Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood, Jill Watts, 2007
Hattie McDaniel should be a permanent Hollywood icon: a singer, a comedian and, as anyone knows who's paid due attention to her performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, a gifted actress who could have conquered any role brilliantly, a la Tom Hanks. Because of her race, McDaniel was pigeon-holed as a domestic worker or minstrel show performer in every movie role she ever played. Small consolation that she paved the way for so many talented actors; she deserved better.
Despite the heavy-handedness and occasional inaccuracies in the prose (McDaniel's full name is overused, and at least one photograph is mislabeled), this story of the neglect of an extreme talent is touching and maddening.
_________________________________________________________
Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast At Tiffany's and the Dawn of the Modern Woman, Sam Wasson, 2010
Ahh -- Audrey Hepburn. I'm swooning a little bit right now. The face. The dress. Who is there who doesn't adore Audrey Hepburn?
This book is the captivating story of the making of one of the most beloved films out there, a film based on a novel about a carefree hooker and her gay best friend during World War II.
Sound familiar? No? That's because the movie's producers, paralyzed by anxiety over having to sell as a hooker a star who might as well have been a certified princess, dumbed down the original story to get it past the censors and the public. Gay narrator becomes straight gigolo in love with Holly. Hooker becomes party girl. Instead of disappearing to South America and then Africa, Holly retrieves her nameless cat, kisses "Fred," and they presumably stay together. Mickey Rooney does a resoundingly unfortunate turn as a Japanese photographer with ridiculously squinty eyes and such a crowd of teeth that he looks like he's wearing somebody else's dentures along with his own.
The result? A somewhat generic (in 2010 terms, that is; it was groundbreaking in 1961) love story about a girl looking for her place in the world.
Still, the narrative nimbly transports the reader, especially the parts about how Henry Mancini created a completely fresh musical idiom, and why Blake Edwards's miraculous cocktail party scene, which lasts about ten minutes, took a week to film.
_________________________________________________________
What Is Life Worth?: The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of September 11th, Kenneth Feinberg, 2006
Kenneth Feinberg, currently charged with administering the $20 billion BP fund to compensate those harmed by the Gulf oil spill, wrote this memoir about his role as Special Master of the federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. This is the story of the humanity Feinberg invested in attempting to help ease the pain of the inhuman events of September 11, 2001. He and his law firm tackled the job pro bono, spending months meeting with every potential claimant to determine eligibility for compensation and arrive at a fair settlement. "Poignant" doesn't begin to describe the tone of this book; one of the most wrenching vignettes comes near the end, when Feinberg describes his profound sadness at being unable to get through to seven families so paralyzed by grief that they were unable to apply to the compensation fund, even though he and his staff begged to be allowed to fill out all the paperwork for them.
