When stars' careers hit the skids, they inevitably write up their own account of their glory days. What can be learned by perusing the pages of the autobiographies of such stellar talents as Bette Davis, Tony Curtis and Zsa Zsa Gabor? As our intrepid reviewer discovers, "We learn that we should find better things to do with our time."
_______________________________
I awake from a dreamless sleep and plunge straight into a nightmare," read the first words of Zsa Zsa Gabor's autobiography One Life Is Not Enough. I know the feeling; I recently awoke from a dreamless sleep and plunged straight into Zsa Zsa's 1991 autobiography. Then, unable to get back to sleep, I plunged straight into Tony Curtis's 1993 autobiography Tony Curtis: The Autobiography, and after that, still too unnerved to get back under the covers, I plunged straight into Bette Davis's 1962 autobiography The Lonely Life. . . followed by the 1988 autobiography of her dipsomaniacal fourth husband, Gary Merrill... followed by the 1985 autobiography of her vengeful daughter, B.D. Hyman. My nightmare over, I plunged back into a fitful sleep filled with Gorgons, harpies, asps and people who look like Eric Stoltz in Mask, but, thankfully, nobody named Zsa Zsa.
Why was I reading these books? Because Movieline thought it would be an interesting intellectual exercise to study the autobiographies of washed-up movie stars and find out if the books had anything in common. Boy, did they ever: Two of the stars were of Hungarian descent, two had appeared in the enduring classic Arrivederci, Baby, and one book was co-written by a bimbo with the same last name as one of the movie star's wives. All three of the stars had worn lingerie chosen by famous designer Orry-Kelly, two had not appeared in Tarns Bulba with Yul Brynner, and all three had daughters whose parents were totally fucked up.
Yes, in Zsa Zsa, Tony and Bette, we had stumbled upon a richly variegated control group: a dimwit celebrity who was never really a movie star; a dimwit movie star who was never really an actor; and a bona fide actress, celebrity and movie star who often behaved like a dimwit and had a lot of dimwit relatives. What the books had in common was this:
1) Their authors, even in the late twilight of their careers, categorically refuse to admit that their careers are over even when they're making movies like Lobster Man From Mars and Queen of Outer Space, which are really little more than extraterrestrial versions of The Whales of August.
2) The stars, having spent their entire lives trying to avoid public disgrace, now feel a positively over-whelming urge to humiliate themselves in public, serving up horrifyingly graphic anec-dotes about dogs, enemas, poison ivy on the genitals, and Liz Taylor.
3) The books really suck.
One legitimate question the reader may feel constrained to ask at this point is: if you're reviewing Tony Curtis's autobiography when it's still reasonably hot off the presses, why did you wait 32 years to review Bette Davis's autobiography, and why did you wait three years to review Zsa Zsa's? The answer to the first part of this question is simple: Movieline wasn't around 32 years ago, so we've got some catching up to do. (Next month: "Fatty" Arbuckle.)
As for One Lifetime Is Not Enough, while it is indeed true that this book, co-written by a person with the suspiciously bimbonic name of Wendy Leigh, was actually published by Delacorte Press in 1991, it's worth noting that at the time the publisher was holding out for $21 a copy. Movieline has a strict policy of not reviewing books until they are marked down to a price commensurate with their literary merit. So we waited three years. Last week, we spotted the book languishing in the bargain bin at $4.99. We may still have overpaid a bit, but at $4.99 we're at least getting into the ballpark. As for Tony Curtis's book, well, we got a free review copy from the publisher.
Let us begin our examination of dismal movie-star memoirs with a look at One Lifetime Is Not Enough. Zsa Zsa Gabor is arguably the greatest actress with Attila the Hun's blood flowing through her veins to ever come out of Budapest. Born into a family of aggressive Hungarian social climbers--her mother once dropped a note to the Prince of Wales when Zsa Zsa was only 12, hinting that he should marry her daughter when she was of age--this Carpathian cutie's career seemed to be going in the wrong direction when she moved to Ankara in the mid '30s and married a Nazi-loving Turk named Burhan Belge, which literally means Burhan the Belgian, though not in Turkish. Zsa Zsa, not yet the radiant movie star she would never actually become, did not consummate this marriage because Burhan's religious beliefs prevented him from making love to a woman who brought a dog to bed. As would mine.
