Showing posts with label Celebrity memoirs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Celebrity memoirs. Show all posts

Friday, January 18, 2013

Forty-four candles

The Longest Way Home by Andrew McCarthy
When it Happens to You by Molly Ringwald


The 1980s were the golden age of almost nothing. But to give the decade its due, it was a good time for teen movies. In the early part of the decade, the actors Andrew McCarthy and Molly Ringwald were giants of the genre. Both were members of the Brat Pack, which also included the likes of Rob Lowe and Demi Moore. But unlike the more trivially good-looking members of that troupe, McCarthy and Ringwald had character. McCarthy was sensitive and exceedingly wide-eyed: he looked like a bush baby with a mullet. Ringwald was famous for her red hair, lush lips, and willowy frame.

Depressingly for those of us who grew up with them, both actors are now irrefutably middle-aged. McCarthy is 50, Ringwald 44 ... [read more]

Monday, April 2, 2012

Less Fun than it Looks

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, March 24-25, 2012 

Is there a job in the world that isn’t much less fun than it looks? From a distance, being a Wiggle would appear to be a pretty cushy gig. Roll out of bed at around ten, slip on the coloured shirt for a mid-day show, mingle backstage with some celebrity milfs, then spend the remainder of the day reclining in a hot-tub full of cash. 

Anthony Field, the Blue Wiggle, has written a book that unveils the less glamorous reality: the bad hotels; the terrible food; the backstage arguments, one of them culminating in the throwing of a toy drum kit; the grim logistics of coping with irritable bowel syndrome on the road. Field isn’t complaining, mind you: he keeps stressing that the joy of the live shows makes it all worthwhile. But he leaves you feeling that he and his fellow Wiggles have thoroughly earned their success. 

Field earned his while suffering from a diabolical array of health problems that threatened, at one stage, to curtail his wiggling for good. He pulled himself back from the brink, thanks to an exercise and dietary regime he details in the book’s second half. But it’s the first half, describing how he got to the brink in the first place, that makes for more compelling reading. 

Field played in the Sydney band The Cockroaches as a youngster. An uncomfortable fit as a rock and roller, he eventually quit to finish a degree in early childhood education. This would prove one of the shrewdest career moves made by an entertainer since Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. During his final year at university, Field formed a children’s group with two other teaching students – Murray Cook and Greg Page – and the ex-Cockroach Jeff Fatt. The Wiggles were born. (A fifth Wiggle, Phillip Wilcher, played on their first album but left soon afterwards.) 

The group’s early struggles were not all that different from an emerging rock band’s: there were meetings with boneheaded executives, efforts to crack the American market, gruelling tour schedules. Sometimes they played three 90-minute shows a day. Could Keith Richards manage that? 

Probably not, if he had to spend two hours in the backstage toilet every time he ingested something mildly toxic. Field, during his darkest years, was so unhealthy that he made Keith look like Michael Phelps. His problems, according to his own incomplete list, included “hernias, back ailments, broken bones, food sensitivities, colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, potentially fatal infections, circulation issues, and exhaustion.” 

Let's pause now to get a few things straight about the Wiggles’ collective health issues. Field is not the Wiggle who left the group to deal with a mysterious fainting illness. That was the Yellow Wiggle, Greg Page, who quit back in 2006, and was reinstated earlier this year, causing his replacement to be controversially stripped of the yellow shirt. (Field’s book, alas, was completed too early to tackle the Wigglegate imbroglio.) 

Nor is Field to be confused with the Purple Wiggle, Jeff Fatt, who had a pacemaker installed in 2011. No: Field is the one who has suffered from just about everything else. He is excellent at evoking what it’s like to live with chronic pain. Fellow sufferers will find some of his observations scarily accurate. “Pain,” he says, “becomes a habit that’s hard to break.” 

Field broke it when he met a holistic chiropractor named James Stoxen. In the book’s second half Field lays out, complete with photographs, the exercise routines with which Stoxen helped him morph from an overweight, pain-racked pill-popper into the chiselled, tattooed specimen depicted on the book’s front cover. (Sidebar question: now that even the Wiggles are getting tattoos, can we agree that the tattoo has officially lost its bad-boy connotations? Who’s getting one next? Kevin Rudd?) 

The book, it must be said, does get rather bogged down exploring the Stoxen philosophy. Stoxen views the body as a giant spring. He carries around a bedspring in his bag to demonstrate this principle. He believes that the spring is divided into seven “floors” or levels. He abhors shoes, and advocates walking around barefooted whenever possible. For all I know, he may be right about these things. But his intonations do sound, prima facie, like those of many other self-help gurus who have gone before him. 

