Leaving a Doll's House: A Memoir (Hardcover)

by Claire Bloom (Author), Bill Phillips (Editor) "I WAS BORN in the North London suburb of Finchley on February 15, 1931, the eldest of two children born to Edward Blume (originally Blumenthal)..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, United States, Vivien Leigh (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
The dismal account of actress Claire Bloom's life with author Philip Roth. Bloom, once described by Gore Vidal as, " ... the most beautiful of postwar screen presences and the finest interpreter of Ibsen in this generation," writes that she was entranced by Roth during their first meeting in 1966. A decade later they moved in together, and she was his muse during the late 70s and early 80s. But Roth's abusive temper and bouts with depression made life nearly intolerable. Even so, they married in 1990, only to divorce a short time later. Though Bloom recounts Roth's violence and betrayal in frightening detail, she never explains why she couldn't muster the strength to simply leave him.

From Publishers Weekly
In 1982, English actress Claire Bloom (b. 1931) published a memoir, Limelight and After, that focused on her professional achievements. This second memoir reveals her personal life. "Now," she writes, "all the factors have altered, and I am free to tell my story in full." Bloom invests the first half of her narrative with a plainspoken eloquence as she recounts her difficult childhood in London, Florida and New York, and as she writes of her affairs with a series of dashing but unreliable men?including Richard Burton and Yul Brynner?with regret but genuine affection. The heart of the book, though, and no doubt its main selling point, is Bloom's long and bitterly angry account of her 18-year relationship?including a marriage?with Philip Roth, who is portrayed here as a brilliant monster, inventively cruel and manipulative. His seductiveness, writes Bloom, "wasn't charm; it was intelligence." By the end of their relationship, Bloom sees him as a "game-playing, Machiavellian strategist." Roth may nor may not have had it coming, but Bloom's hundred-page aria of ire makes for uncomfortable reading in any case. It seems a genuine cri de coeur, howver, voiced with the sensitivity that distinguishes the rest of this earnest soulful autobiography. Photos not seen by PW. Major ad/promo.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 251 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown & Co (T); 1st edition (November 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316099805
• ISBN-13: 978-0316099806
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,059,883 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Frank, Poignant, November 7, 2004

By	Danusha Goska (Bloomington, IN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Leaving a Doll's House: A Memoir (Paperback)

Claire Bloom's "Leaving a Doll's House" is poignant in its honesty, but a bit underwritten. The first time I reached for my highlighter pen was on page 104, where Bloom describes a distraught Vivien Leigh.

Leigh, of course, was the incomparable beauty who portrayed Scarlett O'hara in "Gone with the Wind." Leigh's marriage was unsteady; she suffered from mental illness. Leigh kept her emotions in check, but one night Bloom entered Leigh's dressing room and found her in tears. "Vivien in tears was not like anyone I knew; no red nose, sniffles...she simply sat at her table, in her beautiful scarlet [how appropriate] costume; diamond tears rolled down her cheeks, her beauty undiminished, her make-up untouched." What an image.

Page 149 includes a similarly brief, and pointedly telling, anecdote. Bloom's husband, the author Philip Roth, insists that a skunk has anti-Semitic feelings toward him. This anecdote goes a long way towards explaining Roth's new book, "The Plot Against America."

For the most part, though, the book is frank, and underwritten. For example, Bloom's father was a feckless businessman and gambler who abandoned Bloom, her mother, and her brother. Years later, when she became a successful actress, Bloom's father reappeared, backstage in her dressing room, with a new, rich wife in tow. Bloom, by her own account, was pointedly cold and humiliating to him. Three days later, he died. "I believed," Bloom writes, "that it had been my callous behavior that had killed him" (79). Bloom does not pause after this remarkable confession; only one sentence is offered as denouement, "I picked up and went on with my life."

Bloom played an essential role in a superlative film, "The Haunting." This film is unsurpassed in its genre; its psychological and sociological undercurrents raise it far above most horror films. Though made in 1963, in black and white, and since remade, it regularly makes top ten lists for "the scariest movie ever made." Bloom never mentions it here.

Too, Bloom partnered some of the biggest names among twentieth century actors: Richard Burton, Yul Brynner, Rod Steiger, Anthony Quinn, Laurence Olivier. If the reader had never seen a Burton film, I'm not sure he would get an adequate impression of Burton from this book.

