General

by Kitty Kelley

Being poor, adopted, gay, and Jewish fueled Jeffrey Seller to become a multimillionaire and then spiraled him into psychotherapy four days a week for 12 years. “I always felt like an outsider,” he writes in his Broadway memoir, Theater Kid. But he admits that being a Jew probably saved his life and paved the way to his immense success.

Growing up in “Cardboard Village,” a housing project east of Detroit, young Jeff auditioned for the annual Purim play at Temple Israel, which tells the Old Testament story of Esther, the clever Jewish queen who saves her people from the villain Haman. Too young then and not yet “out,” the 9-year-old does not audition for the role of Esther. Instead, he’s cast as a sailor in the chorus, and from that experience, he falls in love with theater.

The day after the performance, Seller writes a play for himself and his two fourth-grade pals called “Adventureland.” He shows it to his English teacher and begs her to let him stage it. She agrees, recognizing what she calls “a theater kid,” and Seller becomes a playwright, director, actor, and producer, which charts the rest of his days. He acts and directs plays throughout grade school, high school, and college at the University of Michigan, which he attends on student aid. He spends his summers as a theater counselor at Camp Tamarack.

While grateful for his first theater experience with the Purim play, Seller remains resentful of the synagogue in Detroit that humiliated him as a have-not. “This wealthy temple that caters to its many affluent members has underscored my shame at being poor and my feeling that I am less than the other kids and families who attend,” he writes, adding, “We were so broke we went on welfare.”

Today, at 60, Seller is worth millions, having produced hugely successful plays such as “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights,” and winning four best-musical Tony awards. He’s also the only person in Broadway history to have produced two Pulitzer Prize-winning musicals, “Rent” and “Hamilton.” He’s amassed producer credits for hits like “The Cher Show,” “Sweeney Todd,” and “West Side Story,” as well as for clunkers like “The Last Ship” with Sting. “Money, sex, and ambition is my life,” Seller tells the New York Times.

While no longer poor and living in the projects, the Broadway producer remains adopted, gay, and Jewish, which, he shares, leads him into intense psychotherapy, and finally to writing this book. “I wrote it for everybody who has ever felt left out.”

He divides his memoir into three acts, similar to a theater script. Act I features young Jeff, who’s advised by a friend’s mother to introduce himself as Jeffrey because “it sounds better.” Before he’s in first grade, Seller learns he’s adopted, which he feels isn’t as bad as being poor and living in a “neighborhood where the parents have less: less money, less education, less stability and the kids are deemed less: less smart, less cooperative, less likely to succeed…I want to escape the poverty that entraps me and my dark dour family.” He calls his father “a loser.”

Act II has Seller graduating from college in 1986, heading for New York City, and coming out to his parents, who shrug. “It’s like being right- or left-handed,” says his father. But it’s a devastating time for gays, with the onslaught of the AIDS crisis. “It inhibited me physically,” Seller writes. “I was so afraid of death…of getting sick.”

Thomas Mallon also addresses that paralyzing fear in his new book, The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994. In rereading his extracts of those years, Mallon writes in his preface that “the relentless spread of AIDS constantly thwarted the happy entries,” adding that the deaths of friends and lovers plunged him into a whirlwind of grief and fear. Pages later, he observes, “To think there was a time when Anita Bryant was all we had to worry about.”

Act III for Seller whirls him into the stratosphere of financial success, proving his assumption “that I can bend the world to my will if I try hard enough.” Still, he remains so terrified of AIDS that he signs up with the Gay Community Center for a seminar called “Making Safe Sex Fun!” His conclusion? “Bottom line: the connection between sex and death doesn’t go away.” Yet pages later, he writes in wildly X-rated detail about a sexual encounter with two strangers in a steam bath on his 30th birthday.

Seller sprinkles every page of this book with name-drops: “When our next-door neighbor Kurt Vonnegut stopped by one afternoon for an informal lunch…” To see the first run-through of “Hamilton,” “I called Mike Nichols, acquaintance, supporter, friend.” So many names, but no index. No footnotes or chapter notes, either, despite pages and pages of quotes and verbatim recollections of long conversations from his youth, all of which the author attributes to “my phenomenal memory.” Spotlighting his professional achievements, he makes only slight mention of his personal life, including his former lover, Josh Lehrer, with whom he lived for 26 years, and the two children they adopted and raised together.