Still, there is no doubt that his techniques have worked for Field. Nor can you question the genuineness of Field’s desire to spread the word. He knows he sounds like an evangelist, but feels that the good news must be shared. His fervour is contagious. At one point I seriously considered rustling up a set of witch’s hats (where do you buy a witch’s hat?) and giving his programme a try. I know how his young fans feel. Field has enthusiasm, and that can’t be faked. Somehow he never lost it, no matter how debilitating his problems got.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Three-way cherub

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, June 25-26, 2011

Rob Lowe has always had the ideal American face. It looks plastic, but it’s real. It’s the face of a cherub: a cherub who filmed himself having two separate three-ways (in one of which he wasn’t the only dude) and got away with it, back in the days when things like that were still considered mildly embarrassing. It’s the face Michael Jackson’s surgeons always seemed to be chiselling their way towards.

Placed on the cover of an autobiography, Lowe’s face threatens the kind of skin-deep entertainment you get from a Lowe movie. He became a star during the blandest decade in the history of American film, and his performances in those home-made pornos were by no means the most wooden of his career: he was the kind of actor who, in order to portray a tortured saxophone player, simply messed up his hair and walked everywhere with a sax around his neck.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to hear people talking as if Lowe’s autobiography has substance. It’s even more of a surprise to discover they’re not wrong. The blurb writer who hails the book as “a major publishing event” undoubtedly goes a bit far. But Lowe has solid instincts as a memoirist: he knows what sort of things you’ll want to hear, and he’s much more perceptive and thoughtful than you expect someone who looks that good to be.   

He recounts his early childhood in a series of rapid fades: a shrewd way of fast-forwarding to the showbiz stuff without missing any essentials. His parents separated when he was four – a trauma he evokes with some effect. His teen years in Malibu are packed with cameos from past and future stars. He plays baseball in Martin Sheen’s backyard with Charlie and Emilio; makes home movies with the Penn brothers; dates a girl whose father turns out to be Cary Grant.

We’ll have to take Lowe’s word for it that he was unpopular at school, especially with the ladies. But at fifteen he got cast in a half-successful sitcom. This failed to impress girls who actually knew him, but girls who didn’t were suddenly interested. Mobbed and palpated at a publicity appearance, the young Lowe gets an insight into the hollowness of fame. “If you really knew me,” he thinks, “you wouldn’t like me nearly as much.”

The book’s centrepiece is an admirably detailed account of Lowe’s work on The Outsiders, his first feature. It wasn’t a bad film to debut in: Coppola was directing, and Lowe’s co-stars included Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane. (Dillon won the hotly fought contest for Lane’s affections.)

Come to think of it, Lowe’s account of the film’s making is a lot more interesting than the film itself. He has an excellent memory for detail. His big breakdown scene required him to cry on cue for take after take. He did so. Then the ineffable Francis strolled onto set and announced it was time for the close-ups: Lowe had blown out his ducts on wide shots.

After the cast scatters to make other films, Lowe pays a telling visit to Cruise on the set of Risky Business. The old fraternal spirit has waned. “Tom has a new perspective on his acting style, telling me, ‘I want to spend time hanging with you but Joel [his character] doesn’t.” Is Lowe taking a wry jab at the great man here? It seems distinctly possible – unless you’re ready to accept that Tom really needed the Method to help him dance around in his Y-fronts and go toe-to-toe with the guy who played Booger in Revenge of the Nerds.

If the whole book had the intensity of the pages about The Outsiders, it would be one of the most interesting actors’ autobiographies of recent times. But Lowe covers nothing else in quite the same detail. Writing about his videotaped ménages, he’s decidedly stingier with behind-the-scenes anecdotes. He does, though, explain how he managed not to notice that one of the female participants was underage. The bar he met her in, you see, had a doorman who was hyper-vigilant about checking IDs.

The book gets sketchier as it goes, and there are some strange omissions from its later pages. Lowe never finds room to mention the illness and death of his on-screen brother Swayze. And although he makes frequent mention of his “deep interest” in politics, he never gets around to discussing that interest in any substantial way. Why, for instance, does he prefer Democrats to Republicans?

By the time he gets to The West Wing, his big comeback, he seems to be in a distinct hurry. We only get about fifteen pages on it. By the standards of the average showbiz autobiography, that’s quite a bit. But by the standards of Lowe’s earlier chapters, it feels like short weight.   

There is mention, in the book’s acknowledgements, of a “tight deadline." This explains a lot. But why was it a matter of such urgency to get Lowe’s book out? Couldn’t the publishers have waited till it was ready, or readier? As it stands, it’s not as disposable as most showbiz memoirs, but it leaves you wondering about the even less disposable book it might have been.

