Bunkering With Books

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT

BY CONNIE CRONLEY

When the going gets tough – and boy has it lately – I retreat to a comforting genre. And to me, that can be books about actors, movies, plays and playwrights. I lucked into three exceptional examples.

“The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood” by Sam Wasson is an extraordinary book about the making of the movie “Chinatown,” considered by some to be the pinnacle of 1970s cinema, as well as the end of a great Hollywood era. I was so enthralled I watched the movie again three times, and although I still find the story confusing, so did everyone involved in the movie. The details of set decoration, costuming, scriptwriting, musical score and direction are fascinating.

The major players are Jack Nicholson in his first starring role; director Roman Polanski, reeling from the brutal death of his wife Sharon Tate, yet genius enough to take control of the movie; Robert Towne, acclaimed for writing perhaps the greatest original screenplay of all time, (but did he really write it?), and producer Robert Evans who brought friends together to create the film and muscled it through production just as cocaine began to decimate film careers – his included.

Gossipy to read how Faye Dunaway and John Huston behaved during the filming, and fascinating to learn about production designer Richard Sylbert, his sister-in-law costumer Anthea Sylbert, and composer Jerry Goldsmith who came in to tweak the score and transformed it into something memorable.

I have a special fondness for Irish memoirs. Actor Gabriel Bryne’s new “Walking With Ghosts” is a lyrical, often dark, memory trip to his childhood in 1960s Dublin. This is not a dishy account of his famed life on stage, in television and film, although there are anecdotes about drinking with Richard Burton and acting with Sir Laurence Olivier. You can learn more about his life on Wikipedia. This is a book about his brooding soul. Even his first acting success on Irish television identified him as “a kind of Irish Heathcliff.”

Much of his memoir is remembering his troubled history with Catholicism. There were the fearof-God nuns and cruel teaching brothers at his parochial schools; the nun who told the children the enduring lesson of Adam and Eve, “And by the way, your children will be miserable as well;" the brother (non-ordained teacher) who beat the boys with a bamboo cane while degrading them verbally. Sexual abuse was one reason Bryne dropped out of seminary while studying for the priesthood. He was a petty crook and failed plumber before he found his way into acting. Much of his life, and a good deal of the memoir, is about his addiction to alcohol, “... my most trusted friend, before it betrayed me and brought me to my darkest days.” He has been sober for the last 25 years. James Grissom’s title, "Follies of God," tells us nothing about the book, but the subtitle, “Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog,” says volumes. It is a quest by Grissom, at the request of Williams, to find the women who inspired his work, acted in his plays and helped the playwright understand his worth as an artist and the meaning of his life. Big quest. It started almost 40 years ago when Grissom was a student and aspiring writer and Williams was addicted to drugs and alcohol, sick, washed up and near death (he died in 1983).

Talk about dishy, with all of Williams' eloquent loquaciousness. Through interviews with the actors and directors and the playwright’s remembrances, we meet the women who came out of a fog to inspire him. They were his mother (the inspiration for “The Glass Menagerie”), Lillian Gish (who knew she was his first choice for Blanche DuBois), Jessica Tandy (the original Blanche), troubled Kim Stanley (the original Stella Kowalski), bitter Jo Van Fleet, Bette Davis (facing down the blacklist), steely Katharine Hepburn, Geraldine Page (“a titanic talent”), along with director Elia Kazan who had more to do with the success of Williams’ plays than I realized.

This book, full of philosophical insight, burbling with his lush vocabulary as rich as a Viennese pastry, is a deep dive into the American theatre that Tennessee Williams transformed and the people who helped him do it.