Okay, so I finished reading Here's the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice by Maureen McCormick, who used a lot of cocaine and was just generally shattered. And I got done with My Word is My Bond by Roger Moore, who did not use a lot of drugs and was not shattered, and Pieces of My Heart by Robert Wagner, who was a bit of a social climber but tells some interesting tales of 50s Hollywood. And I thought I'd better read the 1976 book Doris Day: Her Own Story by A. E. Hotchner before tackling one of the three or four Doris Day books that have come out in the last two years. Doris, by the way, was a mess when it came to marriages, and she learned how to deliver a song by listening to Ella Fitzgerald records. Anyway, so now I'm reading actress Lorraine Bracco's 2007 autobiography, On the Couch, which is pretty good but a little tense at times. And I dropped off a box of books and videotapes (yes, I'm still thinning out my collection) at the nearest public library branch and went over to their used books bin and picked up a hardcover copy of Joseph Wambaugh's 1990 novel The Golden Orange. I don't read a lot of fiction, and I certainly haven't waded through all of Wambaugh's stuff, but I liked his early works, and I thought I'd give it a try (there's a murderous sentence, huh?). And somewhere in the middle, between the Roger Moore and Robert Wagner books, I ready the frankly bizarre autobiography A Fuller Life: Hollywood, Ed Wood, and Me by Dolores Fuller, Stone Wallace, and Philip Chamberlain. Dolores "dated" a lot of guys while she was married and they were married, and a lot of the chronology is sort of mixed up and overlapped. She makes it abundantly clear that she hates Sarah Jessica Parker's portrayal of her in the 1994 Tim Burton movie Ed Wood, but then I understand that lots of people hate Sarah Jessica Parker. Anyway, I think the next book in the hopper will be Stan Getz - Nobody Else But Me by Dave Gelly. But we'll see. Different books catch my eye all the time. What are you reading?
1 comment:
Well, you have got me interested in the whole phenomenon of Noir, so I have picked up The Raymond Chandler Papers, Selected Letters and Non-Fiction, in the hope of learning a bit more about the provenance of his "knight in dark armour". As a devotee of the politically incorrect I recommend A Mencken Chrestomathy, by old H.L.
A propos of nothing I watched the new restored version of Max Ophuls' Lola Montes last night on DVD. Rather extraordinary. We think of Ophuls as all luxury and long takes, but it is really his close attention to character and motivation that makes him so great, I think.
Greatly enjoy the blog. All the best.
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