There are, instead, clever one-liners written by a Broadway obsessive. “Going to see the Shuberts [theater owners Bernie Jacobs and Gerry Schoenfeld] is like going to see the Wizard…They remind me of the Muppet Show hecklers, Statler and Waldorf, except they are not even a little bit funny.” The Shuberts’ competitor, Jimmy Nederlander, gets described as “a crap shooter from Guys and Dolls.”

Seller writes that, ultimately, Theater Kid is a book for gays who love musicals:

“Musicals make me feel good in a way that no other experience can, except sex. There, I said it. Musicals and sex. I can’t live without sex; I can’t live without musicals.”

And that’s a wrap.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Women might be surprised to learn that much of what hangs in their closets was designed by a woman they’ve never heard of — the leotards and leggings, hoodies, denim jackets, leather skirts, dresses with pockets, side zippers, and ballet flats. Yes, even the jersey wrap dress. All this time, you thought it was Diane von Furstenberg who gave you an hourglass figure in the 1970s. Actually, DvF simply resurrected and glamorized what Claire McCardell had already made into a wardrobe staple decades before.

As an unknown designer, McCardell made a monkey out of Christian Dior, with his padded shoulders, tightly cinched waists, and teetering high heels, which he trumpeted in 1946 as his “New Look” for women. Unimpressed by the French maestro, McCardell cut her ready-to-wear garments to fit a woman’s natural shape, making Dior’s wasp-waists look like skeletal twists. Betty Friedan agreed, and years before she rattled America with The Feminine Mystique, she wrote a 1955 magazine profile of McCardell entitled “The Gal Who Defied Dior.” That same year, McCardell made the cover of Time. Yet it’s Dior whose name reigns in fashion today, while McCardell and her creations faded after her death in 1958.

But now comes glory for the forgotten fashionista in a sparkling tribute by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, who’s written Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free.

Growing up as a tomboy in Frederick, Maryland, playing with her brothers, McCardell refused to be encumbered by the hoops and stays and bones and wires of her era. She began making her own simple clothes as a youngster and would eventually graduate from the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, later known as Parsons School of Design. Spending her junior year abroad, she set sail for Paris to study the intricacies of haute couture. At the age of 23, McCardell returned to New York City determined to make a career in fashion. She modeled sportswear at B. Altman and Company for $25 a week and then landed a job sketching ready-to-wear designs, but with no real experience and unable to keep up with production, she was fired in 1929. But she bounced back weeks later, found another job on Seventh Avenue, and started at the bottom of the pay pole.

McCardell was blessed by the gods of career girls and gradually soared because she knew what she wanted to do and never stopped chasing her goal. Having decided she didn’t want to have children or become a housewife, she postponed marriage for many years so she could bring her designs to the world. Psychologically, she needed to work. “Without it,” Dickinson writes, “she wasn’t sure who she was.”

A practical woman, McCardell used her own experiences to fuel her designs. For instance, she grew frustrated having to lug a 100-pound steamer trunk full of clothes from her apartment to the docks of the Hudson River and then onto (and, later, off of) an ocean liner every time she traveled to Paris on a buying trip. So she devised a system of five different garments made of crease-free jersey that she could interchange while traveling and that fit into a single suitcase. Such a system of separates was unheard of in 1934, but it would revolutionize American fashion 50 years later.

Next, McCardell designed the “Monastic dress,” a tent-like garment with dolman sleeves and belted with thin ties that wrapped multiple times around the waist. The frock — which freed women from corsets, girdles, and crinoline — sold out its first day in stores. Then, the clever designer conceived the “Pop-over dress” as something fashionable women could wear while cleaning the house before they popped over to a cocktail party. The Pop-over cost $6.95 in 1942, sold more than 75,000 in its first season, and won a Coty Award for McCardell. On a creative blitz, she also designed the “Diaper bathing suit” and Capezio ballet flats, and she put pockets in everything from capris to evening gowns. She moved zippers to the side of garments instead of the back so women could dress themselves without assistance. In doing so, she invented American sportswear for women and pushed the ascent of American design, which eventually challenged the fashion dominance of France.

In this achievement, McCardell was surprisingly aided by New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, who summoned a group of fashion journalists to educate him about the industry. After listening to the women, the mayor vowed to help build an organization to foster American fashion, which led, months later, to the creation of the New York Dress Institute, which protected and promoted the designs of American clothiers.

