Word: higham
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...MYSTERY OF CITIZEN WELLES ORSON WELLES: A BIOGRAPHY by Barbara Leaming; Viking; 562 pages; $19.95 ORSON WELLES: THE RISE AND FALL OF AN AMERICAN GENIUS by Charles Higham; St. Martin's Press; 373 pages; $19.95 THE MAKING OF CITIZEN KANE by Robert L. Carringer University of California; 180 pages...
Leaming is acutely hostile to more critical predecessors, notably Charles Higham, who argued in The Films of Orson Welles (1970) that the director suffered a neurotic fear of finishing his movies. "A destructive book," says Leaming. Welles shares her animosity. In one of his expensively unfinished films, The Other Side of the Wind, which stars John Huston as an aging movie director attempting a comeback, Welles included a snotty critic called "Higgam." This role was played for a time by Director Peter Bogdanovich, who was also collaborating on a book, titled This Is Orson Welles, until Welles canceled the book...
...doubtlessly yield from time to time to the theatrical temptation of make-believe. Yet the accumulated mountain of star lore certainly tells more than enough about what Hollywood stars are actually like. The Secret Life of Tyrone Power depicts that virile swashbuckler as bisexual. In The Untold Story, Charles Higham tries to make a case that Errol Flynn was also sexually ambivalent-and argues, not quite convincingly, that Flynn was a Nazi agent of some sort. In This Life, Sidney Poitier confesses to catching an adolescent case of gonorrhea, and in Please Don't Shoot My Dog, Jackie Cooper...
...Bette: The Life of Bette Davis, Higham...
Americans have never been profoundly attached to their own history. John Higham, a historian at Johns Hopkins, once met a man who claimed that historical consciousness increases as one travels east. Thus the Californian, in awareness of the past, would be the moral equivalent of the housefly. The Eastern U.S. would be slightly more sophisticated, Western Europe more so. Anyone who travels in Poland, Higham says, cannot help being "overwhelmed by the passionate and complex involvement of the people with their history. We don't have that...