Celebrity memoirs are such a successful, protean, and permeable genre that there are now not one but two weekly podcasts dedicated to analyzing them, Celebrity Memoir Book Club and the hilarious Celebrity Book Club. The literary magazine Lit Hub recently dedicated an article to the origins of this genre that makes the publishing industry rotate. Although it was the actress Sarah Bernhardt, considered one of the first modern celebrities, who inaugurated the confessional style, the first indisputable bestsellers correspond to the three volumes of memoirs written by the pro-fascist aviator Charles Lindbergh. In the thousands of pages that make up the three books, Lindbergh talks about family values, but not about the many illegitimate children and simultaneous wives that he had hidden across Europe. In that, in the informative selection, he was also a pioneer.
HOW WOULD AMIS DO IT?
In one of the best pieces of the highly entertaining Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, Martin Amis admired Anthony Burgess's superhuman ability to produce novels, reviews, translations and whatever they threw at him without breaking a sweat. After the death of Amis himself a few days ago, many of his writer and editor friends have told similar things about him. In The Guardian, an editor who requested many articles from her throughout her life, Lisa Allardice, recalled when, as soon as John Updike died, she called Amis, a friend and disciple of the author of Run, Rabbit, Run, to request an obituary for him. urgency. "Call me in ten minutes," Amis told him, without clarifying whether or not he accepted the assignment. She did, and then Amis proceeded to dictate a perfectly worded article to her in his characteristic tangled prose, even pronouncing the italics. The piece, half improvised over the phone, ended with a phrase that can now be applied to his author: “His style was unstoppable and compulsively lively and musical. Several times a day you turned to him, as you will now to his ghost, and wondered: how would Updike do it? It is a very cold day for literature”.
JAMES IVORY'S INITIATION JOURNEY
One day James Ivory rummaged under some Indian robes that had belonged to his partner and professional collaborator for decades, Ismail Merchant (died 2005), and found 16 16mm tapes. They were from 1960 and he had recorded them himself when he left the United States for a long trip through Afghanistan. Ivory, who is over 90 years old, met with his trusted screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, with whom he co-wrote A Room with a View, Return to Howard's End and many other films, and also with the editor of his most famous films, Giles Gardner, and the three of them composed a documentary James Ivory, The Long Journey, which recounts that journey in Afghanistan, but also his entire life and career. A curiosity about the film, which premieres this week on Filmin, is that the footage captures the day Ivory and Merchant met, at the screening of an Indian film in New York. And it highlights the paradox that this group of such diverse origins – an American, a Muslim Indian, a German of Indian origin – dedicated themselves for decades to giving the definitive film version of the British upper classes.
PLAY THE MISLEAD
If someone has not seen the penultimate episode of the fourth and final season of Succession and intends to get to it spoiler-free, perhaps they would do well to stop reading here. For the rest: the episode focused on the funeral of the patriarch of the clan Logan Roy. But when it was filmed, to avoid leaks, the crew distributed scripts and marked the church where it was shot, Saint Ignatius, in Manhattan, with the name of Ewan Roy, the brother of Logan played by actor James Cromwell. In addition, the directors asked Brian Cox, who plays Logan, to attend the filming of his own funeral and to be seen for a long time on the steps of the church, in case there were paparazzi covering the filming and thus increase the feeling of confusion. . Cox was also there that day as his consort, as his wife, actress-director Nicole Ansari-Cox ended up making a cameo as Sally-Anne, one of his ex-lovers who sits on the bench at the billionaire girlfriends and wives.
HOW ANNA MAE MANAGED TO STAY TINA
The recently deceased Tina Turner was not born with that name but with that of Anna Mae Bullock. "Tina Turner" was the brainchild of her first husband, Ike, who thought it would be something of a revolving charge and recorded it in the late '50s. His idea was that if Bullock, with whom he began singing in 1957, would he was leaving his duet, he would replace her with another singer, who would then become Tina Turner. When she managed to leave that violent marriage in 1972, sneaking out of a Dallas hotel the day after a beating with 36 cents in her pocket, she was aware that her own stage name, under which she had performed for more than a decade, it did not belong to him. Finally, she managed to keep him in the divorce agreement and that was crucial for the most successful stage of her career, in the eighties, when she was already over forty.