Bloom's Burton has intense green eyes; she quotes a critic who says, beautifully, that his voice is so powerful "he carries his own cathedral with him" (50). But this reader never understood why Bloom risked the pain she reports feeling being his lover while he lived with, and loved, his first wife, Sybil Burton.

Bloom's brief fling with Brynner is enlivened by a late night visit to a Paris nightclub where Brynner, who mythologized his ethnic and professional roots, was adored, and sang with, the Gypsies he said raised him. The night was capped in Russian fashion, Bloom reports; drinking glasses were thrown against the wall.

Pages 195-220 contain, without comment, Bloom's diary entries from a particularly rocky time in her marriage to Roth. This is the best, rawest, most detailed writing in the book.

As others report, Philip Roth is depicted here -- believably -- as a demented and sadistic man. He is also clearly depicted as an object of genuine pathos. It must be hard to be Roth's wife; it must also be hard to be Roth. Without ever using the term, Bloom creates a vivid portrayal of Roth as a kind of idiot savant with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Reading of Roth's self-induced wounds of greed -- he demanded that Bloom pay him huge sums of money as compensation for the time he spent with her -- paranoia, and sheer unhappiness is like reading of a patient tormented by self-induced skin rashes. It's simply hard to watch, and you can't help but say a prayer for his speedy recovery.

"Leaving a Doll's House" is an easy read, and poignant in its honesty. It offers insights into Claire Bloom that will cause me to view her performances, and other women I meet, in a more expansive, and more compassionate, light.

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars For Roth junkies only; a guilty pleasure, July 4, 2003

By	G. Mogel "xrad2" (Newbury Park, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Leaving a Doll's House: A Memoir (Paperback)

Ok, I admit and I am embarrassed--I ate this book up like a pint of Haagen-Daz. And afterwards, I felt about the same as I do when I look at the empty ice cream container: a little shamed, vaguely nauseous, highly satisfied. I am a huge Philip Roth fan, a collector of his signed first editions, etc., so you have to take this reveiw with a grain of salt. Ms. Bloom, or whoever ghosted it, is much better writer than I had anticipated and the pages flew by (just one more spoonful...). Charlie Chaplin, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Gore Vidal, Rod Steiger--it was interesting to read what felt like highly redacted versions of who these men were in Ms. Bloom's life. She does seem to reserve a certainy clarity and honesty for her depiction of Roth, for better or worse, than she seems willing to give to these other men. I, frankly, believe most if not all of what she wrote about Roth, and it is tantalizing to watch the threads of her fact with him reverberate in his fiction. (Sylphid, the harp-playing harpy in "I Married A Communist" is very openly Bloom's daughter with Rod Steiger). So if you are a Roth fan and are interested in a painful dissection of his fiction, you should probably put this on your shelf...though don't expect HIM to appreciate it.

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Philip Roth gave me a lousy divorce settlement..., December 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Leaving a Doll's House: A Memoir (Paperback)

I picked up this autobiography not out of any particular interest in Claire Bloom the actress (I'll say Claire Bloom the writer resembles Claire Bloom the actress : competent, well-spoken, attractive but so narcissistic it is difficult to empathize with her), but rather intrigued by her relationship with Philip Roth, an author I admire but find maddeningly misogynistic.

Bloom the writer is no more convincing than Bloom the actress at depicting a depth of feeling. She tells us she loved Roth, Richard Burton, her mother and her daughter. Yet mother and daughter both get short shrift (when Roth didn't want the daughter around, the daughter was out on her ear). First and second husbands get little attention (not famous enough ? there is something of the groupie about Ms. Bloom).

She names her autobiography after « A Doll's House » but is this ironic ? She portrays herself as the original doormat-wife and mistress and then asks her audience to sympathize with her inability to get her husbands to respect her. She moans about unfaithful husbands but delights in telling her readers how she cuckolded Richard Burton's wife. Pot, meet kettle.

The book's main source of interest is its description of Philip Roth's mental breakdown. This is fascinating for Roth readers - however humiliating it must have been for Roth the man to endure (and now to have exhibited in public by his ex-wife).