doesn't make either of the stars look good and you get very little sense of why the two were ever attracted to each other.
Most of the book is about Bogart. Bacall doesn't even enter the scene until page 225! He obviously is a major star and, to be honest, she wasn't. His filmwork is incredible, hers not so much, but both were not well liked outside their fellow Hollywood elitist partygoers. I had not recalled until I read this that Bacall was the head of the original Rat Pack celebrity group and had an almost-marriage with Frank Sinatra, who later commandeered the term for his own group of Vegas buddies.
There are some bits about their movies mixed in with personal life quirks, including numerous affairs, but there is way too much regarding political controversies (dozens of pages instead of what could have been summarized in just a few). The worst part of this couple is their disregard for their children--at one point they travel to Europe and Africa for six months for vacation and The African Queen, leaving son Stephen in the arms of a caretaker who drops dead moments after they fly away but neither parent is concerned enough to return to comfort the traumatized boy.
A few interesting stories do not a good biography make. The writer depends too heavily on previously published material, then when he doesn't know motivations or can't tie up stories into neat endings, he guesses and conjectures without facts. Add to that the inability of the author to cut out trivialities, and the book should have been at least one-fourth shorter.
In the end it doesn't even match the subtitle as "Hollywood's Greatest Love Affair." Just as he had done with his previous wife, Bogie cheats on Bacall just a few years into the marriage, seemingly with her knowledge as she cheats on him. Beyond their screenwork there doesn't appear to be much chemistry between them. All you end up with is two crabby, bossy, tempestuous, unhappy stars that seem mostly to be in love with their own images....more
Somewhat entertaining story of a fascinating life that's marred by horrible grammar, ghetto writing style, and a terrible scene in which she celebrateSomewhat entertaining story of a fascinating life that's marred by horrible grammar, ghetto writing style, and a terrible scene in which she celebrates getting an abortion despite acknowledging that it's a human life (actually dancing afterwards in the abortion room). While my heart goes out to Haddish for the incredibly difficult childhood she went through, it's tough to justify her bad choices once she is an adult and should know better.
She turned out pretty well considering her literally insane mother, ignorant father, mentally abusive stepfather, and even her demeaning grandma--who only kept Tiffany around as a foster child in order to make money and pushed her out at age 18. Haddish has a sense of right and wrong early in her life but makes a number of bad decisions while ignoring the advice of many around her. Typically she blindly follows the bad people that lie to her (even continuing to praise the most abusive in this book) while rebelling against those trying to do good. And while it's nice that she thanks her Jehovah's Witness God in the acknowledgements for giving her life, why does she not see that she took that same opportunity away from a child?
Or if that doesn't bother you, how about the fact that she was once a pimp, making money off connecting men with women-for-hire? Or when she defecated in her boyfriend's expensive tennis shoes to show him how mad she was for him cheating? Or her stumbling through high school by non-stop cheating on exams since she couldn't read? Or her negative phrasing about a handicapped airline co-worker who lives at a disabled care facility she calls "The Island of Misfit Toys" and writes about him, "There was no escaping the fact that I cannot date a handicapped guy." How does she get away with this? The book is filled with offensive handicapped slurs and racist language, including repeated use of the N word. Tiffany Haddish is not a person of high moral quality, though she tries to do better than how she was raised.
Add to that a terrifying chapter on her ex-husband, who she claims is fat and ugly (look him up online, he's not). She seems to blame him for all her many problems, including abuse, but then she makes herself even look worse with her own decisions and violent actions.
I get that the co-author wanted the star's "voice" to sound authentic in the text, but the non-stop "we was" type statements or sentences with missing verbs just make Haddish sound stupid. I will watch her performances in the future with a bit of admiration for how far she has come, but can only hope she grows as a human to better understand that she can't just joke away her failures but that her actions can negatively impact others. In some sad ways she has used her comedy and acting to become like the parents who mistreated her....more
Excellent memoir that covers most of the star's private life but comes up short when dealing with her on-screen work. Anderson has no trouble getting Excellent memoir that covers most of the star's private life but comes up short when dealing with her on-screen work. Anderson has no trouble getting blunt about the men who mistreated her (including her horrible ex-husband Burt Reynolds) and she uses this to "set the record straight" from what she claims are lies in previous year books from Reynolds and a woman who was a onetime love interest.
She gives a lot of depth regarding her start in Minnesota and how she went from a dark-skinned brunette (turned down for roles due to her looking too Hispanic or Native America!) that was a Sunday School teacher and child bride, to a brassy blonde who married too many times and had no problem getting into bed with some famous men on first dates. While I appreciate her pro-faith and pro-life stances, it would have been nice to have heard her regret some of the promiscuous choices she made, including cheating with married men and living with her WKRP costar Gary Sandy, who went ballistic on set when they broke up.
There are two big flaws in the book: too much time spent on disgusting drug addict and abuser Burt Reynolds (about 60% of the book, even though he only took up a few years of her life); and that there are almost no stories about WKRP. She gives more details on the productions of her other flop TV shows than she does the classic radio sitcom.
It's well-written, fast paced and entertaining, until she gets stuck in the vindictive Burt Reynolds mode--which gets old fast. Even though her story is incomplete because it was written so long ago it's worth reading as long as you don't mind the depressing stories of an abused woman who just seems to tolerate it instead of standing up for herself and using those high heels against her violent lovers....more
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