Dismayed that the sweetness of her sultry Danubian flower might be wasted on the desert air of the Dardanelles, Zsa Zsa soon began humping Kemal Ataturk, a firebrand revolutionary who was less offended by Mishka the Wonder Dog than was Burhan the Belgian. But then the whole unsavory Third Reich thing got going in a big way, so Zsa Zsa decided to abandon romantic, mysterious Eastern Europe and move to greener acres in Beverly Hills, where her sister Eva had already married a doctor. After dating Charlie Chaplin, who didn't mind dogs or Hungarians, she fell in love with flashy hotel magnate Conrad Hilton. But things didn't work out in the boudoir, so she started screwing around with Conrad's son, Nicky, who was already married to Elizabeth Taylor.
This raises the fascinating possibility that Nicky Hilton may have been the unwitting carrier of a urinary infection or scrotal virus that made every female who came into contact with him want to marry at least eight men, preferably assholes. Zsa Zsa also discloses that in a fit of parental pique, Conrad Hilton once hit Nicky so hard that she thought the youngster might have sustained a concussion. This would explain his subsequent decision to marry Liz.
Tired of billionaires with dubious parental skills, sexually unadventurous Turkish caninephobes, and cranially damaged stepsons who would voluntarily marry Liz Taylor, the Hunnish Hellcat next fell in love with and married the famous British sourpuss George Sanders, but not before a brief interlude where Greta Garbo kissed her on the lips at a party. "I've never had lesbian tendencies," co-writes Zsa Zsa, "but if I had ever had them, the woman of my life would have definitely been Greta Garbo." I've never had lesbian tendencies, either, but if I had ever had them, the woman of my life would have definitely been Greta Garbo, too.
Shortly after Garbo stopped hitting on the Magyar Mata Hari, Zsa Zsa began her mercifully brief acting career, snagging a supporting part in Moulin Rouge, whose director, John Huston, for some unfathomable reason, did not think she was right for this, or any other role.
"Move in close. I mean close," John Huston admonished his cinematographer Ossie Morris. "If they can see how beautiful she is, they won't notice that she can't act."
Obviously, Morris did not move in close enough.
Although Zsa Zsa was still madly in love with hubby Sanders, she now began a torrid affair with Porfirio Rubirosa, a dashing playboy from the traditionally undashing Dominican Republic, where women are a dime a dozen, as are men named Porfirio Rubirosa.
"Sometimes, when I looked into his eyes, I saw myself," says Zsa Zsa, in a statement of unrivaled optometrical tautological-tude. Porfirio wanted the Belle of Budapest to divorce Sanders and marry him, primarily so that he could see what the name Zsa Zsa Rubirosa would look like on the place settings, but Zsa Zsa was still madly in love with Sanders who, even though he was suffering an endless series of nervous breakdowns, kept her amused with antics such as almost getting her to screw a priest named Guido.
As Gabor recalls the incident, she greeted Sanders that night with the words: "Don't ask me what I did with Guido. Let me show you."
Sanders must have been pleased, because his only comment afterward was, "I assume Guido is leaving the church."
Although Sanders was still very much in love with his Hungarian Honey-pie, he soon divorced her in order to marry her sister Magda. (At this point, Guido drops out of the story.) Infuriated that her sister was now screwing her ex-husband, Zsa Zsa began sleeping with Richard Burton, who had not yet married Liz Taylor, who was no longer married to Nicky Hilton, who'd long ago had a roll in the haystack with his stepmother Zsa Zsa. Gabor recalls that she and Burton celebrated New Year's Day by eating "Hungarian sausage as spicy and hot as our new romance"; he later died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Draw your own conclusions. After renting her home to Richard Harris, who, inexplicably, never shared her bed, Zsa Zsa went for the U.K. hat trick by sleeping with Sean Connery.
