The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson
This article first appeared in Entertainment Weekly.
Henry Willson, the agent who ”created” Tab Hunter, Rock Hudson, and many other male heartthrobs in the ’40s and ’50s, gets his own, less flattering biography in Robert Hofler’s The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson (Carroll & Graf, $26.95). ”In addition to a rather hawkish nose, his face featured a bulbous lower lip that curled down over a nonexistent chin…. It was an inviting face…. But then, so was a clown’s.” With that tone, you’d think Variety theater reporter Hofler was writing about Mussolini. Or Cats. A decent researcher but a poor writer, Hofler is so obsessed with portraying Willson as a ”manizer,” he forgets small matters like an overarching theme, character development, and synthesis of information, maddeningly stringing together contradictory recollections of an event and leaving readers to fend for themselves.
By all accounts, including Hunter’s, Willson was a nasty, manipulative, perverted piece of work, but he’s six feet under in an unmarked grave near the Burbank airport. Surely that — and this biographical treatment — is punishment enough. D+
Devil in the Details
This article first appeared in Entertainment Weekly.
Jennifer Traig is exactly like Ellen DeGeneres. That is, if DeGeneres were a frizzy-haired, Old Testament-obsessed, anorexic, Jewish teenage girl with obsessive compulsive disorder. Traig’s touching, jocose (and, at times, long-winded) memoir, Devil in the Details, of her 1980s teen years in California is a wild ride: One chapter revs up with her carrot diet, veers straight into her high school’s connection to the movie Blood Sport, makes pit stops at sheep castration and the drama club before crashing straight into Gene Shalit. Traig deftly weaves her crippling battle with OCD with her search for religious identity: ”Sex, death, and impurity are the greatest hits on the OCD jukebox, and they are in heavy rotation in the Old Testament.” By treating her family with kid gloves and making jokes at her own expense — so refreshing in the confessional genre — Traig elicits plenty of sympathy for her devils. A-
Us
This article first appeared in Entertainment Weekly.
Clark Griswold demonstrated the perils of family trips more than 30 years ago, but apparently Douglas Petersen never saw one of National Lampoon’s Vacation movies.
The hapless 54-year-old Londoner at the center of David Nicholls’ new novel thinks a European tour is the perfect strategy to win back his wife, Connie (”Douglas, I think our marriage has run its course. I think I want to leave you”), and his sullen, distant, college-bound son, Albie (”We’re not friends. You’re my father”). Problem is, Douglas has the emotional touch of an sledgehammer—his idea of father-son bonding is showing the boy the hotel room where he was conceived. Ick.
Us, which follows the family through art galleries, seedy inns, and sorry restaurants, is laced with flashbacks of Douglas and Connie’s unlikely three-decade marriage. She is a free-spirited former artist; he’s a biochemist. She is a human being; the jury is still out on him. As the clan lopes from France to the Low Countries to Germany, Nicholls captures the discomfort and claustrophobia of forced fun all too well. The results are laughable and disastrous.
Unlike Douglas, Nicholls is a master of nuanced relationships. He’s also a pro at delivering a tight, clever structural narrative, as he proved in his terrific previous novel One Day, which was an Entertainment Weekly best book of 2010. (It was then adapted into an Anne Hathaway movie, which should have been on EW’s worst-film list in 2011.)
A footnote: Us is one of two compelling new books with a pronoun for a title—the other, You, by Caroline Kepnes (a former EW staffer), is a more literal take on the pain people can cause each other. Great novels, the both of them—just don’t read them with your loved ones. A-
Nine Inches
This article first appeared in Entertainment Weekly.
Get your mind out of the gutter. This isn’t about porn. Nine inches refers to the space that must separate junior high schoolers at a dance. In his first short-story collection in 19 years, Perrotta (Little Children) mines his familiar but fascinating territory — the intersection of class, envy, and boredom in suburbia. The standouts: ”The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face,” about a Little League game that turns into Armageddon, and ”Backrub,” about a teenager rejected from every college he applied to who turns to running pizza and drugs. B+
Top of the Morning
This article first appeared in Entertainment Weekly.
In the April 21 New York Times Sunday Magazine, reporter Brian Stelter refashioned his book about the morning-show wars, Top of the Morning, into a juicy article detailing ”Operation Bambi” — NBC’s plan to dump Ann Curry as host of Today before the 2012 Olympics. Go read it. It’s terrific. The problem with Morning is the other 275 pages.