Who knew U.S. designers would come to owe so much to McCardell? But such is the charm of this book and its author that you’ll care about a designer you’ve never heard of, who became the first American to get her name on a Seventh Avenue label. Years before Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein, Anne Fogarty, Anne Klein, Donna Karan, Bonnie Cashin, Tory Burch, or Lilly Pulitzer, there was “Claire McCardell Clothes by Townley.”

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

The first commandment for authors: Write what you know. And in his fourth book, The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood, Matthew Specktor does exactly that. Being a show-business baby — his father is still a top agent, and his mother was a one-time screenwriter blackballed for crossing the picket line during a writers’ strike — Specktor celebrates Hollywood at its most glamorous and powerful apex. Having worked in the film industry during the 1990s, he’s professionally equipped to tackle the subject of old-school movie moguls who once made magic.

Specktor opens his book with a prologue recalling his 13-year-old self attending a Sunday afternoon party in the Hollywood Hills with his parents. The party, he writes, is “afloat on…wine and dope.” Most of the guests are writers, directors, actors, and actresses. “The mood is riotous, a little unhinged.” When he joins his mother, “She hands me her wineglass, so I can take a robust swallow.” (Pause here to consider Mom giving her underage son alcohol.)

Looking back at that 1979 party, the author sees it as “the golden hour” when movies reigned at the center of American cultural life. To tell the story of that time — the era of Hollywood’s boom and bust — Specktor, a MacDowell Fellow, uses the techniques of fiction to present a nonfiction story, combining the personal upheaval of his family after his parents’ divorce with the tumultuous revolution in Tinseltown.

He states up front that, to tell this story, he will “occupy the minds of other people,” meaning he won’t attribute previously published material, which might jolt journalists. While roaming free-range through the pastures of others, he declares that he will “use an artist’s privileges” as he melds fact with fiction and jumps from first-person to third-person narration. Caveat emptor: This author is going to color outside the lines. Forewarned is forearmed.

Shortly before this book was published, Specktor gave an interview in which he described himself as growing up “celebrity-adjacent,” meaning he knew people who knew celebrities, and he wrote this “hybrid memoir” with just enough recognizable names to engage readers. For example, he recounts Marlon Brando calling his father and leaving a long, rambling message on the family’s answering machine. That’s the first and last time Brando’s name surfaces here. Perhaps his overreaching gimmick is understandable, considering the competition from real celebrity memoirs published in the past few years, including Streisand’s My Name Is Barbra; Inside Out by Demi Moore; Thicker Than Water by Kerry Washington; Finding Me by Viola Davis; and Making a Scene by Constance Wu.

Specktor’s writing chops make this book catnip for anyone interested in old Hollywood, when the studio system ruled supreme and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer boasted “more stars than there are in heaven.” At that time, Lew Wasserman was enthroned at Music Corporation of America (MCA), an emperor atop an empire heralded in Connie Bruck’s 2000 masterpiece, When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence.

For Specktor, “the golden hour” seems to be when Wasserman was sovereign and young Turks led by the “hubris and ungodly ambition” of Creative Artists Agency’s (CAA) Michael Ovitz conspired for CAA to topple the MCA monarch. “It’s good to be King,” Specktor writes, echoing Mel Brooks, “but would it be better to be Emperor?”

Here, the author suddenly interrupts narrating the approaching battle between the two movie moguls to tell readers that he personally identifies with Ovitz because “this man, who is the conduit through which Hollywood will enter its period of imperial decline, is just like me. He loves art with a ferocity few people can equal.” That ferocity will eventually enable Ovitz to build a mammoth collection (Picasso, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko) and make him one of the world’s most renowned art collectors.

Wasserman and Ovitz dominate this book like Iago and Cassio, and throughout, Specktor remains in thrall to the MCA megalopolitan. When he later sees Wasserman, now tottering in his 80s, the author feels “a wild urge to fall at this man’s feet and embrace him” because, to Specktor, Wasserman represents the golden era of Hollywood. Alongside such idolatry for a mogul who never spoke to him, readers might be unsettled by Specktor’s dismissal of his screenwriting mother, now deceased, as a “professional failure.” Conversely, he lauds his 91-year-old father as a success because he represents a client roster of marquee stars like Robert Duvall, Robert DeNiro, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Barbra Streisand, Geoffrey Rush, and Helen Mirren.

