On March 16, in my “Second Letter to Subscribers,” I announced a three-part bonus series from this writer’s point of view on the vagaries of book publishing. In previous installments, I whispered secrets first about literary agents, then about editors. Now it’s the turn of book reviewers. This is the third section of what I’ve dubbed “Things I Promised Not to Tell.”
Having used up available space for this post, I’m adding a supplement today as Bonus Number 21.
First of all, let me say that I don’t hate bad reviews of my books. Of course, like every writer I prefer the other kind. Even so, I’ve garnered useful pointers from several negative notices. The reviews that I loathe, however, are the ones based not on the book but rather on jacket copy, or on skimming rather than reading. Even worse are those generated by the reviewer’s biases. Unless you’re alert to the polite prejudice, the chicanery-with-a-smile, and the widespread incompetence of the media industry, you may be unaware that such reviews actually see print. They do. And in so-called “respectable” newspapers and magazines, as well as on Amazon and a thousand other websites where “reviewers,” meaning any rube with an ax to grind, can unload ungrammatical opinions in volleys of misspellings and illogic.
My objection to those online jottings is that they are anonymous. Require the would-be “influencers” to identify themselves, as actual opinion makers do in print and online.
What is meant by the terms “favorable review,” “a rave,” “a career-killing review,” etc.? More or less what the phrases suggest, except that an unwritten rule among professional reviewers and their editors is that, for balance, each rave should include at least one hesitation, and a review that’s entirely negative should contain the hint of a compliment, if possible.
Here’s an example of that first unwritten rule. The novelist Louis Bayard, reviewing my book Finding Zsa Zsa in the Washington Post in 2019, paid a number of compliments. I laughed at his mild slap to my wrist: “His…breathless prose and pugilistic opinions suggest he is either competing with or being absorbed by the Gabors themselves.” (If I ever meet him, I intend to speak Hungarian so that he’ll grasp my total engulfment in Gaborness and Hungariana.)
If you’ve read my chapters up to now you recall my contempt for the right wing, including Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. And yet that paper devoted a long, even-handed essay-review to Finding Zsa Zsa in its Sunday edition on July 28, 2019. The writer, Hailey Eber, had obviously read the book closely and made notes. Her facts were correct, and she grasped my intentions: to demythologize the Gabors while having fun with them but also to reveal the pain and heartaches behind the frothy legend. Even if Eber’s opinion of the biography had been less favorable than it was, I would respect her scrupulous grasp of the scope of the book, which begins in Budapest in the 1890s and ends with Zsa Zsa’s death in Los Angeles in 2016.
Louis Bayard and Hailey Eber are reviewers who take seriously the difficult task of book evaluation. But then we come to a disgraceful one named Liz Brown. Her website names her one obscure book along with publications she has written for, among them the New York Times, Bookforum, Elle Decor, and The Los Angeles Times. It was in the latter that she reviewed Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of “Imitation of Life” on February 12, 2009. The ransomware prose of her attack is an example of what I referred to above as a review based on the reviewer’s biases.
Her ad hominem aspersions blame me for refusing “to engage the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who had tremendous respect for [Imitation of Life director Douglas Sirk].” As if Fassbinder’s drug-addicted, goggle-eyed adulation of his betters required pages in my book devoted to his rhythmless, charmless product — the cinematic equivalent of poetic doggerel.
Fassbinder, of course, is the darling of drab writers like Brown who hoist the banner of a certain kind of chickenshit liberalism — self-righteous, disdainful, hypocritical. Mistaking astringence for intellect, they’re the present-day equivalent of New England puritans without the theology.
Despite the absence of a Fassbinder tribute in my book, Liz Brown managed to “like knowing that Susan Kohner, who played the angry racially passing daughter in Imitation of Life, is the mother of Paul and Chris Weitz, the guys who made American Pie.” (“Directors” would have been a better word, but Brown is no stylist.) Along with interest in those guys, Brown likes knowing about all the white people in my book, no matter how fleeting their appearance: Lana Turner, John Gavin, John Stahl, Fannie Hurst, Jo Ann Greer, Karen Dicker, Sirk’s German ex-wife (a Nazi), his Jewish second wife Hilde Jary, Ann Robinson, John Waters, Lypsinka, Lex Barker. She even brings in David Thomson and his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, which is not mentioned in my 422 pages.
