Customer Reviews

Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

first and only non-fiction account of an openly gay and openly leftest hollywood and broadway personality spaning 80 years of glamour. His credentials and reputation are beyond question; his legacy will live far byond his years. Even the youngest amounst us will know the personalities. The best part about it is the true life love story that enables and keeps the man productive into his 80's. Straight or gay...don't miss this one!

The best thing a book can have is the author's voice, and Laurents' autobiography certainly has his: argumentative, discrening, opinionated, political, sexy, candid. He has a bristly side to him and he doesn't hide it. And this makes his book seem genuine and compelling, not the kind of "I loved them all..we had a great time" gush that many older entertainment types write. His take on the blacklist is wonderful. His backstage stories about how his play ("Time of the Cuckoo") was a hit and his movie ("The Way We Were") got chewed up in the editing room are fascinating. And he doesn't hold back: Sydney Pollack comes off a clever swine, Jerome Robbins is shown warts and all. You may find that Laurents is the kind of man you might have trouble liking in real life, but you won't be able to put his book down. That's because he's a real writer with a voice...and it's in these pages. One of the best theatre books in quite a while, certainly the best since Neil Simon's first book. Seems like good playwrites make good memoir writers. Read this!

This is a beautifully written book! I loved every page of this book and I heartily commend Laurents for making me feel what it was like to be a gay man in the forties and fifties who just happened to know most of the greats of New York and Hollywood! it's a cliche but my advice is to run out and buy this incredible book! Thank you, Mr. Laurents!

I just finished reading this fascinating but maddening autobiography last night. There is no doubt about it - Arthur has quite a story to tell. His storytelling pulls you in, making you feel as if he's telling the stories directly to you. He's met or worked with virtually every major star of the past 60 years so he's definitely got tales to tell. However, after reading for awhile, I found several things off-putting. Early on, Arthur starts to regale us with endless stories of sexual conquests. He inevitably describes his partners as "handsome", "beautiful", etc. A few stories like this would have gotten the point across, but I eventually came to the conclusion that Arthur was very insecure about his attractiveness and had to make sure that we readers knew that he was very desirable (even if pictures don't seem to tell that story). Then there's the sexual encounter he has with an old friend and sex partner who was starring in a play that Arthur was directing - it was simply creepy to me. As I continued reading, it just seemed that Arthur wanted to dissect and criticize almost everyone he came across, especially those who had disappointed him, and on several occasions I thought he was incredibly unkind. His portrait of Jerry Robbins is one-sided at best and mean at worst - he definitely comes across as if he has an ax to grind with Jerry. His coldness upon Jerry's death struck me as amazingly hard-hearted, considering all that they had done together in their lives. Arthur also never seemed to turn that critical eye onto himself. He generally comes off as good in all encounters, while others are usually immoral, dishonest, etc. I also had the sense that Arthur might have embellished the details to help himself come out so well in his stories. (This is especially ironic, considering his comments about how Gypsy Rose Lee did the same in her autobiography.) If you're interested in Broadway and the movies in the second half of the 20th century, this is a great read. Just beware the shortcomings of the author.

Arthur Laurents, by chance and by design, has been near the center of theatrical landmarks like WEST SIDE STORY. Thank God he lived to write this memoir.

The most fascinating character revealed is Laurents himself, a highly intelligent, ambitious writer driven and sustained for decades by anger, political self-righteousness, and sex.

The passages (there are many) about his busy love life come across too often as the barroom boasting of a man chronically insecure about his looks and physical appeal. Laurents tells us again and again how beautiful his lovers were, and how great they were in bed, etc. etc.

A gentleman would withhold most of this, but Laurents doesn't pretend to be a gentleman. He throws acid on everyone who ever crossed him or disagreed with him politically. For a man angered above all by "injustice", he shows little concern for the names or reputations of colleagues and friends he trashes on nearly every page. All this settling of old scores makes lively reading, but one is surprised that such an angry, vengeful, judgmental guy has any friends left at all.

Like so many in the arts, he uses leftwing politics as a substitute for personal morality. In other words, he may lie, cheat, deceive, and lay waste in his personal life, but his Leftist convictions automatically make him feel superior to everyone he knows.

All this adds to the psychological interest of Laurents' self-portrait, which reveals more, I suspect, than he knows. That said, it's a fine book, an important book, and should be read by anyone with an interest in 20th century American theatre, especially musical theatre.