Shining through this kaleidoscope of false gods and famous names is a short chapter entitled “White Dancing” about a diminutive Black man of towering influence who teaches a graduate fiction workshop that Specktor feels fortunate to have taken years ago. “It is only through him (“Mr. Baldwin: We call him that…”), I am finally able to understand that writing is not some glamour profession, a gin and tonic and a cigarette as you slouch over your typewriter, bitching about the studio’s notes, but a moral one, in which you are tasked with failing again and again and again.”

God bless James Baldwin for trying to save a young man, now 58 years old, who remains bedazzled by Hollywood.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

“As New York goes, so goes the nation” is more than a Big Apple brag. It’s the bellwether of the country, highlighted by the city that takes bold initiatives and establishes the national pulse. Some might dispute that point today, but Russell Shorto makes a persuasive argument for it in his eighth book, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.

The author comes to this historical exploration via his previous work, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America, written in 2004, and documenting the initial influence of New Amsterdam. Shorto is a senior scholar at the New Netherland Research Center of the New York State Library, which is in the process of translating 12,000 Dutch records into English.

In the new book, Shorto presents the story of 17th-century America and the three wars waged between the Dutch and the British for dominance of Manhattan Island — “a world-changing event,” he writes, that rocketed the British to victory over the Dutch, and the reason why most residents of the New World now speak English. (When Donald J. Trump became president in 2025, he stipulated that English was to be recognized as the country’s official language.)

At certain points, Taking Manhattan reads like a psychohistory of man’s inclination to plunder and pillage for power and illustrates the rancor of religion and the wars waged over whose deity should reign supreme. The entire era was awash in religious hatreds among knee-bending Catholics, anti-pope Protestants, and bloodletting Puritans, plus Presbyterians and various other religions, all hell-bent on killing each other in the name of God.

In recounting the 17th-century restoration of the Stuart monarchy in Great Britain, Shorto writes that it’s easy to dismiss London as Gomorrah, full of primal urges and indulgences. “There is surely something to that but my inclination is to turn the matter on its head.” With perspective, he does exactly that, pointing out that the previous era of Puritan rule had been pernicious: no drinking, no dancing. People were imprisoned for holding religious services and punished if their children played on the Sabbath. The Stuarts simply restored enjoyment. They rediscovered Shakespeare and no longer demanded chastity be the hallmark of civilization.

Being steeped in the history of the era, and with access to newly translated documents, the author celebrates the Dutch influence on Manhattan but takes issue with previous historians. He questions one declaration that the “sale” of Manhattan in 1626 involved only a verbal agreement. “I find that unlikely,” he writes, “because if they had initially settled for a verbal agreement, the Dutch, being highly conscious of such administrative matters, would have gone back to the Lenape [Native Americans] later to put it in writing.”

Within his text, Shorto also instructs readers “to cast a cold eye on the mindset of our ancestors,” particularly on the subject of religious tolerance, which was sorely lacking in the 1600s. He champions Dutch tolerance but chides Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director-general who barred Lutherans, Quakers, and Jews from settling in New Netherland, adding that “the attitude toward Native Americans and Africans argues pretty decisively against any broad underlying ethos of tolerance.” Shorto further cautions against applying 21st-century acumen to 17th-century actions. “We don’t need to judge people of the past according to our standards so much as we need to recognize patterns and milestones in history.”

Such compassion is not characteristic of all historians, and Shorto seems to have come by his while growing up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which he recalled in his 2021 memoir, Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob. Writing with certain pain, he told the story of his namesake grandfather, a small-town mob boss in the 1950s who, Shorto estimated, made about $2 million a year over a 20-year period. “The pain he inflicted on [my grandmother], the pain he inflicted on my father…that then colored my father’s whole life, which in turn colored my life,” Shorto wrote. The New York Times summoned a mafia association to praise his book, predicting readers would be with him “All the way, as Sinatra would say.”

Mentioning the memoir in connection with the publication of Taking Manhattan may be instructive to underscore Shorto’s understanding of history’s human dimension and the historian’s moral responsibility to penetrate facts and figures, dates and details to present the ugly underbelly of our nation’s growth.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Most biographers can only fantasize about unfettered access to their subjects — to know their thoughts and dreams and aspirations, to understand their dilemmas, to explain their demons. Consequently, they invest years researching old records, hunting sources, and plumbing archives to construct a life story. In this respect, David Sheff is a unicorn. As a personal friend of Yoko Ono, who is now 92 years old, he had full access to her files, friends, records, and children, to whom he dedicates this book, which he describes a bit exuberantly as “one of the greatest stories of our time, a harrowing, exhilarating, and inspiring journey.”