The standard for a TV-industry tell-all is high, thanks to Stelter’s Times colleague Bill Carter, who owns the genre with two books about late-night-host feuds and an underrated tome about the 2004–05 TV season, which launched Desperate Housewives and Lost. In Carter’s books, you get the sense that the author was in the room when big decisions were made. In Stelter’s debut, you get the sense that he was staring at his smartphone. The author, founder of the blog TVNewser, often dissects media coverage of a story rather than the story itself. Twitter comments by viewers are given the same weight as on-the-record sources — of which there are precious few in the chapters about Today‘s implosion. Matt Lauer and Curry refused to talk to Stelter after Curry’s ”promotion” to ”Today Anchor at Large.” But in a Pulitzer-worthy reporting coup, Stelter was able to snag his Times co-worker Nicholas Kristof, identified as a friend of Curry’s.
Stelter seems to have a vendetta against Lauer, dredging up accusations of extramarital affairs without providing additional evidence (he points out only that ”some executives at NBC told me they believed the rumors”) and flogging him for not doing enough to save Curry’s job. Just as disturbing are Stelter’s Hemingwayesque sentences (in length, not substance), hackneyed analogies (Today is Coke! Good Morning America is Pepsi!), and antipathy for the medium he covers (”Wisely — not a word you will see all that often in a book about television…”). And has anyone who has picked up a book in the last century wanted to be called ”gentle reader”?
The book (and prose) improves in Stelter’s chapters on GMA, where he was able to interview the on-air talent. (Poor Josh Elliott isn’t rewarded for his cooperation; Stelter quotes him and gleefully dings him in the same sentence.) There are some outrageous stories about booking guests, but few previously unreported bombshells or sharp insights. Robin Roberts’ brave battle against MDS, for example, has been documented better elsewhere — most notably on GMA. Stelter proposes that viewers are flocking to GMA because the anchors are inviting and likable. The same can’t be said for Top of the Morning. C
Reconstructing Amelia
This article first appeared in Entertainment Weekly.
Amelia Baron has thrown herself from her high school’s roof after she was caught plagiarizing a paper on Virginia Woolf…or so it seems. The problem is that Amelia is obsessed with Woolf in a way that only a hyperintelligent 15-year-old girl can be. And her workaholic single mom, Kate — a brilliant attorney — has received an anonymous text that reads: ”Amelia didn’t jump.”
And off we go into this year’s Gone Girl — you remember Gillian Flynn’s best-selling nail-biter of 2012 — which is set against the backdrop of Grace Hall, a prep school in the tony Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. Like Gone Girl, Reconstructing Amelia seamlessly marries a crime story with a relationship drama. And like Gone Girl, it should be hailed as one of the best books of the year.
Amelia and Kate take turns narrating chapters that reveal the truth behind their ostensible Gilmore Girls life. Amelia is tapped for one of Grace Hall’s secret societies, falls in love for the first time, and has a Manti Te’o-type correspondence with a gay boy named Ben. None of which she tells her mom. Meanwhile, Kate, who has deep guilt over Amelia’s paternity, copes with her daughter’s ”suicide” by going all CSI on Amelia’s texts and emails, as well as a hateful school blog called gRaCeFULLY.
To reveal more would require a spoiler alert the size of a Jumbotron. But in her debut novel, Kimberly McCreight spins a riveting narrative that somehow delivers thoughtful commentary on working-mom guilt, bullying, police corruption, and Gossip Girl. Every single twist in Reconstructing Amelia is clever, and rightfully earned. As that righteous babe Virginia Woolf once said, ”Fiction is like a spider’s web.” McCreight is a masterful weaver. A
A Thousand Pardons
This article first appeared in Entertainment Weekly.
For his follow-up to the masterful 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist The Privileges, Jonathan Dee attempts to breed The Good Wife and Scandal with the suburban ennui of a Tom Perrotta novel. And for most of A Thousand Pardons, it looks like he’s going to succeed.
Ben Armstead hates his upper-middle-class existence — wife, house, couples therapy — so much that he’s determined to take a blowtorch to it. That blowtorch arrives in the form of a comely summer intern at his New York City law office, and in short order Ben faces a lawsuit, an arrest for DUI, jail time, and a divorce from his wife, Helen, who decides that Tammy ”Stand by Your Man” Wynette’s advice is bunk. Broke and unable to withstand the pitying stares of her community, Helen lands a job at a crisis-management firm in New York City — where it turns out she’s got a knack for making powerful people apologize for their misdeeds (everyone, that is, except her husband) — and moves there with the couple’s adopted daughter, Sara. Dee bounds gracefully among Helen’s, Ben’s, and Sara’s points of view as they try to reassemble their lives. Their stories feel honest, and the prose is beautiful.
Then, without warning, Dee suddenly plops his characters into an entirely different novel — a slapstick mystery involving a rugged, reclusive alcoholic actor from Helen’s hometown who may have killed his one-night stand. From there the novel jerks to an unsatisfying, hurried conclusion, as if Dee is trying to blurt out his final chapter before an awards-show orchestra drowns him out. He has some keen insights into the power of apology, but it’s awfully hard to forgive him for not sticking his ending. B-
Memorable Line:
”Screw the right thing. If he hated her so much, if life with her was such a death sentence, then let’s see him be a man about it, for once, and devise his own escape.”