Meanwhile, her career languished, as does the second half of the autobiography. Sadly, as Zsa Zsa gets older and chunkier and actually starts to resemble a Hungarian sausage, she receives fewer and fewer marriage offers from right-wing Turkish firebrands and men named Porfirio, and more marriage proposals from losers named Herbert and Frederick, Duke of Saxony. Reduced to making films such as Queen of Outer Space and appearing on "The Merv Griffin Show," Zsa Zsa is soon getting snubbed by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who ducks out of an invitation to come over and sample her spicy Hungarian sausage by saying, "I can't fly down because we are invading Cambodia tomorrow." This is, without question, the best excuse for not screwing Zsa Zsa Gabor that any human being has ever devised.
The last 100 pages of the book are dreary indeed, as Zsa Zsa suffers through a seven-month marriage with a man who has a secret torture chamber in the basement, and virtually no interest in Eastern European sausage products. Bondage again surfaces in her life when a kinky Beverly Hills cop pulls her over for an expired registration on her Rolls-Royce, then later arrests her for a slap--an incident that resulted in her being handcuffed, jailed, and forced to accept unsolicited floral arrangements from Roseanne Barr/Arnold. The whole incident, she says, was a terrible affront to her "dignity."
Actually, the worst affront to her dignity is the 32-page photo spread which includes a publicity still of Zsa Zsa posing with two large canines in a dog sled in Anchorage, Alaska. Gabor of the Yukon looks happy. The dogs don't. I think her first husband may have been on to something.
As the foregoing makes reasonably clear, Zsa Zsa Gabor is an idiot and her book is unbelievably stupid. But it does have one thing going for it: it is at least a self-contained unit. By this I mean that Zsa Zsa's poignantly imbecilic book did not inspire her daughter Francesca Hilton to go out and write a second imbecilic book (Magyar Mommie Dearest) refuting her mother's dewy-eyed recollection of events, nor did it inspire any of her numerous husbands to go out and write books (How Rosy Was My Ruby When Her Sausage Was So Spicy) refuting their daughter's version of events. Zsa Zsa's book is probably the last we'll be hearing from or about Zsa Zsa.
How different is the case of Bette Davis. Here we have an incredibly talented actress, a winner of every acting award imaginable, the object of almost universal admiration, a woman who was clearly everything Zsa Zsa was not: gifted, intelligent, thin and not related to Eva. Yet, just like Zsa Zsa, as soon as Bette takes her pen to paper, she feels compelled to make a complete fool of herself in public.
"I cannot linger with Persian subtlety on the rim of a rose," Davis writes in her hopeless 1962 autobiography The Lonely Life. "I must suck it dry and move on."
Ignoring for the moment Bette's Omar Khayyamesque prose, we see in this statement the actress's unequivocal attitude toward her myriad of husbands, her children, her co-workers and even her doting public. Don't ask me to do you any favors because I've got other roses to suck dry.
The revised 1990 paperback version of The Lonely Life is an astonishing book for 10 reasons:
1) It contains a truckload of lies about her relationship with her husbands and her children.
2) It contains lines like: "I was always eager to salt a good stew," which presumably describes her relationship with fourth husband Gary Merrill.
3) It contains a few additional chapters, tacked onto the book just before she died in 1989, to let Bette defend herself against charges leveled by her despicable daughter B.D. Hyman, in the 1985 book My Mother's Keeper, that she was a bitch on wheels.
4) It contains a tasteful little epilogue by Bette's personal assistant Kathryn Sermak reminding everyone what a bitch that daughter B.D. was.
5) It contains a "Memorial" section in which all the people who weren't present at Bette's funeral service get to read what David Hartman had to say about her.
6) It contains all the lyrics from the song "I Wish You Love," which Davis herself had recorded--and, yes, this version was played at Davis's funeral.
7) It contains a reproduction of a handwritten letter Bette wrote to her
mother.
8) It only costs $5.95 in Canada.
9) It doesn't have even one picture of B.D. in it, not even a baby picture, long before she grew up to be the vindictive, mud-slinging daughter-from-hell who just about killed her mother--and probably did it deliberately considering that she published My Mother's Keeper not long after Bette's mastectomy.
10) It's written with Persian subtlety and sucks dry.