Sheff met his subject in 1980 for a Playboy interview published in January 1981. At the end of that year, John Lennon was murdered by a deranged fan, and Sheff flew to New York to be with Ono, Lennon’s wife. He then wrote a book, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He also contributed to the January 1981 People cover story, “Yoko Ono: How she is holding up,” and later sold the film rights. In 1984, he wrote more Lennon profiles (“The Betrayal of John Lennon” and “The Night Steve Jobs Met Andy Warhol”). His Playboy interview was reissued in 2021 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Lennon’s death, underscoring the wisdom of “waste not, want not.” Now comes Yoko: A Biography, which the author presents as the capstone to Ono’s career as a conceptual artist.

When Sheff first proposed interviewing the couple, he had to submit his date of birth, plus its time and place, to Ono beforehand. “The interview apparently depended on Yoko’s interpretation of my horoscope,” he writes, “just as many of Lennon’s business decisions are reportedly guided by the stars. I could imagine explaining to my Playboy editor, ‘Sorry, but my moon is in Scorpio — the interview’s off.’ It was clearly out of my hands.”

Ono’s obsession with astrologists, seers, and fortune tellers, much like Nancy Reagan’s mania for consulting the stars to plan presidential trips, bordered on pathology. In one year, Ono spent over $1 million on readings from psychics, mediums, and clairvoyants. When she agreed to meet Sheff, she summoned him to the Dakota in Manhattan, and he arrived with copies of previous Playboy interviews with Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Schweitzer, Bob Dylan, and Jimmy Carter. Ono leafed through them and then responded:

“People like Carter represent only their country. John and I represent the world.”

Apparently, Ono’s seers didn’t “see” Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize in the future. When the former president died at the age of 100, Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang “Imagine” at his state funeral, the song that Ono and Lennon wrote in 1971. She co-wrote the lyrics with Lennon, who deprived her of credit at the time. He later told Sheff, “I wasn’t man enough to let her have credit for it. I was still selfish enough and unaware enough to sort of take her contribution without acknowledging it.” In an interview with the BBC, he added, “I just put ‘Lennon’ because, you know, she’s just the wife and you don’t put her name on, right?” “Imagine” became the most acclaimed song of Lennon’s solo career. Years later, Ono said, “I feel in the big picture the fact that John and I met was to do this song.”

Sheff’s biography of Ono is buttressed by her marriage to Lennon, particularly their years opposing the Vietnam War. In fact, they celebrated their 1969 wedding with a seven-day, public “bed-in” for peace, filmed and distributed around the world. “Lil’ Abner” cartoonist Al Capp accused them of staging the event for money. “Do you think I could earn money by some other way, sitting in bed for seven days, taking shit from people like you?” Lennon snapped. “I could write a song in an hour.”

Weeks later, Lennon wrote to Queen Elizabeth and returned the 1965 MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) medal she’d presented to each of the Beatles. His accompanying note:

“Your Majesty: I am returning this MBE in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts. With love. John Lennon of Bag.”

(“Cold Turkey” is the song he wrote about the couple’s withdrawal from heroin; “Bag” refers to their “bagism” campaign, which they introduced by covering themselves in white bags as an example not to judge people by their race or physical appearance.)

The last part of this biography, entitled “Yoko Only,” illustrates her career as an artist best defined as avant-garde — radical, experimental, even revolutionary. In “Cut Piece,” possibly her most famous performance art, Ono knelt on stage with scissors on the floor in front of her. Fully clothed, she invited audience members to come to the stage, one by one, to cut a piece of her clothing, and take the cut piece with them until she was completely naked. Described as “reception theory,” the audience becomes as involved in the art as the performer.

More recently, Ono unveiled her “Wish Tree” in several cities around the world. Each tree carries instructions: Make a wish, write it on a piece of white paper, and tie the paper to a branch. She does not read the wishes but collects them every year to be buried at the base of the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland.

