Touched by the Sun: My Friendship with Jackie
by 

Carly Simon

I skimmed some of the other Goodreads reviews, and wonder if we read the same book. People were either grousing about the lack of "private" information about Jackie Kennedy, or spitting nails about Simon's "invasion" of said privacy.

We are talking about the woman who is arguably the iconic 20th century female. Why? Lots of reasons, but at least one of them is that Jacqueline Kennedy kept her secrets. No catering to an avid press, combined with an equally avid interest in personal privacy. Simon waited 25 years after her friend's death to publish this simple memoir of the relationship. So much for the charge of somehow "cashing in" on Jackie's friendship.

She tells it in a non-linear fashion. This is the way that most friendships proceed, isn't it? Two people come together and bump along, discovering what each is willing to reveal about the other in fits and starts. No true friendship --- in my experience, anyway --- is an instant data dump. Isn't that part of the fun, the frisson that comes as new details emerge through conversations that tell you, yes, I have found a kindred soul? Simon picks her way along, and shares nuggets of how she and Kennedy related to each other, starting with an awkward question about shoes and proceeding to her hilarious narration of a ghastly dinner party given by Kay Graham for Bill and Hillary. Simon attended; Jackie didn't, but reveled in the details provided by Carly in a post-disaster phone call. As one does with a friend. Jackie was a terrific audience. She loved stories (hence her work as an editor), and Simon did not disappoint. Don't we all have a friend like that? If not, find one. The laughs alone are worth it.

Look, we all know the gory details about Jackie Kennedy's life. The poverty that drove her, the intimate details of her marriages, the shopping addictions, the horrifying events of November 22, 19633, yada, yada, yada. That is the world of Kitty Kelley or A Woman Named Jackie or, God help her, the National Enquirer. This book is an antidote to all of that kvatch. Simon is a terrific writer. No surprise, given her lyrical career and Boys in the Trees. But this slim history of a close friendship is pitch perfect. And while it contains the bonus of heavy hitters as far as celebrities who appear, it really could be the story of any friendship. If you are lucky enough to be of a certain age (raises hand) with close friendships that have changed your life (raises other hand), this book is going to send you into reveries about them. No, it isn't Tolstoy or even Troyat --- Carly and Jackie referenced each of them in conversation! --- it is a damn good read.

Highly recommend.

The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando
by William J. Mann

I liked this biography a lot, even though in the end I think Brando's life defeated Mann's understanding, just as it did Brando's. He was a genius in one area: acting. Unlike another genius, Meryl Streep, he was contemptuous of acting's worth. This may have stemmed from the reasons offered by Mann: his upbringing by an alcoholic mother and a father who not only never understood his son (pardonable, as no one else ever did) but withheld his love. Or it might have been because he thought it was a damn silly way to make a living. My own conclusion after reading this book is that it had a great deal more to do with the decades in which Brando's career flourished. Mann argues that Brando made only a handful of "great" movies: Streetcar, On the Waterfront, The Godfather and just maybe Last Tango in Paris. Everything he made after 1973 was for purely mercenary reasons (Jor-El, anyone?), as were the films he made after Waterfront through Candy (for that turkey he was doing a favor for the friend/lover who directed it). But Mann does point out that Brando never gives a bad, or at least uninteresting, performance in anything he ever put on film. That's to his credit. Even when he was bored with a role --- Nathan Detroit, Kurtz, Napoleon --- he contributed something.

But Brando was far more interested in the social justice issues that boiled over in the 50s, 60s and early 70s --- opposition to the death penalty, the civil rights movement, the mistreatment of the indigenous peoples, Vietnam, etc. He missed the boat totally on feminism and gay rights. Throughout his life, Brando was sexually voracious. If he can be faulted for this trait, and he should be, he remained unprepared to deal with the after-effects of physical intimacy. As a result he fathered a lot of children. Mann makes the point over and over again that Brando wanted to be a good father. In the end, he lacked the self-restraint to discover what that meant. For two of his children (each by a different woman) this had tragic results. His son Christian shot and killed his sister Cheyanne's lover. Christian went to prison. When he emerged, he had little to do with Brando and died young. Cheyanne killed herself. Mann opens the book with a grief-stricken Brando at Christian's murder trial. He is Lear over Cordelia's body.

In the end his image was overwhelmed by the weight gain, the Sacheen Littlefeather contretemps, the collapse of his relationships and the plethora of second and third rate projects he attached himself to in the effort to support his families. Mann's compassion for Brando saves the book from degenerating into bathos, nor does he judge the actor for wasted opportunities. He carefully restores the greatness of his acting and mourns Brando's lifelong inability to be happy. It is a worthy biography. My suspicion is that Brando would have hated it for laying his private struggles bare to the gaze of a wide audience.

