The corn is Greene
Larry Adler
Hollywood Garson Kanin (Hart-Davis, MacGibbon £4.75) My Story Marilyn Monroe (W. H. Allen £2.95) Could be I'm getting cynical. Here are two books, one by Garson Kanin on Hollywood and the other by Marilyn Monroe — never before Published, it says on the cover — and I don't believe either one. Why not? Is it the books or is It me?
Kanin would have you believe his recall is total, that he remembers every conversation he's ever had with every big name he'e ever worked with, not only that but he also remembers the conversations the big names had with other big names, when he wasn't even there. That's some memory.
Years ago Lillian Ross created a sensation with her New Yorker pieces about the making of the film The Red Badge of Courage, later put out as a book, Picture. Everybody from L. B. Mayer and John Huston to the kid who holds UP the clapper-board in front of the camera, was quoted verbatim and they generally came out sounding like schmucks. But Ross made You believe her and while a lot of people were annoyed, outraged or just plain hurt, nobody claimed they were misquoted. Later she gave the treatment to Hemingway, spending several daYs with him during a New York visit, and in her piece she made a complete slob out of
Hemingway, a bigger bore than a bar-room drunk.
So why do I believe Ross and why don't I believe Kanin? Well, her pieces had immediacy, everybody was around to challenge her accuracy if they wanted to, though nobody did. Also, she wasn't interviewing anybody: the People she wrote about weren't talking to her but to each other and she was just around, taking notes, recording impressions, the hood Concealing the cobra. Most of Kanin's people, 9bldwyn, Barrymore, Laughton, Gable, Lombard, are dead by now. And all of their conversations are terribly pat. As a boxer I used to know might say, they all come on pretty gbbd. Kanin comes on pretty good too and the °MY ones who don't are the ones Kanin doesn't like.
There are good showbiz yarns in the book though, such as Kanin's account of Mae's whorehouse, where the girls were uncannily accurate doubles of film stars. Kanin confesses hIS partiality for "Carole Lombard," mainly because he had a crush on Carole Lombard. But his general way with an anecdote is four pages of what purports to be verbatim dialogue. No r1;bubt about it, it does fill up space and wasn't it Jbbri O'Hara who said he was switching to Writing fat books because they sold better than skinny ones? Well, I don't mind suspending d_isbelief — I just don't likel being made to feel um being hung with it. Which. brings us to lIfy Story which is suPPosed o be by Marilyn Monroe. We are asked to be 'eve that she rote sentences like,
All Your hingry days d hysterical nights
step up to the eadlines 1nd take a bow." Arm M arm? Or "The boys co tinued to come after me as if I were \a vampire with a rose in my teeth." How different from the life of our own ,1 dear Bela Lugosi. Try this on for size: "Automobiles roll down Sunset Boulevard like an endless. string of beetles. Their rubber tires make a purring high-class noise."
At which point I made a very low—class noise, not to be repeated in a family paper. Still with me? "Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul." And more such 'epigrams'. On the last page, 143 — at least it's not a fat book — it says. "This is where Marilyn's manuscript ended when she gave it to me. Milton H. Greene."
I have a limb I keep for going-out-on purposes. Haven't used it in ages but this seems as good a time as any.
The corn is Greene.
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