The “Wish Tree” at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, welcomed spring last year abloom with thousands of white paper blossoms tied by wishful visitors, a testament to participatory art and to the avant-garde artist who continues to imagine and intrigue.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Josephine Baker (1906-1975) found fame in France in the 1920s as the American expat who danced in “a mere belt of bananas.” Ernest Hemingway described her as “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw.” Now, 50 years after her death, the dancer, singer, ingénue, scandal-maker, activist, and spy is being celebrated in a memoir pieced together from various interviews she gave in French over more than 20 years. While there have been a few biographies and one film about the “Bronze Venus” — also known as the “Black Pearl” and the “Creole Goddess” — this potpourri, translated into English after a half-century, purports to present “a collection of defining moments, impressions and images” of her life.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri (pop. 800,000 at the time), as Freda Josephine McDonald, she took her second husband’s name and kept it through two more marriages. She recalls her hometown as “the city of 100,000 Negroes,” where she grew up “cold and hungry…No father…I left school when I was eight years old to go and work.” Scavenging food from garbage cans, she spent many nights on the street. At 15, she was recruited for a vaudeville show, moved to Harlem, and then to France for a role in La Folie du Jour at the Folies Bergère theater.

In Paris, Le Josephine’s landmark cabaret show, “Le Revue Nègre,” became a sensation as the flamboyant dancer played to the disturbing stereotype of Blacks as inherently primitive. Crossing her eyes, waving her arms, swaying her hips, and swinging a G-string made of bananas, she clowned, rolled her eyes, and made faces. Exuding sexuality and wearing only feathers (or fruit), “the American Negress” became an instant sensation with her tribal-inspired dances and her comic commentary. “One day, all the papers, the dailies and the weeklies, were talking about me,” she recalled, citing the “presents, pretty presents, a mountain of them” bestowed upon her “dance sauvage”:

“I’ve been given rings with fire opals as big as eggs; I’ve been given a pair of very old earrings that belonged to a duchess one hundred and fifty years ago; I’ve been given pearls like teeth; flowers that came from Italy on the same day…a pair of golden shoes…”

Seizing her instant fame, Baker posed nude for fashion photographers, sold Bakerskin — a skin-darkening lotion — and promoted Bakerfix, a hair pomade. Yet she paid a price for her celebrity:

“[B]eing a curiosity was a very tough job for me…It was written in the contracts: ‘Entertain people’…tweaking the beards of good old gentlemen, flattering the fat ladies, making them dance in their fancy coats and stiff outfits, you know the sort of thing.”

On her European tour, the “Onyx Queen” recalled “the old Catholic groups hounding me with their Christian hate, from station to station, from town to town…in Vienna they rang all the city’s bells at full peal to warn the church-goers that Josephine Baker, the demon of immorality, the devil herself arrived…I came to represent the ‘moral decadence threatening the great country of Austria.’” In Hungary, her visit was debated in Parliament three times, and her performance was greeted by an ammonia bomb. “For one endless second,” she writes, “I had goosebumps under my ostrich feathers.”

By 1936, Le Josephine was the toast of Paris, but when she returned to the U.S. to star in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, Time magazine denigrated her as “a St. Louis wash woman’s daughter” and “a Negro wench,” who stirred jaded Europeans of the jazz-loving type. “But to Manhattan theatre-goers last week she was just a slightly buck-toothed young Negro woman whose figure might be matched in any night club show, whose dancing & singing could be topped anywhere outside France.”

Devastated, Baker returned to France, renounced her U.S. citizenship, and became a French citizen the following year. During World War II, she aided the French Resistance, performing for troops throughout the country, for which she received the Croix de Guerre, the Légion d’honneur, and the Rosette of the Resistance. In 2021, she became the first Black woman to enter France’s Panthéon.

Baker punctuates many anecdotes in this book with “oh, la la!” and presents her philosophy of life as “a matter of affection that one has or doesn’t have,” which may or may not explain why she adopted 12 children, “one of every race,” and kept a menagerie of pets, including six dogs, three cats, a monkey, a parrot, two budgies, three white mice, a goldfish, a snake, and a cheetah — the latter, adorned with a diamond collar, was part of her stage act. The children, plus menagerie and maids, lived on her estate in Castelnaud-Fayrac, outside of Paris, until 1968, when Baker went bankrupt and had to sell the property to satisfy her debts.

While Le Josephine acknowledges four husbands, she does not mention her reputed relationships with women, such as the French writer Colette or the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. In another publication, one of her sons described her as bisexual.

Sadly, the chanteuse ends her mishmash of a memoir on a dark note. “No Jews, no dogs, no [n—–s],” she writes in a diatribe against the U.S. “That’s what they boil down to, Americans, in their country, along with the atomic bomb, the portable refrigerator, and chewing gum.” Baker repeats her racist rant several more times and then asks:

“Can you blame me for being obsessed with this phrase, these ferocious words that I heard people say even in New York itself and by good people?”

