Amazon.com: 'Tis Herself: A Memoir: Maureen O'Hara, John Nicoletti: Books

From Publishers Weekly
Film legend O'Hara (b. 1920) and her collaborator, Nicoletti, have assembled a delightful anecdotal autobiography. She calls it "the tale of the toughest Irish lass who ever took on Hollywood and became a major leading lady of the silver screen." Born in a Dublin suburb, Maureen FitzSimons was a child radio actress, joined the Abbey Theater at age 14 and was cast in two major films before she was 19. After Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939) came The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), launching her career of 60 films. Many were top productions, yet O'Hara never received an Oscar nomination: "Hollywood would never allow my talent to triumph over my face." She recalls highlights and hurdles, including confrontations with stars and directors, commenting, "I have acted, punched, swashbuckled, and shot my way through an absurdly masculine profession during the most extraordinary of times." With her hazel-green eyes and red hair, O'Hara was dubbed "Queen of Technicolor," but yearned for more than "decorative roles." During her lengthy friendships with John Wayne and director John Ford, she saw "the darker side of John Ford, the mean and abusive side." In concluding chapters, she writes about her TV appearances as a vocalist, the mysteries surrounding the death of her husband, Brig. Gen. Charles F. Blair and her life in the Virgin Islands, where she ran an airline (Antilles Air Boats) and became publisher of Virgin Islander magazine. Hollywood's heyday returns to life in this revealing, insightful memoir. O'Hara treats readers like close friends, and her powerful personality is evident throughout. Photos not seen by PW.
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

The true leading lady has been gone from movie screens long enough that we can now ask ourselves if we miss her. So let's start by seeing how much we've missed Maureen O'Hara, a case study in second billing -- an immaculately lovely actress who could be tough or yielding as the occasion required but who was rarely required to carry the occasion. She was instead carried (sometimes literally) by square-jawed, square-framed leading men (John Wayne, most often) who could admire her pluck and sass without ceding any male prerogative. Maureen O'Hara was the woman who said she wouldn't be waiting when they got back -- and always was.

So let's put O'Hara front and center for a change, and let's pick her up when she's still Maureen FitzSimons, an ambitious young Dublin girl from a proud, attention-hungry family. The lassie is all set to embark on a career with the Abbey Theatre when the movies come calling, in the portly form of Charles Laughton. He can't stand her screen test, but he's taken by her dauntless hazel-green eyes, and so, still in her teens, she becomes his co-star in "Jamaica Inn" (1938), and then she's Esmeralda to his Quasimodo, and he's all set to cast her in another film when the war intervenes.

Marooned in Hollywood, she takes whatever flotsam comes her way, and before long, another man comes to her rescue: the irascible and already legendary director John Ford. He's an almighty mess and a self-proclaimed Irish republican, but he drops her into the sentimentalized Wales of "How Green Was My Valley," and, soon enough, she's helping him enact masculine myths of the West ("Rio Grande") and the U.S. Army ("The Long Gray Line") and, of course, Ireland ("The Quiet Man"). And even when he's brutalizing her on and off the set, she's careful not to protest too much. Or maybe it's just because she's too eaten alive by that husband of hers, the alcoholic nut job who lives off her and cheats on her and punches her in the stomach when she's pregnant with his child. But she gets a divorce and a new lover, and then, just as her career is tapering off, she finds marital bliss with Charlie Blair, an aviation pioneer who gets himself killed in a plane crash that is never satisfactorily explained. And then her best friend, John Wayne, dies, and what is there to live for? But she keeps on going because, by heaven, she's "a tough Irishwoman" who's never lost her faith in God and never will.

It's a movie, all right, but is it a book? Maybe, but not this book. 'Tis Herself is everything you'd expect from a film-star memoir, and less: clock-punch prose, self-serving anecdotes, absurdly perfunctory allusions to world events ("Vietnam was over. Watergate had come and gone, and a gentle peanut farmer was poised to become president") and liberal heapings of dirt on the safely dead. If anything, the gossip in 'Tis Herself, coming from someone who prides herself on her piety, has a more rancid aftertaste than usual. O'Hara reminds you of that angel-faced Catholic schoolgirl in the back row who waits for Sister's head to turn and then shanghais the nearest ear. (Lana Turner lied about her age! Peter Lawford and Richard Boone got caught in a male brothel!)

Amid all this settling of scores and posing for statues, a reader's only recourse is to pick up the threads that the memoirist, in her haste, has dropped. And so we note the curious way in which O'Hara's life and career have overlapped with gay or bisexual men: Laughton, to begin with; and second husband Will Price, who in addition to being a wife-beating lush, reportedly dabbled with men; and in the one plot twist that took me by surprise, John Ford, who is caught by O'Hara in a major liplock with "one of the most famous leading men in the picture business." (Oh, wouldn't you like to know? So would I.)

Ford's lowering presence nicely illustrates the book's other unspoken theme: the degree to which O'Hara, a self-styled man's woman, let herself be man's punching bag. She was, by her own account, coerced into marrying Husband No. 1, coerced out of her money by Husband No. 2 and coerced by Husband No. 3 into giving up her career. And in between husbands, there was always "Pappy" Ford, a labyrinth of "secrecy, lies, and aggression" who sent her mash notes and undermined her career, made nice with her family and humiliated her in public, treated her as a muse and then sicced law enforcement on her. Ever the good battered wife, she excuses his malice as a perverted form of love and coos to his departed spirit: "I love you too, Pappy." This recurrent pattern of submission sits bizarrely on a woman who insists she "always gave as good as I got" and was "only on her knees before God."

But the same dichotomies play out in her films. For all the beauty of her complexion and the purity of her John Singer Sargent profile, she was reduced, time after time, to the shrew waiting to be tamed. And tamed she was: defanged by Errol Flynn in "Against All Flags," publicly spanked by John Wayne in "McLintock!" (with a hand shovel), hauled by Wayne from glen to glen in "The Quiet Man" (rupturing one of her disks in the process). Did it ever occur to her, while her good friend Duke was dragging her facedown through a field of sheep dung and good Pappy Ford was looking on with an approving smile, that there was a cost to being a man's woman, that being a leading lady doesn't necessarily lead anywhere? If it crossed her mind, she's not telling.

Reviewed by Louis Bayard

'Tis Herself: A Memoir (Hardcover)

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