Two memoirs and one collection of interviews take us inside the hearts and minds of three remarkable artists.
Here are three books with built-in fan bases — the thoughts of three famous men of stage, screen and television. Each man is contemporary enough for the target reader to already have a personal impression of the subject and know a thing or two about his work. All three were also dead before the publication of the words they no longer own. And that’s where a memento-mori melancholy makes posthumous reading complicated.
Paul Newman (1925-2008), for instance, did not sign off on his memoir, THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF AN ORDINARY MAN (Knopf, 297 pp., $32), edited by David Rosenthal. This relatively raw, momentarily candid reflection by one of the great Hollywood stars of the second half of the 20th century is based on transcripts of interviews made between 1986 and 1991. Newman was in his 60s at the time of the sessions, and he chose a good friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, as a trusted confessor with whom to explore his ambivalent relationships with his own beauty, sex appeal, career, family and relationships. He got others to talk to Stern, too. Newman was conflicted about a lot, and talkative: about his hot romance with his fellow actor Joanne Woodward, who would become his second wife, in a marriage that lasted 50 years; about the death of his son, Scott, from a drug overdose in 1978; about his drinking; and about an emptiness inside him that did not suit the aims of celebrity profiles. “I’m still not sure about what my core really is,” he said. “I don’t have a gift for fathering,” he said.
This last admission is at the dark heart of the book. The subject and the interviewer eventually dropped the project. Woodward, 92, is in the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease. Stern died in 2015. So the publication of this long-abandoned, apparently once-rejected material (Newman burned the audiotapes, but the transcripts survived) comes under the joint management of Newman’s five adult daughters, one of whom supplied the book’s introduction and another the afterword. (They also oversaw and appear in an adaptation of the same material in the six-part HBO documentary series “The Last Movie Stars.”) It was not easy, both father and children make clear, to grow up under the blaze of such stardom. This book, and the TV series that amplifies it, may be a belated airing of truth. It is also a Newman brand-extension decision, made without the consent of the memoirist.
A different kind of sadness chills SCENES FROM MY LIFE (Crown, 259 pp., $28.99). The narrator is the distinctive actor Michael K. Williams (1966-2021), who made the role of Omar Little, a gay stickup man with a baroque code of honor who robs street-level drug dealers in the acclaimed HBO drama series “The Wire,” one of the greatest fictional characters in modern television history. With a different throw of the dice, Williams would now be promoting his own memoir, which was written with Jon Sternfeld.
Here is the first paragraph of the finished product — polished by Sternfeld, no doubt, but naked with real desperation: “Way before I was anything or anyone, I was an addict. That was my identity, what people thought of me, if they thought of me at all. Into my mid-20s, I was on the verge of being discarded, like so many of my brothers and sisters who never got a chance to be something else. But through God’s grace, I am still here.”
Williams died of a drug overdose in his Brooklyn apartment at the age of 54, before publication. After which, every sentence in this now depressing, hectic self-accounting should be read backward for the clues, feints, excuses, highs of success and lows of backsliding of a man who was both an uncommon artist and a common drug OD statistic.
Nurture did not favor him. As Williams tells it, when he was growing up in Brooklyn, his parents fought, his father split, his mother’s influence over him was suffocating, she thwarted his every artistic urge, and his sexuality confused him. By his last year of high school, he was smoking crack. From then on, his account is a jumble: He was a model, he was a backup dancer, he was in rehab, he partied. He was slashed in a bar fight when he was 25, resulting in the assertive scar that made his handsome face memorable as well in other HBO dramas, including “Boardwalk Empire.” Playing Omar was a high, and the character’s death was a devastation to the real man. He wanted to give back to his community and speak to young vulnerable people about his rough journey. This book gives back in the direst of ways.
Beginning in early 2017, on and off through 2019, the New Yorker staff writer D.T. Max conducted five long interviews with Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) in the hopes of writing a magazine profile of the celebrated composer and lyricist. The hook was to have been a musical Sondheim was working on at the end of his life. We may never know why the project was such a personal struggle for the artist. But it was, it floundered, and Sondheim withdrew his interest in participating in the profile. For that matter, we may never know — and why should we? — the real state of his health and the real discomforts and diminishments attending a man heading toward the age of 90.
All we know is that soon after his subject’s death, Max has turned his unused transcripts into FINALE: Late Conversations With Stephen Sondheim (Harper/HarperCollins, 225 pp., $20.99). There is nothing fresh here, not to anyone who, loving Sondheim, has already probably read a lot by and about him. There is, instead, evidence of a vulnerable late-life fragility and creative depression that the journalist hopes to package as reflection. Max has moxie in his favor, that’s for sure. Not knowing much about Sondheim beforehand, aside from the fact that he loves the guy’s work, was in a high school production of “West Side Story” and felt, as he puts it, “a unique connection” to the man (only like every Sondheim devotee ever), Max decided that biographical ignorance would be in his favor, and that in place of knowledge, the younger man would delight the older man with banter. With conversation. With being a part of this unusable profile.
And so, with singular tone-deafness, he presses an obviously fading old man, asking how’s it going, huh, how’s it going, can I sit in on your creative process? No? Why not? And Sondheim seems to be saying, I’m tired, my body hurts, you’re not listening, I’ve explained this all before. To which Max goes, OK, let me tell you a pun, a rhyme, you must meet my wife. To which Sondheim says, let me get my hat and my knife.
I wish. Max cites Lin-Manuel Miranda’s comment that “anyone who tells you that Sondheim isn’t an influence on their music or their work is lying.” A better quote would have been one the creator of “Hamilton” put in the singing mouth of George Washington: “Let me tell you what I wish I’d known / When I was young and dreamed of glory. / You have no control / Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”
Lisa Schwarzbaum, a former critic at Entertainment Weekly, is a freelance journalist.
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