In her introduction to Fearless and Free, the writer Ijeoma Oluo promises readers “a collection of defining moments, impressions and images.” On that weak point, there’s no debate.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Dorothy Parker is probably best known for her bon mots: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” and “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” During a party game called Give Me a Sentence, she drew the word “horticulture” and seconds later quipped, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”

Such sparkling wit from the only woman to sit at the Algonquin Round Table suggests a gleeful romp through Gail Crowther’s new book, Dorothy Parker in Hollywood. But buyer beware. Before the first chapter, the author issues a stark warning about her subject: “irreverent, witty, mocking, uncontrollable, derisive, drunk, world-weary, deadpan, and wry.” Parker attempted suicide four times and wrote wistfully about ending her life in a book of poems she entitled Enough Rope. After one overdose, she wrote the poem “Résumé”:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker in Hollywood is not Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. In fact, one wonders why a British writer like Crowther with limited familiarity with Hollywood decided to tackle a subject so previously well documented by Marion Meade (1934-2022), who wrote Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (1988), followed, in 2004, by Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. Two years later, Meade edited Parker’s collected works, The Portable Dorothy Parker, still in print after 60 years. (“Even Marilyn Monroe had a copy on her shelves,” Crowther reports.) And, in 2014, Meade published her final book, The Last Days of Dorothy Parker: The Extraordinary Lives of Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman and How Death Can Be Hell on Friendship.

Crowther’s earlier book Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton suggests she knows the territory of self-destructive female poets, so perhaps she felt equipped to address the sad screenwriting years of Parker, who claimed to “hate Hollywood like holy water.” Parker died in 1967 in a Manhattan hotel with only her brown poodle, Troy, at her side. Crowther seems to identify somewhat, as she dedicates this book to her own dog, which died in 2022: “In memory of my best boy, my life and writing companion. My George.”

Curiously, Crowther begins Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by citing “the unpleasant side of Parker, her meanness…cruelty…malice…brutality.” Yes, she celebrates her subject for being clever, but add an “a” to clever, and you get cleaver, which illustrates the effect of Parker’s humor. She once critiqued an actress as someone “who looked like a two-dollar whore who once commanded five.” When told that Clare Booth Luce made a habit of being kind to her inferiors, Parker asked, “Where does she find them?” And in her “Constant Reader” column for the New Yorker, she said of A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”

Understandably, most of Parker’s contemporaries wanted to be the last to leave the room. Meeting her sounds like encountering a boa constrictor: You can freeze in place or you can bolt. Either way, you’re still a goner. She seemed to fit Murray Kempton’s definition of a critic as “someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.”

With “a string of spectacularly unsuitable younger lovers,” writes Crowther, Parker’s private life was a bit of a mess. Her first husband, who divorced her, was an alcoholic, and her second husband, whom she married, divorced, and years later remarried, was bisexual, although she dismissed him in public as “queer as a billy goat.”

Hollywood was extraordinarily lucrative for Parker, but she claimed her screenwriting years were not happy, despite her 1934 salary of $1,000 a week (the equivalent of $20,000 a week in 2024). “It took over half the screenwriters in Hollywood one year to earn what Dorothy Parker was being paid for one week,” writes Crowther.

Parker loved the money but hated the place, which she described as “dull a domain as dots the globe.” Yet she cherished her left-wing political circle of friends, including Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Donald Ogden Stewart, Orson Welles, and Fredric March. She was arrested and fined for picketing the death sentences of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and was put on the FBI watchlist during the McCarthy era, when she was blacklisted as a communist in 1950. She never worked on another film but lived comfortably on royalties from four volumes of short stories, eight poetry collections, and three theatrical plays.

Still, Crowther is stymied by a lack of information. “Between 1951 and 1961 it is hard to imagine what life was like for Dorothy Parker,” she writes, forced to acknowledge that “little is known about these years.” This is a biographer thrashing in the deep end without a life preserver, swept into waters over her head:

“Sadly, we do not have Parker’s response to this unfortunate accident…”

“It is difficult to know what Parker was up to…”

“With no surviving screenplay that specifically shows Parker’s contributions it is impossible to know for certain…”

“The lack of surviving Parker material is lamentable…”

Parker’s alcoholism soaks every chapter of this book, along with the trauma of her abortions, depression, and suicide attempts. Yet by fictionalizing herself in the 1929 short story “Big Blonde” as a drunken divorcée who survives suicide, she earned the O. Henry Award that catapulted her to fame. But there was no happily-ever-after to her life.

