Word: drakes
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CHILDREN, YOU ARE VERY LITTLE by Betsy Drake Grant. 245 pages. Afheneum...
Movie stars who write are like statues that bleed-highly suspect. But Betsy Drake, a minor star of the late '40s (Deep Are the Roots) who spent the '50s as Mrs. Gary Grant, has produced in Children, You Are Very Little a first novel with flair and ferocity...
Author Grant says she began to write when she was eleven and, like her heroine, was living with relatives on a farm in Virginia because her parents had separated. Born to money (her grandfather built the Drake Hotel in Chicago), she grew up in Paris, New York, Chicago, Washington. In her teens she and her mother were broke, but in 1946, after summer stock and a go at modeling, she signed a film contract. She met Cary Grant on a boat coming back from England and, not sorry to escape a career in mediocre movies, married him in 1949. Divorced...
Psychiatric assumptions underlie much of the book. "Adults demand that children understand what they're trying to say," Betsy Drake points out, "but too often they interpret a child's most serious moments as stupid or cute or funny. So children, in self-defense, learn to play for the laugh. It's a style of craziness, a style of survival, a style of distancing. I learned this style as a child but I'm not really impressed with my comic or ironic side. I'd much rather write straight out of despair...
...rams, And a shepherd of a heap of pretty little sheep, And a nice fold of pretty little Jambs, And he lived with his five andforty wives, In the city of great Salt Lake Where they woo and coo as pretty doves do, And cackle like ducks to a drake...