2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
What Tragedy?, November 25, 2009
I picked up this book in the hopes of learning about a cultural icon. Betty Grable's Pin-up from World War II was something every child of the 1950's and 1960's was familiar with. But who was the person behind the first Supermodel?
This book attempts to answer this question, but falls short. We learn she is a contradiction to her wholesome image of the smiling girl next door. She was an abusive mother, had a predilection for bartenders, bikers and hard living men. She was a hard drinking, bawdy and tough edged woman.
She was also a star of the first magnitude, who took her career seriously. She was a hard working star who enjoyed her work and her celebrity status.
But this book never successfully explains her tragedy. she had unhappy marriages, but so have 51% of us in this country, and this does not qualify us as having tragic lives. She had a gambling addiction, but apparently could always support it. She lived hard and died too young, but this was a life choice she made.
Spero Pastos was not an experienced author when he wrote this biography, and although I learned about Ms. Grable's life, I would have liked a more balanced and complete treatment.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The book pulping was designed for, July 31, 2008
Betty Grable was an emotional cripple, a child abuser, and an all-around jerk to everyone who knew or worked with her. I had hoped that Spero Pastos's biography of her would show her in a true light. It doesn't, though; Pastos is so wrong-headedly and so nastily vituperative towards every woman he mentions that Grable's very real faults are lost in the muddle.
Simply put, Pastos's work reads as if it were written by a misogynist. Every woman Pastos refers to in this book is evil in some way, and every man's faults are caused by the women in their lives. To give one example: Grable's mother spent most of her adult life crippled due to an infected hip joint. This in and of itself was not unusual at the time; tuberculosis of the bone and staph infections of the joints crippled hundreds of thousands of men and women before antibiotics were discovered. In Pastos's mind, however, Mrs. Grable couldn't have had a medical condition: no, she was a woman, so she must have been making it up solely to hurt her poor, poor put-upon husband, and therefore his abuse of their children was totally her fault, not his!
Pastos does this over and over and over again with every woman in the book. Betty's mother is a neurotic malingerer. Betty's friends are enablers (unlike Betty's husband, Harry James, who is barely even slapped on the wrist for allowing his children to be beaten black and blue in his presence). Betty's co-stars are catty. Betty's female relatives are co-dependants. And so on and so on. This litany of All Women Are Crazy Neurotic Weirdos And Men Are Their Victims doesn't just raise the reader's ire, it also takes away from the very real story Pastos should be telling: Betty Grable's abuse and cruelty. Betty simply doesn't stand out among the myriad of nasty evil women Pastos presents. Worse, Pastos seems to be enamored of the idea that every problem in the world, or at least every problem caused by women (although in his mind they're the same thing), is caused by some psychological fault like neurosis or conversion syndrome or enabling or Munchausen's. None of these people could possibly have been unobservant or physically ill or even, horrors of horrors, a bad person. No, there must be some psychobabble behind everything.
This book made me very sad. Child abuse is often discounted or ignored, and it's important for former victims of abuse to speak up, especially if their parent is all but deified by a large proportion of the public. But this book doesn't paint Betty Grable as a child abuser: it portrays all women as evil just for existing as women, and Grable's very real faults are lost in the midst of a truckload of insultingly misogynistic psychobabble in which every woman is bad and every man is more of a poor, put-upon victim than the children who were abused.
I do not recommend this book in the least.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A tragedy Indeed, March 26, 2009
I found this book to tell many things of the famous star but left me seeing her as a train wreck other than a movie star. I am certain her daughters did give advise on this book, and sadly enough the children were the ones that were left to feel they were her heavy baggage of her sad and lonely life. I did not get all truths or facts from this book on her life, I felt so much was left ot not to make her seem as troubled and disliked as she was. Very sad ending, yes indeed.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