I was about 20 pages in to this wonderful autobiography when I found myself thinking, "Man, I'm going to like this". All 380 other pages, I was right. Actually, I wish I could give it four and a half stars, because I do have one small complaint about it -- Arthur Laurents in many places in the book seems to be writing to people who know him already and are, so to speak, looking for themselves in the index. The story leaps around from place to place and time to time and age to age fairly randomly, and in more than just a few places people's first names appear with the apparent assumption that all of us are going to know exactly who it is that Arthur is talking about. That said, there are also lots and lots and lots of people that everyone knows about, and it is sort of gossipingly wonderful to read interpretations of Katharine Hepburn as being sort of weird, Lena Horne as being sort of wonderful, Jerome Robbins as being sort of way too much about himself, etc., etc., etc. Beyond all that there is this man, Arthur Laurents, himself. The flyleaf to the book says that he has had a "rich life", and that's putting it mildly. There is not only the magnificence of the body of his work, but there's also just a guy who lived life to its way-beyond fullest. He smoked dope (and, unlike Bill, inhaled and liked it), he slept around because he found lots of people sexy and attractive, he did what his heart called him to do in his profession, he bitched with a lot of people and made friends with lots of other people -- in short, if that's not necessarily who I would want to be myself, it sure enough is somebody I would like to be friends with and know. This is a wonderful autobiography even for someone who has never heard of Arthur Laurents, because it is all about people you've known all your life, but it is also a wonderful autobiography because few people who write autobiographies ever let that much of themselves show. I loved it, and I think you will, too.

Original Story by Arthur Laurents is an excellent autobiography by a very talented man. His talents include screenwriting, directing, playwriting. His story is told with candor and humor. He is very upfront about being gay and his various affairs in Hollywood and New York, noticeably his long affair in the late 40's, early 50's with Farley Granger. The book takes you behind the scenes of the movie industry and the people who ruled Hollywood. He is frank in his opinion of the people he worked (and lived) with. A Marxist since the thirties, he shows no affection for director Elia Kazan who blew the whistle on many of Hollywood's greats during the '50s. Laurents has wonderful stories about working on Broadway with West Side Story and Gypsy. His priceless vignettes about Ethel Merman are worth the price of the book alone. Many other celebrities are mentioned throughout his book.He has lived a very full life and it is very evident in this entertaining book. And he's still going strong at 83.

The history of entertainment in the US is a fascinating maze of economics, innovation and, not least of all, personality and talent. For me, what Laurents does best here is to fill in some of the missing pieces, elaborate and embellish the already legendary story of Broadway and especially the musical theatre from the 50s and beyond. It is enriching to get another point of view on the making of such influential shows as West Side Story and Gypsy. It is also daunting to learn how many and in what ways swollen egos spoiled or shaped the creative process and result. Laurent's anger at those who squealed during the HUAC witchhunt is palpable and his frankness about his and others' sexuality is...well...titillating but sometimes quite silly. His outspokenness would have been socially uplifting 30 years ago. Today, it seems to echo those who have already gone before him. This is a book that needs to be added to musical theatre history especially for those of us who believe in the musical theatre (and not in the mind-deadening nonsense on Broadway and in the West End today).

I got a big kick out of this book. Actually, I couldn't put it down. I admire Laurents' intelligence and his honesty. It was very refreshing to read a show business autobiography that did not seem to be written to attest to the author's heterosexuality. It found it rather titillating, especially tidbits like his being told at a gay and lesbian party by the lover of [a female celebrity] that her first lover had been Gypsy Rose Lee's mother. (This fact was what made him interested in writing the musical, Gypsy!) The book is interestingly structured. It jumps back and forth and time, but it is all quite logical. "A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood" it certainly is, with a huge cast of characters that includes Chaplin, Gene Kelly, Alfred Hitchcock, Gore Vidal, and Shelley Winters (who was a "beard" for Laurent's lover, Farley Granger), as well as the obvious Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins. Parts of the book are grotesque and I thought the last 20 pages could have been cut to about two, but I really recommend this book. I've thought about it a lot after reading it, which is highly unusual for a book of this genre. Oh. And I laughed a great deal, too.

Arthur Laurents' professional life has taken him from obscurity to the highs of Hollywood to the highs of Broadway. And personally, he obviously always felt that a lover was more important than a hit. Laurents pulls no punches. He takes the reader on a journey like none other I've read about: having worked with almost every big (and little) name in the theatre and film, he lets us in on backstage drama and trauma. And he tells how he survived. As to his personal life, it is ALMOST as heady as his writing career. His story is informative and exciting and romantic and funny and moving. This is a MUST READ. 400 pages goes by in a flash.