Incidentally, one of the reasons Bette had to go back and add those extra chapters is because in 1962, when B.D. was still in high school, Mom had unwisely written this about her offspring: "Brimming over with joy and enthusiasm and a love of her horses that is now centered on her very own mare, Stoney-brook, she is utterly trustworthy and responsible. She is a young woman of whom I am proud."
Foolishly, Davis had also written: "If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself. If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent. My children will tell you that I haven't made it easy. I believe, if home is not sometimes a jungle, they will eventually be unfit for the outside world."
Apparently, B.D. was more than prepared for the outside world, because by the time she'd grown up and turned Stoney-brook into glue, she was ready to tear Mom to pieces in My Mother's Keeper. In addition to calling her mother a slut, a drunk, a child abuser, a liar and a woman known to appear at the top of the stairs during a party in a see-through nightie and tell the assembled throng below that she would like a glass of warm milk, B.D. (does this stand for Bondage & Discipline?) was ladylike enough to publish the book while Mom was still alive. Thus, although My Mother's Keeper lacks the riveting clothes-hanger scenes that make Christina Crawford's Mommie Dearest so appealing, it makes up for that by being published soon after mom had a mastectomy and her heart went on the fritz.
Keep up the good work, B.D.
What's really nice about the Davis Family Chronicles is the Rashomon Effect, where, with each successive memoir by each dysfunctional family member, a clearer picture of the truth emerges. First, Bette writes her autobiography telling the world that her husbands were pigs but that she was just swell. Then B.D. publishes her autobiography telling everyone that Mom's fourth husband, Gary Merrill, used to stroll around the house sipping martinis stark naked when she was a little kid, scaring the hell out of the maids, and that Bette was a lush and a pig who recruited one of B.D.'s former swains in the hope that his reappearance in her life would wreck B.D.'s marriage with a man Bette disapproved of.
Then Gary Merrill publishes his autobiography, Bette, Rita and the Rest of My Life, denying everything B.D. says about Bette and himself, but doing so in language so evasive and unconvincing that we come away convinced that at least half of what B.D. has alleged is probably true--certainly that naked martini incident, anyway. Then Bette Davis responds to all the other responses by giving a bunch of exclusive interviews to a deranged sycophant named Whitney Stine (I'd Love To Kiss You... Conversations With Bette Davis) who must be completely bonkers judging from the fact that he withered away just five days after Bette's death.
What a crew.
The Lonely Life has one genuinely interesting chapter: the one where Bette Davis cooly analyzes the on-screen relationship between Hollywood glamour boys and women who can really act. That chapter lasts six pages. The rest of the book is devoted to evening the score with everybody who ever crossed her, and to dispensing pearls of wisdom that seem like they came from Zsa Zsa's mouth. "It is said that it is virtually impossible to rape a woman," Bette writes. "I contend that it is equally impossible to emasculate a man."
I think Bette is confused.
She's also confused when she writes: "The act of sex, gratifying as it is, is God's joke on humanity. It is man's last desperate stand at superin-tendency. The whole ritual is a grotesque anachronism, an outdated testament to man's waning power."
This is undoubtedly true, but as grotesque anachronisms and outdated testaments to man's waning power go, it's one of the best, particularly when oral sex is involved.
This brings us, logically, inevitably, to Tony Curtis, whose co-author, Barry Paris, says that he only took the job co-writing Tony Curtis: The Autobiography because he was impressed by Curtis's "flights of existential fancy." At first, I couldn't tell what he meant by this. Then I got to the part of the book where Tony compares his life to Marlon Brando's, and concludes that the star of The Black Shield of Falworth had a more successful career than the star of A Streetcar Named Desire. Then I got to the part where clothing designer Orry-Kelly decides that Tony Curtis has a nicer ass than Marilyn Monroe's. Then I got to the three-quarter-page photograph of Tony Curtis, Sidney Poitier and Sammy Davis Jr. looking quite... quite...fanciful. Finally, I got to the part where Tony declares, "I'm cut from a different cloth. I know who the major players are, and I was one of them. So were Marlon and Elvis and Sinatra and Cary Grant and not a whole lot of others."
But surely, Tony, if you make the list there's room for Pia Zadora?