(Originally published in The Weekend Australian, June 25-26, 2011) 

Monday, May 2, 2011

Lighten up, Tina


Originally published in The Weekend Australian, May 21-22, 2011

Tina Fey has been called the funniest woman in America. Until I read Bossypants, her disappointingly negligible new book, I’d probably have agreed. Fey’s 30 Rock is the sharpest sitcom on TV. It’s full of quotable, literary lines. Bossypants, alas, is not. It’s too rambling and loosely written to make you laugh; you suspect that Fey composed it with less care than she lavishes on the scripts of her show. And that seems significant. In an age when the best American TV writing strives for permanence, books like this one increasingly seem to have the status that American TV shows used to have. They're becoming so disposable that nobody really expects them to be anything else.

But let’s begin with Fey’s strengths. There may be no better practitioner of the one-liner in America today. Here she is on how it felt to grow up in the 1970s: “It was always ‘Day 27’ of something in Beirut”. And here’s what she said when she was impersonating Sarah Palin, and was called on to address the topic of gay marriage: “I believe marriage is meant to be a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers.” (At the time, we should recall, Palin’s pregnant daughter had just celebrated a lightning engagement to her luckless inseminator.)

That’s how Fey sounds at her best: compact, venomous, bang on target. But you can’t construct a 270-page book entirely out of one-liners. Over the long haul, Fey turns out, inevitably, to be a less scintillating performer. Mostly her book is a mildly jocular memoir, sprinkled with some purely comic chapters that never really take fire. She declines to tell the “whole story” behind her famous scar, saying only what she’s already said in interviews: at the age of five, she was slashed across the face by a stranger. There’s some interesting stuff about the nuts and bolts of TV writing. There’s an excellent chapter about a calamitous luxury cruise.

All this is readable, occasionally moving, and better than average for a book of this kind. But that’s exactly the problem: this book reads like a somewhat better-than-average celebrity memoir, when Fey seemed more than qualified to give us a proper book, written by a real writer.

30 Rock is refreshing because it offers a wide-angled perspective on America’s cultural insanity. One had hoped that Fey's book would be like that too: cool, sceptical, above the American fray. Instead Fey embraces many of the trivial celebrity-culture priorities that her show so trenchantly lampoons. She has no quarrel, for example, with the Oprahesque assumption that the self, especially the outer surface of it, is an endlessly discussable topic. She tries to be ironical about getting manicures and posing for glamour shots, but she doesn’t find these things quite absurd enough to stop doing them. She seeks credit, and perhaps even deserves it, for having “thus far refused to get any Botox or plastic surgery.” But a culture in which that qualifies as a brave and radical act, roughly on a par with refusing treatment for an arrow through the neck, should get a far more comprehensive satirical bollocking than Fey gives it here. 30 Rock would give it one. But in Bossypants, Fey fatally personalises the big social questions. Defending her private “choices”, she sounds far too touchy to be funny.

Back in the 1970s, Woody Allen published three volumes of comic pieces that were ultimately collected as his Complete Prose. To measure Fey’s book against Allen’s is to realise how drastically the American mind has shrivelled over the intervening years. Allen’s range of reference was unapologetically wide. Dostoevsky, Kafka, Plato, Van Gogh, Yeats, Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein – many an Allen joke depended on your having at least a rough idea who such people were. When Fey drops an obscure name, it generally turns out to be some actor from a justly forgotten TV show. Larry Wilcox? Jon from CHiPs. Robert Wuhl? The guy from Arli$$. It’s moderately funny, once or twice, when a woman as smart as Fey conjures the name of some long-forgotten TV hack, or drops some gangsta catchphrase. But when she confines herself to the same tiny spectrum of American junk culture for the course of a whole book, you struggle for air. 

When Fey does risk a lone literary allusion – her cruise-ship chapter is entitled “My Honeymoon, or A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again Either” – she adds a clanging footnote that epitomises the book’s weaknesses: “If you get this reference to David Foster Wallace’s 1997 collection of essays, consider yourself a member of the cultural elite. Why do you hate your country and flag so much?!” Fey’s deft touch deserts her here, as it does in so many parts of the book. She lets anger propel her beyond irony and into mere sarcasm. But we should probably cut her some slack on this one. America’s fools and philistines want her down there in the trenches of the culture wars, with them. The temptation to take the odd brutal crack at them must be awfully hard to resist.  

Fey got a six million dollar advance for this book. That is a fair whack. No doubt she felt obliged to deliver the kind of book that would earn the money back. But it isn’t much fun watching an intelligent writer pretend to be less smart than she really is. Writing for TV, Fey has never seemed to be in any doubt about what her audience wants. It wants her to write as sharply and dangerously as she possibly can. She doesn’t seem to think readers of this book will want the same thing. Reading Bossypants, you get a feeling you never get while watching 30 Rock: the feeling that you’re being written down to.  

(Originally published in The Weekend Australian, May 21-22, 2011) 

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Jack the Lad

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, November 13-14, 2010 

There is a revealing scene in Michael Caine’s new autobiography. Caine is at a lavish Oscar party, sitting next to the socialite Arianna Huffington. As the ceremony plays live on a big screen, Caine gives Huffington his “uninhibited” views about the winners. After a while, he asks her why she keeps fiddling with her BlackBerry. She tells him she’s transmitting a live blog of the proceedings. Caine is horrified: he fears she’s been telling the world what he really thinks about his peers.

