Word: joan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...many of the issues of the women's movement, from housework to abortion, were so basic to so much received wisdom that they seemed, by prospect or in perspective, either trivial or threatening. "Attention was finally being paid," Joan Didion wrote in a 1972 essay, "yet that attention was mired in the trivial. Even the brightest movement women found themselves engaged in sullen public colloquies about the inequities of dishwashing and the intolerable humiliations of being observed by construction workers on Sixth Avenue. ... It was a long way from Simone de Beauvoir's grave and awesome recognition of woman...
...Davis, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and (in separate covers) Elizabeth Taylor are merely the foremost subjects of the latest crop of biographies, autobiographies and memoirs. Dozens of these volumes have been gushing off the presses, and sometimes the trend seems to be toward not just revelation but multiple exposure: Joan Crawford and Errol Flynn have been dealt with in a couple of books each, and three biographies of Gary Cooper issued forth almost simultaneously...
...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 claims to have been the teen-age lover of Joan Crawford. Some of this brings back memories of Hedy Lamarr's 1966 autobiography, Ecstasy and Me: My Life As a Woman, which wound up telling so much that the "author" denounced it as "obscene, shocking, scandalous, naughty, wanton, fleshy, sensual, lecherous, lustful and scarlet...
...Here I am, warts and all," Henry Fonda exults on the jacket of Fonda, Howard Teichmann's new as-told-to book. And Fonda's spirit merely mimics that of other such recent candor-struck memoirists as Shelley Winters, Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth Ashley, Sidney Poitier, Gene Tierney, Joan Fontaine and Ingrid Bergman. There cannot be many Hollywood giants left who have not been treated in one book or another. To peruse even a few thousand pages of these literary star treks, however, is to realize that they do not bring unmitigated pleasure to the ordinary reader...
Just as typically fraught with inflamed sensibility are Ingrid Bergman's narration (My Story) of her long, racking breakup with Roberto Rossellini and Joan Fontaine's accounts (No Bed of Roses) of alienation from her mother and estrangement from her sister Olivia de Havilland. Writes Fontaine of the sad encounter that followed Olivia's winning of the 1946 Academy Award for Best Actress: "After Olivia delivered her acceptance speech and entered the wings, I, standing close by, went over to congratulate her ... She took one look at me, ignored my outstretched hand, clutched her Oscar...