The Love Song of Jonny Valentine
This article first appeared in Entertainment Weekly.
The Justin Bieber oeuvre is already overstuffed with such literary classics as Justin Bieber: My World, Justin Bieber: His World, Justin Bieber: Up Close and Personal — and, though the Pulitzer committee snubbed it, Nowhere but Up: The Story of Justin Bieber’s Mom. However, there’s one more account of the pop star’s life that needed to be written. The Love Song of Jonny Valentine is the best book you’ll ever read about Justin Bieber. Just one hitch: It’s a novel, and it’s not actually about Justin Bieber.
Discovered on YouTube, Jonny Valentine is an 11-year-old pop sensation with chart-topping hits like ”Guys vs. Girls” and ”RSVP (To My Heart).” His universe consists of his bodyguard, his tutor, his voice/dance coach, and his momager, Jane. Mom’s a coked-up Medea (ancient Greek, not the Tyler Perry version) who calls her son ”baby,” chastises him for his ”chub,” asks him to hover above a stadium every night in a flimsy swing, and plans for the End of Days when he has to start taking Accutane.
Valentine, which chronicles Jonny’s make-it-or-break-it tour — his second album is underperforming — is a buoyant, smart, searing portrait of our culture’s obsession with young pop stars. The book posits that his mom and the entertainment industry have enslaved Jonny — but that his fans and the media are complicit too. It’s also eerily prescient. After a night out drinking, Jonny drops in at a children’s hospital to rehab his image; in early January, after photos surfaced of Bieber allegedly smoking a joint, he visited a similar facility.
Wayne doesn’t fully master his preteen protagonist. Jonny knows the meaning of ”hierarchy,” but on the same page can’t grasp the word ”rhetorical.” And it wouldn’t have hurt the story to age him a couple of years. Quibbles aside, Valentine illuminates the inner life of a ”Baby” — excuse us, baby — superstar more than any interview ever will. B+
Memorable Line
”…the boos got louder until it seemed like the whole audience was yelling, and even though it was what I’d wanted, once I actually heard it, it was the worst feeling in the world.”
The Chris Farley Show
This article first appeared in Entertainment Weekly.
Chris Farley was a corpulent Saturday Night Live veteran like John Belushi. He died of a drug overdose like John Belushi (at the same age, no less). And now, with The Chris Farley Show, he gets his own biographical treatment just like — you guessed it — John Belushi.
The ”oral history” form of presentation — essentially a string of anecdotes from friends and family — is popular in the Saturday Night Live canon. (See Bob Woodward’s 1984 Belushi bio, Wired, and 2002’s Live From New York.) It’s no wonder: Everyone involved — Chris Rock, Tim Meadows, David Spade, Rob Lowe, and Tom Arnold — are terrific storytellers.
In exacting detail, Tanner Colby and Farley’s brother Tom dutifully trace the comedian’s life from his wealthy upbringing in Madison, Wis., to his improv days in Chicago at the ImprovOlympic and Second City theaters to his five semi-distinguished years on Saturday Night Live and beyond. As with any good oral history, The Chris Farley Show moves briskly and the reporting is deep. (The most notable omission from the celeb-packed tome is SNL peer Adam Sandler.) Farley’s own physicality is a good metaphor for the book: The meal is overstuffed with gossip and dish, whether it’s Spade lamenting a fallout with Farley over a girl (it was never truly repaired) or Rock scolding Farley’s famed Chippendales sketch with Patrick Swayze. ”There’s no comic twist to it,” explains Rock. ”It’s just f—ing mean. A more mentally together Chris Farley wouldn’t have done it.”
Farley doesn’t come off as particularly likable — hookers, drug addiction, and his deepest insecurities are on full display. Still, he ultimately emerges as more than just a sweaty beast who gave good pratfall. Here’s a guy who lived to please his 600-pound alcoholic father (wonder where those demons came from?). Beneath the unhealthy physique was an almost graceful athlete. He was a deeply religious man who attended Catholic mass twice a week. But for all of the candor, Farley makes a little too much of its subject’s talent. The second-coming-of-Belushi proclamations flow endlessly; at one point, Farley is even compared to Johnny Carson. His first film, 1995’s Tommy Boy, is dubbed a ”minor classic.” Perhaps. If the other Oscar nominees are Black Sheep and Beverly Hills Ninja.
It’s actually Chevy Chase who, while blasting Farley over his narcotics addiction, puts his legacy in proper perspective: ”Look, you’re not John Belushi. And when you overdose or kill yourself, you will not have the same acclaim that John did. You don’t have the record of accomplishment that he had.” Very true. In fact, this unflinching, well-written book outshines any Farley highlight reel. B+