But who’s missing from Liz Brown’s review? It’s Juanita Moore, the African American actress who, like her costar Susan Kohner, was nominated in 1959 for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. And whose life and career occupy a major portion of the narrative. The book is dedicated “To Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner, with love and admiration.”
Nor does Brown’s review name any other African American person from the book. Not one. Omitted are Juanita’s friends and costars, all of whom, like her, struggled valiantly against Hollywood racism and the pervasive racism in the United States: Mahalia Jackson, Joel Fluellen (who appear in Imitation of Life); and the African American stars of the 1934 Imitation of Life, Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington. Others in Brown’s racist omissions are Dorothy Dandridge, Robert Hooks, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis — friends and colleagues of Juanita Moore. And all in the book.
On the basis of her heinous review, I accuse Liz Brown of blatant racism!
And what of David Ulin, book review editor of the Los Angeles Times when the review appeared? I consider him similarly guilty for his refusal to print the letter in which I pointed out Brown’s deplorable omissions. Here is that letter.
Another reviewer, Melissa Anderson in Newsday, called Fassbinder “Sirk’s most devoted acolyte” — a gross overstatement. She was apparently ignorant of Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven (2002), an all-out homage, and the many other directors who revere Sirk — e.g., Quentin Tarantino.
Gore Vidal, in the New Yorker, December 1, 1997: “Few American reviewers actually read an entire book, particularly if the author is known to hold opinions that are not those of the comglomerate for which the reviewer is writing.”
Charlotte Hays writes, though not very well, for the far-right National Review. She is also Director of Cultural Programs and Senior Editor at the Independent Women’s Forum, an organization founded in 1992 to promote a “conservative alternative to feminist tenets” following the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. (Remember his harassment of Anita Hill, who wasn’t amused by his Long Dong Silver dick jokes?) The Independent Women’s Forum grew out of an ad hoc group called “Women for Judge Thomas.” Surely this information tells who Charlotte Hays really is. That, and a snippet of her prose from the National Review on February 8, 2012, re: Rick Santorum’s wormy aspirations to become the Republican presidential candidate: “If you think he can win in November, be my guest. I worry that he doesn’t have the kind of broad appeal to beat even a disaster like Barack Obama.”
The real disaster, of course, is Clarence Thomas — hero of Trump supporters, anti-abortionists, homophobes, and of Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow, whose under-the-table gifts to the shifty Supreme Court justice have recently created embarrassment and scandal at the nation’s highest court. And then there’s Ginni Thomas, contemptible wife of the crooked justice. Their shady dealings have made them the Supreme Court’s Bonnie and Clyde.
The Washington Post, a paper that’s liberal when convenient, hired Charlotte Hays in 2012 to review my sixth book, Inventing Elsa Maxwell. Why a scapegrace, self-styled southern belle would attack a harmless biography of a largely forgotten gadabout struck me as odd. But not for long. The stimulus to Charlotte Hays’s polecat aggression was a gay man’s biography of a lesbian, viz., Elsa Maxwell (1881-1963).
My great offence, according to Hays, was a passage of 145 words — in a book of 340 pages. “Trouble appears at the start,” she wrote. “After quoting a banal telegram sent to Maxwell from President John F. Kennedy, who was thanking her for birthday greetings in 1963, Staggs goes into mind-numbing detail about, of all irrelevant things, the delivery of the telegram — seems it was sent to the wrong address and Maxwell didn’t get Kennedy’s telegram before her final trip abroad. Who cares? This is a portent of many infuriating digressions to come, including a footnote on the career of the British diplomat Arthur Balfour — just because he came to dinner and socialized with Maxwell.”
