Michael Lindsay-Hogg: Luck and Circumstance: A coming of age in Hollywood, New York and points beyon

[selenak]

The art of writing in an interesting fashion about your own life is still severely underestimated. Having had an interesting life doesn't do the trick, as I found out many years ago when I slogged through Marlene Dietrich's memoirs, which were deadly dull, despite the facts of her life being certainly of the fascinating kind. But not many people

Comments

Part I

[ljlorettamartin]

[every time I come across a memoir that isn't just interesting in terms of reported content but actually has style, I'm over the moon.]

I agree, and I threw a couple other examples in a comment to your post on jhp.

[make for a surplus of father figures regarded with varying emotional investment, and that's not touching on Geraldine's lovers without possible fatherhood like Robert Capa or Henry Miller,]

And in the end, the warmest relationship he has with an adult man as a child is with the old Russian guy who babysat him when he was small. It's the one real father-son-like photo that's included, and MLH makes a point to say how safe and loved he felt with the man, unlike with the three men who could actually make a claim on the "father" title.

Interestingly, MLH's "fatherlessness" defines him just as much as John Lennon's did him, though in very different ways. For John it was a chip on the shoulder, for MLH it was this disconnection and longing.

[One of the things I find in writing about people who are dead is that, after a short or long time, no matter how close the relationship was, they become like characters in fiction;]

When I read this passage, it resonated so much with me that I dog-eared it for no particular reason.

Re: Part I

[selenak]

Agreed re: MLH and Vladimir Solokoff.

I hadn't thought to compare his ways of dealing with the father question to John Lennon's, since I was too struck by the way it was both a parallel and a complete contrast to Orson Welles' own surplus of fathers and what happened there. In OW's case there was also legal and most likely biological dad (Richard Welles), his mother's long term lover who was absolutely obsessed with him (Dr. Maurice Bernstein, nicknamed Dadda), and fantasy dad (the headmaster of his school, Roger Hill, whom he hero-worshipped and according to himself even had a crush on). The big difference to MLH's circumstances is that far from being absent, all three fathers are ever present and competing, especially once Beatrice Welles has died, and it all climaxes in Bernstein and Hill teaming up to advise 14 years old Orson to reject by-then-a-complete-alcoholic Richard. Which he does, Richard dies a few months later, and Orson develops not just the conviction he killed his father but a life long obsession with Falstaff. (Simon Callow pointed out the significance of Welles even at age 22, the first time he tackled the Henries, casting himself as Falstaff, never Hal.)

To return to "Luck and Circumstance": it really is a superb book, and I'm profoundly grateful you drew my attention to it.

Re: Part I

[ljlorettamartin]

Very interesting about OW's father situation - I had no idea. I want to make some connection to the metaphor in Citizen Kane, as you did, but I actually haven't studied the movie or seen it more than once :-).

Re: Part I

[selenak]

You might find these two older posts of mine useful:

http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/423134.html

http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/521855.html