24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A WORTHY BIOGRAPHY FOR A GREAT STAR!, February 4, 2006
This review is from: Kay Francis: I Can't Wait to Be Forgotten (Paperback)
Scott O'Brien has worked very hard to produce a tremendous biography of the beautiful actress and film star Miss Kay Francis. There are many wonderul photographs and ads, the most interesting being the material from the plays that Kay Francis starred in on Broadway and on tour. There are also several photographs of Kay Francis taken after her retirement and they show her to be a beautiful woman. Some years ago, George Eells produced a book entitled "Ginger, Loretta, and Irene Who?". This book contained a chapter on Kay Francis that provided a compelling life and career history. However, Eells focused on the negative aspects of Kay's life. Scott O'Brien accessed the actress' diaries and had the cooperation of Kay's close friend actress Jetti Preminger Ames and her family. Scott has done a superb job with this biography of an actress who is fondly remembered by some of us. You won't be disappointed with this book! It is one of the greatest biographies of an actress that I have read!
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Speak, Memory, August 1, 2006
This review is from: Kay Francis: I Can't Wait to Be Forgotten (Paperback)
Scott O'Brien--you magnificent, astonishing fool you! Imagine spending so many years of your life researching the life of a forgotten screen actress from the 1930s, a woman who is barely remembered nowadays! Why fling your undoubted energies after such a quixotic goal? If you must write about old Hollywood, why not write about someone people have heard of, like Joan Crawford, Garbo, Clark Gable? If you want to go obscure, how about Norma Shearer? But for goodness sake, Kay Francis!?! Scott O'Brien, you have labored in the vineyards where angels fear to tread!
As it turns out, I CAN'T WAIT TO BE FORGOTTEN is starlore of a very high order, and if you want an engrossing examination of a great Hollywood personality, this is the book for you. Kay Francis may be little remembered today, but all that is about to change as succeeding generations pick up on the glory that is her screen presence. Born in Oklahoma City ("by mistake," she bitterly commented) in 1905, Francis dabbled in high society and became the social secretary to rich dowagers while pining for Broadway stardom in New York. Her own madcap ways were fueled by the great rush to sexual and economic freedom pursued by many women in the wake of World War I, in which they had been asked for so many sacrifices without even having the right to vote. Scott O'Brien is a sensitive cultural historian and writes with perception about this, the so-called "flapper era," showing us that Kay Francis' fabled and open sexuality was part and parcel of the times in which she grew up.
After an interesting apprenticeship at Paramount Studios, Francis signed a long-term contract with Warner Brothers, and for a time in the early 1930s she became the queen of the lot, eventually rising in salary and status to the absolute heights of success. She was the highest paid actor of them all, and therein lay her tragedy, for Jack Warner turned against her and forced her against her will to play out her contract in increasingly shabby B movies. Late in life, she and her Warner Bros rival, Bette Davis, sat down and let down their hair about their disputes with Warners. Why did you keep making those B movies, Bette asked Kay. Because she was in it for the money, Kay replied. Bette said she walked away, because she was in it for the career.
Kay became a victim of public scrutiny for her shabby studio treatment was the talk of the nation. Eventually she left Warners, and the films she made afterwards, for other studios, are indeed, as O'Brien points out, among the best and most rewarding of her career, culminating in the "Monogram Trilogy" (DIVORCE, ALLOTMENT WIVES, WIFE WANTED) which sound like horrors but instead crackle with noir energy and a gritty raw realism miles removed from the somewhat grand products (like THE WHITE ANGEL, a biopic of Florence Nightingale) of Warners' A list.
Despite love affairs with Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, and even gay stars like Nils Asther, Kay's great love seems to have been a German nobleman who broke off their engagement, as the Second World War loomed, to go back and fight for Hitler. Although she never knew it, he killed himself shortly after Pearl Harbor, far away in Nazi Germany. It was like a scene from one of her great romantic movies, but twisted somehow, bizarre and bewildering.
It turns out that she wasn't even a lesbian, not really, though she had some passionate interludes with a woman here and there. That she was a lesbian O'Brien traces back to a canard propagated by Phil Silvers, her co-star in FOUR JILLS AND A JEEP.
When Kay Francis said, "I can't wait to be forgotten," could she have somehow known that indeed the halls of memory would have been so thoroughly scrubbed clean? No matter now, for thanks to the incredible, noble efforts of author Scott O'Brien, and the hard work of the folks at Bear Manor Media, O'Brien's publisher, a new star has risen, and her name is Kay Francis. You can't keep genius down, even if it speaks with a lisp that turns all one's "r"s to "w"s.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Incredible Job of Research and Writing, March 19, 2007
This review is from: Kay Francis: I Can't Wait to Be Forgotten (Paperback)
Scott O'Brien has pulled off an amazing feat. Kay Francis lived a vigorous and, for the time, unconventional life that could easily be turned into the sleazy tabloid fare all too common (and popular)today. Yet O'Brien has managed to present a vivid, highly readable, and scrupulously researched account without a single trace of nudge-nudge-wink-wink salaciousness or its nearly as unpleasant opposite, sychophantic can-do-no-wrong fan worship. I confess I had started reading with the plan to hop-skip to films I know and love, but I found myself engrossed on every page. I have long been a great fan of Miss Francis's films, but I now appreciate her work far more. (The ONLY small flaw with the book is the typos noted by other reviewers, but this could easily be fixed in a subsequent edition.) The writing is bright and lively. The pictures are great. The author's ability to present a complex and fascinating personality in the context of her times is superb.
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