President Kennedy, of course, was a Democrat — a deadly strike against him for Hays. If she were a less bilious book-skimmer, however, she might grasp the significance of the telegrams. First, Elsa was a regular White House guest, as frequent a visitor as Billy Graham and invited by as many administrations; and second, the final two lines of the brief paragraph ring with foreboding. Here, scanned from the book, is the passage that stimulated Charlotte Hays to spew her foul scent:
I would expect any dolt to grasp the irony, especially since it’s pointed out in those two final sentences. In the context of the book, this brief passage is relevant because Elsa Maxwell was known as a collector of famous people: movie stars, royalty, the greats of opera and popular song, American presidents. Hence the book’s subtitle: How an Irrepressible Nobody Conquered High Society, Hollywood, the Press, and the World.
As for that “infuriating digression…a footnote on the career of the British diplomat Arthur Balfour — just because he came to dinner and socialized with Maxwell” — Charlotte Hays should study history. Arthur Balfour was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 to 1905. Later, as foreign secretary in the ministry of David Lloyd George, he issued the Balfour Declaration of 1917 on behalf of the cabinet, which supported a “home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration is widely considered a cornerstone of the present state of Israel.
And Elsa Maxwell was friends with Balfour and with Lloyd George.
The hopelessly provincial Charlotte Hays appears to be a struggling writer rather than one fully formed. A literary tadpole, so to speak. She is co-author of four books, but sole author of one. It’s understandable that she might need a helping hand — a crutch? — on a first book, but a helping bibliography? She should hire a caregiver for book reviews as well.
Curious to know more about this would-be firebrand, I peeked into one of the books on which she got help. It’s called Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral. Which turns out to be a predictable offshoot of The White Trash Cookbook — small-town prose alternates with recipes for funeral food — and with rather loud echoes of Jeff Foxworthy and others in the “humor” genre, as opposed to wit. I could remark that Hays and co-author are half wits who don’t equal a whole, but I won’t.
In their books, Charlotte Hays and her accomplice have obviously read, and tried to copy, the style of my late friend Florence King (1936-2016), a true conservative as opposed to the night rider scalawags and know-nothings of the present-day Republican party. As Florence explained to me in articulate detail, she was a “traditionalist conservative,” meaning that she looked to such thinkers as Edmund Burke (1729-1797) rather than to “movement conservatives” of the kind washed up in the polluted tide of Reaganism. Her brand of conservatism resembled that of British Torys. Had she lived in the U.K., she would have deplored tabloid coverage of the Royal Family and she would have belonged to the Church of England. At home in Virginia, she attended the next best thing, the local Episcopal parish church — even though she was proudly agnostic. She professed to be a monarchist, and we laughingly agreed on at least one point: this country might have escaped a great deal of hooliganism if it had remained under the British Crown.
Florence King, who was bisexual, had style in her life as in her writing. She could be howlingly funny. Among her titles: Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady; With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy; Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye. Charlotte Hays perhaps believes herself the equal of Florence King. But her style is more Trump than Tory.
Once more, a book review editor refused to print a letter pointing out inaccuracies and misreadings:
What were those inaccuracies? In an attempt at sarcasm, Hays wrote that “Staggs generously shares his thoughts on gay marriage.” I did not use such a phrase, which would have been a gross anachronism for Elsa Maxwell and her partner of many years, Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon. Hays also claimed that Fellowes-Gordon appeared only in “a wrap-up chapter” — further proof of skimming. Early on in the book I traced her from birth in 1891 to presentation at court in 1911, and on to her initial meeting with Elsa in South Africa a year later. I followed with a detailed account of their life together in London; their journey to the United States in 1915; their subsequent involvement in the war effort in New York and elsewhere; and Fellowes-Gordon’s career as an opera singer. In fact, there is so much about this fascinating woman that one could almost publish those pages as a separate biography.
Nor did I quote from “a tape-recorded interview done by Hugo Vickers,” but rather from half-a-dozen such taped interviews. A minor point, yes, but indicative of Hays’s slipshod method. She even implied that Hugo Vickers and I are somehow in competition, since his “enjoyable works contrast strongly with this book.” Hugo is a friend whose generosity is noted several times in the book, a writer of integrity and dignity who, I daresay, would be unimpressed by the sycophancy of a Charlotte Hays.