Simon Donoghue's Reviews > The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas
by 

Corey Robin

The book succeeds when it carefully analyzes Thomas' legal opinions. He does not emerge as a black nationalist, since Robin never is able to offer a coherent definition as to what that means in the 21st century. Citing everyone from Booker T. Washington to Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey to Thomas Sowell only muddies the definition. Thomas has been a conservative for most of his public career. Robin tries to make the case that Thomas is that way because of his grandfather's strict parenting, and there may be something to the proposition. Certainly Thomas invokes his grandfather's lessons often during speeches and opinions. That being said, it seems less a matter of juridical conservatism --- even Scalia was too liberal for Clarence Thomas --- than a "get off my lawn!" temperament. There are also logistical problems inherent in the Thomas world view attributed to him by Robin. How exactly are black people to live separately from the rest of the nation without a de jure as well as de facto segregation? Thomas' attitudes are incoherent, which is not to say that he doesn't hold them. The evidence is in his decisions and dissents. In Robin's listing of those, Thomas seems to be closest to Thomas Jefferson among the Founding Fathers. He is given to messy pronouncements that get a bit sticky when you parse them. An enjoyable read save for the psychoanalysis. That only starts to get interesting when Robin examines Thomas' misogyny. Thomas dismisses his sister, who is an hourly wage earner, as a "good woman" who has not made the most of herself. He and his brothers have. It never seems to have occurred to Justice Thomas that the patriarchy was at least as important to his grandfather as his race. But in the end Robin is defeated by the most silent member of the Roberts Court in terms of understand why he ticks the way he does. But it is hard to argue with Robin's understanding of Thomas a jurist.

Life Isn't Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends.
by 

Ash Carter,

 

Sam Kashner

it was ok

There is a giant hole in the middle of this book. Three guesses, and the first two don't count. It is believable that Nichols had 150 close friends, but not that you would attempt to remember him without getting Elaine May on record. It is difficult to understand his comic sensibility without her take on it, and as far as what made him such a good director, well, that remains a mystery. The reminiscences of actors are uniformly laudatory, and while I am impressed that Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson thought Nichols was a terrific director, that aspect of his talent --- perhaps his main talent --- remains a mystery to me. It probably didn't hurt to get terrific scripts like The Graduate, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Angels in America, but Nichols made his share of stinkers as well. Wolf, anyone? Still, it was an entertaining read. Like being at an A-list cocktail party.

C'Mon, Get Happy: Fear and Loathing on the Partridge Family Bus
by 

David Cassidy,

 

Chip Deffaa

I am David Cassidy's age, so (like him) I was too old to watch The Partridge Family during its primetime run. Cassidy never really says if he watched the show while playing Keith, but it doesn't seem as though he would have had the time or the interest once his teen idol status kicked in. Cassidy was exploited by Screen Gems and forced to keep to an inhuman work schedule. Five days of shooting were invariably followed by concerts all weekend until his body and spirit eventually broke under the strain.

Cassidy seems obsessed with 1970-1974 as the defining experience of his life, which in retrospect it must have been. He entered into it with no real preparation for what would happen when he agreed to star in the sitcom. Interestingly, there is as brief mention of Bobby Sherman, the other teen idol of the period. And by the time The Partridge Family picked up the slack, The Monkees had run its course. But it never seems to have occurred to Cassidy to look at Sherman, Jones or Dolenz as Butterick patterns for what he might expect.

He is also bitter about the lack of parenting he received from his father, Jack Cassidy. The elder Cassidy is presented as an unrelieved disaster. His death in 1975 left the issues between him and his eldest son completely unresolved. David skims over this for the rest of the book dealing with his post-Keith life, but it is clear the lack of a relationship with Jack was the greatest influence upon him. His marriage to Kay Lenz is doomed from the start, his second wife rates a paragraph and his third marriage, still strong at the time the book was written, inevitably ended in divorce. Cassidy is complimentary of her, but never conveys why the relationship worked. There is a sad afterword by his co-author that details what happened after the book was published: a spiral of drunk driving arrests, bankruptcies, professional disappointment and ultimate death from alcohol abuse.

The one-star is not for the sadness of Cassidy's story but for the way he tells it. At no point does he demonstrate any self-awareness, other than an occasional perfunctory note that he treated women poorly. But these are buried in descriptions --- graphic descriptions --- of the enormous amount of sex David Cassidy was enjoying on the road. There is an embarrassing account of awkward intercourse with Susan Dey that led to a complete breakdown of their friendship after it was published. Cassidy seems surprised that she would have minded, which says more about him than anything else. Gentlemen do not kiss and tell, teenaged boys do. And that's the nub of what makes this autobiography sad and unsatisfying. It reads as though a teenager wrote it. Cassidy never really matured. There are reasons for it, certainly, but the perspective suffers and as a result, so does the book. I would like to read a good biography, or even an examination of the teen idol phenomenon. Anyone know of one?