![]() O'Hara deserves her own post, and the Siren plans to give her one in the next couple of days.įor the four or so people who may not have heard-Jude Law is in the international celebrity doghouse over a dalliance with his children's nanny. Finally, there are the ones who just lie their little rear ends off, as Frank Capra apparently did in The Name Above the Title.ĭespite all this I pounce on autobiographies year after year, including the latest, Tis Herself, by Maureen O'Hara. There are stars like Myrna Loy, whose admirable Being and Becoming shows loyalty to her friend Joan Crawford, but perhaps not that much ability to read between the lines of family disputes. Gregory Peck once said he had the distinct impression that if getting a certain shot for Moby Dick had required his drowning on camera, that wouldn't have perturbed his director at all. Read that one and you would think him the most reasonable of directors, which doesn't quite jibe with most actors' recollections. Other times you detect a certain tendency to elide personal foibles, as John Huston did in An Open Book. Right after Leo McCarey made a film about the ghastly toll of the blacklist. Griffith was "incapable of prejudice against any group" and if he had lived, he would done a film of "affirmation about the Negro." Suuuuuure he would have. ![]() Alas, Lillian has certain blind spots, such as when she assures the reader that D.W. The great Lillian Gish gives fascinating details about filmmaking in The Movies, Mr. You also run into the odd priorities of actresses like Ginger Rogers, who could remember every detail of her costumes for her Astaire pictures and almost nothing about trivia such as the choreography. Sometimes you get sins of omission, like Rosalind Russell's Life Is a Banquet, where she neglects to mention the celebrated contretemps over her failure to win an Oscar for Mourning Becomes Electra. ![]() Often I read memoirs imagining the ghostwriter saying soothingly, "But of COURSE I believe you. From there on out, star memoirs were the Siren's literary potato chips.īlinded by the fun, the stories, the dish of it all, it took me years to discover that the hallmark of most Hollywood autobiographies is inaccuracy. Her first experience was with fellow Alabamian Tallulah Bankhead, as the Siren sought reassurance that being from Alabama need not preclude having a fascinating life. ![]() The Siren has been devouring star autobiographies since she was knee-high to a prop table. ![]()
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