Leaving Hollywood in 1964, Parker, widowed at 70, lived her last three years at the Volney, a dignified residence in Manhattan for little old ladies and their dogs. “Still drinking, still hopeless with money and still unable to write,” according to Crowther, “she spent her days smoking, reading gossip magazines and watching soap operas.”

The New York Times, which once dismissed her poetry as “flapper verse,” ran Parker’s obituary on the front page, followed, days later, by coverage of her star-studded memorial service, which attracted 150 friends and admirers. Eulogized by Hellman, she was buried in the gold and pearl-encrusted caftan she’d received from Gloria Vanderbilt, which recalled Parker’s poem “The Satin Dress,” which celebrated just such an event:

Satin glows in candle-light —
Satin’s for the proud!
They will say who watch at night,
“What a fine shroud!”

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Curling up with a hefty book of almost 1,000 pages dense with footnotes, endnotes, acknowledgements, an index, and a bibliography is like cuddling a St. Bernard: It’s a challenging prospect. Yet Mary Gabriel’s behemoth Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art rewards in almost every chapter.

Gabriel has written a massive homage to the women who barged through “men only” barriers to help establish Abstract Expressionism in America, a movement (1937-1957) once defined solely by male artists like Jackson (“Jack the Dripper”) Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Discrimination against women artists was so pervasive at the time that art historians claim Grace Hartigan exhibited her work under the name George Hartigan until 1953, when she was finally given her first show. A raging feminist and the first female artist to make money, Hartigan denied the charge. “It never entered my head,” she said. Elaine de Kooning also rebuked being characterized as a woman artist:

“To be put in any category not defined by one’s work is to be falsified.”

Readers will be grateful that the author defines Abstract Expressionism through the women painters who resisted being characterized as such but represented with their husbands and lovers, “too often fueled by alcohol and dizzying infidelities,” the miraculous movement of 20th-century art in America.

Lee Krasner, who married Pollock, signed her paintings with initials only so no one would identify her work as having been done by a

Seated from left: Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art, ca. 1950

woman. Early in Krasner’s career, she took lessons from the esteemed painter Hans Hofmann, who stood before her easel one day in wonder. “This is so good you would never know it was done by a woman,” he said. Krasner later focused on helping her husband gain recognition because she believed that he had “much more to give with his art than I do with mine.”

Elaine de Kooning, a painter in her own right, frequently slept with renowned art critics and gallery owners in order to promote her husband’s work. One male artist of the era is quoted as saying, “The fifties was a boys club, but some of the women painted almost as well as the boys so we patted them on the ass twice and said keep going.” Elaine de Kooning collected lots of pats.

The book, a bohemian saga, divides between the first wave of female artists — Krasner and de Kooning, scramblers who lived in the shadow of their famous spouses and only came into their own as painters later on — and the second wave of more successful figures like Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler.

Joan Mitchell Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan in 1957.
Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan in 1957.Photograph by Burt Glinn / Magnum

All of these women, with the exception of Frankenthaler, gravitated to the grittiest parts of Greenwich Village around Ninth Street, where they toiled in cold-water flats with no heating or plumbing but surrounded by great wall space where they could spread their canvases. Gabriel describes Frankenthaler as the daughter of a New York Supreme Court judge and a graduate of Bennington College in Vermont, then the most progressive and expensive women’s school in the U.S.:

“She was a woman of enormous self-confidence who never wasted her time with anything but the best.”

The most tempestuous was Mitchell, raised by prosperous parents in Chicago who arranged for her to go to Paris to meet Alice B. Toklas, the life partner of Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Beach, who owned Shakespeare and Company, the French bookstore that published James Joyce and sold copies of Ernest Hemingway’s first book. When Mitchell married Barney Rosset, the union made history: Rosset owned Grove Press, which published Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, Tom Stoppard, Henry Miller, and D.H. Lawrence. Mitchell, the author maintains, “was one of the greatest artists the U.S. has ever produced.”

The book sweeps from erudite scholarship to gritty gossip as it presents the panorama of American art history from the Depression and World War II through McCarthyism and the Red Scare, all of which affected the majestic talents of the “Ninth Street Women.” Like a St. Bernard, that majestic alpine dog, it will save you from avalanches of boredom and ennui and provide a vicarious plunge into the messy lives and mesmerizing genius of American Abstract Expressionism. You’ll emerge gobsmacked and gratified.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books