It turns out that she hasn’t been doing that. And naturally Caine is not about to tell us, either, as he narrates this incident in his book. He will divulge his true opinions, for free, to a quasi-celebrity with the table manners of an eight-year-old. But it doesn’t strike him that an autobiography might be an appropriate place to speak his mind. And who can blame him? We have long since given up expecting anything like full candour from books like this one. Celebrity autobiographers are celebrities first and autobiographers second. The image must be preserved.

Caine’s autobiography never threatens these conventions, but it’s an unusually good book of its kind. For one thing, Caine genuinely seems to have written it himself. If he didn’t, it was ghosted by a master impressionist. For instance, Caine informs us that he used to be “a bit of a jack-the-lad.” Try not to hear Caine’s voice, genially skimming over the consonants, as you read that. No doubt some of Caine’s non-Cockney readers will be puzzled, even alarmed, by such sentences as “I opened my mouth to give the thief a bollocking.” But his lingo gives the book charm.

Caine was born in a London slum called the Elephant and Castle: hence the first part of the book’s title. His unpromising real name was Maurice Micklewhite. A congenital disease gave him permanently swollen eyelids. Then he got rickets from malnutrition. During the blitz, German bombs rained perilously close to his home.

They don’t self-make them like Michael Caine any more. After a near-fatal stint of national service in Korea, he patiently built his career. His early struggles are evocatively described. But let’s be honest: in books like this, it’s the part after the struggle that really interests us. What’s Hollywood really like, assuming it’s really like anything?

Inevitably, Caine’s most vivid impressions of Hollywood come from the late 1960s, when he was first making it there. On the subject of his more recent films, he can’t always rustle up much narrative verve. “I played Nicole Kidman’s father in Bewitched and then went on to play Nicolas Cage’s father in The Weather Man. Neither movie was a big hit …” And that’s pretty much all we hear about both films, and both Nics.

Caine has better fun with his inability to ride horses – a recurrent theme. After early fiascos, he instructs a film company to provide him with a docile mare. Instead he gets a large-testicled steed named Fury. Fury bolts, with Caine on top of him: “We were eventually brought to a screaming halt (it was me doing the screaming).”

Improbably, Caine doesn’t seem to have run across a famous actor he doesn’t like – although he does call Joaquin Phoenix “somewhat strange.” You shudder to imagine what this might mean, because Caine, when it comes to his fellow stars, seems oddly tolerant of aberrant behaviour. His stories about his iconic buddies almost always, inadvertently, end up making the icons sound kind of nasty. Frank Sinatra, for example, was a “great friend”, but “everything was on his terms … there was no equal partnership.” 

Similarly, he considers Sylvester Stallone an old mate, but recalls an incident when Sly deliberately kept an entire film set waiting for three hours. Who would want to be friends with someone like that?

There may be a clue in a story Caine tells about himself and Jack Nicholson. The two are overdue on set, and Caine starts to run. Nicholson says: “Don’t run, Michael. They’ll know it’s us who are late.”

Like most Hollywood maxims, this is clever, but it embodies a monstrous ethical code. You half-expect the no-nonsense Caine to realise this, and give Jack an outraged bollocking on behalf of the common man. Instead, he embraces the Nicholson creed as his own: he hasn’t hurried to a film set since. So Caine is a bit less like us than we might hope, and a bit more like Jack and Sly.

Still, Caine has stayed remarkably sane, considering the ego-deforming pressures of movie-star existence. His book hints at how weirdly hollow that existence can be. Off set, there is constant recognition. On set, there is boredom, “hanging about,” and – in more exotic locations – diarrhoea. Nor does Caine try to conceal – how could he? – that sometimes it’s only about the money. “You get paid as much for a bad film,” he says, “as you do for a good one.” When he won the Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters, he couldn’t accept it in person: he was busy in the Caribbean, filming Jaws 4.

Despite having made over a hundred films, Caine runs out of things to say about them well before the book is done. Maybe, you feel, there’s just not that much to report. The last fifty pages feature a lot of repetition and padding. Finally Caine is reduced to imparting several pages’ worth of cooking tips, including his personal recipe for toast.

Reading Caine is like watching him. You can’t dislike him. He’s the right man to confront us with the deflating realities of his trade. His won his second Oscar was his work in The Cider House Rules. He played Charlize Theron’s obstetrician – which sounds like a promising role. But when Charlize turned up for the big examination scene, and placed a foot in either stirrup, she proved to be wearing a pair of hideous male Y-fronts. 

(Originally published in The Weekend Australian, November 13-14, 2010)