Among reviewers of movies and books, Janet Maslin, now retired from the New York Times, was the biggest loser. Here’s what she wrote on June 7, 2005, about the book whose title she truncated: Sam Staggs, who specializes in recycling gossipy details about the making of famous films, has a new “Streetcar Named Desire” book, “When Blanche Met Brando.” It promises to reveal, among other things, which actresses in the cast had affairs with Elia Kazan, the director, though Mr. Kazan long since wrote about this himself.
The actual title is When Blanche Met Brando: The Scandalous Story of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” In my discussion of the play’s Broadway run, the sole reference to Kim Hunter and Kazan as lovers is this one: “Kim Hunter was Kazan’s girl for a time during Streetcar, but that’s not how she got the part of Stella. In fact, Kazan didn’t know her when the play was cast.” Nor, despite Maslin’s claim, did Kazan himself write about the affair. His autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, was published in 1988, when Kim Hunter and her husband, Robert Emmett, were still alive. Kazan would not have embarrassed them with mention of a dalliance long forgotten.
Maslin’s hostility to the book is obvious in her two foolish paragraphs, although she’s unable to marshal facts even in such brevity. The book, which runs to 394 pages, traces Tennessee Williams’s greatest play from earliest drafts, to Broadway, to Hollywood, and up to present-day revivals. Even a screaming phony like Maslin should realize that “gossipy details” are often the only traces left by the greats of theatre and film.
The second part of Maslin’s myopic “insight”:
Eager for details of any stripe, Mr. Staggs tries to account for the film’s eroticism by analyzing why the leading man preferred real sweat to chemical coating. “Brando’s pheromones were not wasted on Kim Hunter and Vivien Leigh,” he writes. “Would oil and glycerine have aroused them like the overpowering scent of Brando’s armpits?” Facts-for-fans books did not always traffic in that kind of speculation.”
Maslin obviously lacked understanding of Brando as method actor par excellence — further proof of how really unqualified she was for her job. Here is the actual passage from page 195 of the book:
It’s one example, among many others, of Brando as method actor and famous product of the Actors Studio. His method required real sweat in preference to the chemical, and that helps to account for his greatness as Stanley Kowalski. Maslin missed the point that both Kim Hunter, as Stella, and Vivien Leigh, as Blanche, are intoxicated by Brando’s maleness. Perhaps she never saw the movie.
Janet Maslin, like Charlotte Hays, seems unable to write a book unassisted. On Amazon I located a volume co-authored by Maslin and Rochelle Levy; another by Maslin and Robert Emmet Long; then The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made by Vincent Canby, Janet Maslin, et al. She’s credited, along with the Premiere Magazine Staff, for a picture book titled Portraits of Love: Great Romances of the 20th Century with predictable filler on such couples as JFK and Jackie; Bogart and Bacall; John and Yoko; and Taylor and Burton on the cover.
The bar was never high for becoming a critic of anything at the New York Times. Maslin learned her trade, such as it was, as a rock critic in Boston. Later, unhappy in a menial job at Newsweek, she persuaded Abe Rosenthal, oily managing editor of the Times — and notorious homophobe — to hire her as film critic. As she told an interviewer, “They [the Times] were in a fix. Richard Eder, the second-string film critic, had just been made chief theatre critic. Vincent Canby was ready to go on summer vacation. They didn’t have a fill-in.”
They should have hired a temp.
For Maslin, the bar was dropped lower than usual. Rock concerts and movies are hardly the same, and if you’ve read Rolling Stone or the writing of Greil Marcus, for instance, you know that criticism of noisy music is different from valid criticism of the visual.
Flaunting her mediocrity on TV, Maslin often gathered with various colleagues on Charlie Rose to predict, in deadly earnest, the year’s Oscar winners. It was as merry as a frolic for morticians. Then, after many years in the dark, Maslin took up book reviewing — i.e., reading and/or skimming.
Others qualify for this Parade of the Limited, but more would be less. Instead, I’m adding a second bonus today: my interview with the witty curmudgeon Florence King.
N.B. If any of the above wish to respond, I will print their replies, giving them the opportunity that I did not receive.