As opposed to Bette Davis, a vindictive egomaniac who could actually act, or Zsa Zsa Gabor, a harmless airhead who could not, Tony Curtis comes across in his autobiography as a complete and utter schmuck. Who cannot act. Hopelessly oblivious to the yawning chasm that separates him from Brando, Burt Lancaster, Cary Grant and even Kirk Douglas, Curtis uses his book to trash his ex-wives, bad-mouth more talented actors and actresses, and whine that he never got the credit he deserved. An unimaginably dishonorable man, Curtis says that anyone making fun of his famous line, "Yondah lies the castle of my faddah," in The Son of Ali Baba is guilty of anti-Semitism. Right, just as anyone making fun of Meg Tilly's ludicrous German-by-way-of-Vancouver accent in The Girl in a Swing must be guilty of Germanophobia.
Born to Hungarian immigrants who clearly had no idea what they were getting into, Tony Curtis survived getting poison ivy on his balls while growing up on the tough streets of the Upper East Side of Manhattan--a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum--and became one of the most successful awful actors in the history of motion pictures. After a hitch in--what else?--the Navy, Curtis avoided the decaying charms of ZaSu Pitts and others of her ilk and became famous as a classic Hollywood pretty boy. While many of his peers vanished into what he charmingly refers to as "The Toilet of No Return," he went on to a huge career in the Urinal of No Return, appearing with far more gifted actors in such good films as Spartacus, Some Like It Hot and The Defiant Ones, and in such bad films as every other Tony Curtis movie.
Though his career has been in rapid decline for as long as anyone reading this article has been alive, Curtis does not seem to have noticed the abyss where he now resides, gamely shilling to this very day as if low-budget trash such as Where is Parsifal? and Lobster Man From Mars or, even worse, co-starring with Dyan Cannon in a TNT remake of a bad 1945 Barbara Stanwyck movie were the signs of a still-vibrant career. A thoroughly awful man who claims he cannot remember the name of his third wife, Curtis provides us with verse and chapter about his assorted drug addictions, trysts with prostitutes and an obligatory stay at the Betty Ford Center, but is largely mute on the subject of his widely-rumored bisexuality. Which is a good thing to be mute about in Hollywood if you still have any hopes of landing a bit part in Lobster Man From Mars II.
Curtis takes pride in the fact that he has never had a bodyguard, though this is probably because even hardened criminals have better things to do with their time than kidnap people like Tony Curtis. He also takes great pride in his paintings--bland ripoffs of Henri Matisse and Joseph Cornell that are several cuts below Anthony Quinn's bold ripoffs of Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti. When all is said and done, he is what he is: one of the biggest schmucks in history.
In the final analysis, what do we learn from reading autobiographies of faded, jaded movie stars? We learn that we should find better things to do with our time. Especially if you consider yourself to be in any way--how shall I say this?--normal. Between Tony Curtis's fond reminiscences about Mae West's daily enemas, Zsa Zsa getting into bed with Burhan the Belgian and Fido, and Bette Davis poised at the top of the landing, radiantly vulgar in that see-through nightie, requesting a glass of warm milk or a red rose that she could suck dry, I was just about ready for a rerun of "Walton Family Thanksgiving" by the time I finished their books. The whole experience taught me one thing: that our entire relationship with movie stars should be limited to watching them on the silver screen, obtaining their autographs or signing their petitions to protect our children from carcinogenic apples. But that's the absolute limit, for movie stars should be seen, but not heard.
As Tony Curtis so aptly puts it: "I don't care if it's Mrs. Sylvester Stallone. There isn't a name anybody can say that will impress me. I've spent too many years being herded by that goat who gets all those sheep into the slaughterhouse. The sheep know there's something wrong, but their instinct to follow is so overwhelming that they go along until it's too late. I can be herded too, but nowadays, my antennae are up. I've learned to take a different approach."
I don't have the faintest idea what the fuck Tony Curtis is talking about here, but my antennae are up and I'm taking a different approach, too. No more celebrity autobiographies for me.
Unless they have plenty of coat hangers, and they're all being used on the authors...
___________
Joe Queenan wrote "See No Evil" for the April Movieline.