Eats, Shoots and Leaves

...He never foresaw the coming of noisy household mechanisms: dishwashers, vacuums, washing machines, surround sound TV, speaker phones...

...Her readers were, though...

...Narcissus had turned into what he had metamorphosed “with his melting watches, his ants, grasshoppers, crutches, distended breasts, skulls, boats, lions, eggs and behind them, his barren, brooding landscapes...

...The whole exercise teaches her something useful, she writes, “i.e...

...The first rule of biography,” says the chronicler of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, “is shoot the widow...

...Those of us who have written about departed luminaries know only too well how many obstacles are deliberately or accidentally strewn in our path...

...When Mary sent Sondheim a birthday present he thanked her but asked, where was Foxy’s head...

...Occasionally, she observes, people being interviewed have to be saved from themselves...

...Francis, and the investigator into Sisyphus...

...An advocate of the “open plan,” Wright banished walls in favor of large interior spaces, usually accompanied by cathedral ceilings...

...The author of Shoot the Widow has them both...

...She is equally persuasive when she writes, albeit briefly, of her early journalistic career, her happy marriage, and her biographical triumphs and frustrations...

...It was a theatrical extravaganza being staged just for us, but then why was my father shouting so angrily and pulling me across the grass...

...But for Jacobs’ family of five children there was no privacy...

...Meryle Secrest states that playwright John Guare was not a welcoming source for stories about his friend Sondheim...

...Contemplating the oil entitled Metamorphosis of Narcissus she writes, “If, as Kenneth Clark has observed ‘all artists have an obsessive central experience round which their art takes shape,’ then what was as the waves to Turner, the sky to Constable or the sun to Van Gogh was surely, in Dalí’ s case, the theme of the sea, or, more precisely, reflection...

...Secrest did not, of course, heed her own advice—otherwise she would have been confined to celebrities of previous centuries...

...The reason: Spouses tend to hide uncomplimentary details, deny interviews, withhold indiscreet letters, diaries, archives in an attempt to transform the deceased into St...

...these literary sleuths examine newspaper files, run down lacunae and buttonhole anyone with a revealing anecdote about the subject...

...Secrest, eclectic biographer of Kenneth Clark, Salvador Dalí, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers, and many others, has put together a diverting Tell Most book about her experiences with the great and the ungrateful...

...And incidentally to shoot not only the widow of the Great Man, but “his literary executor, his publisher, his agent, his offspring, and anyone else you can think of...

...I must have made too good a guess...

...Leonard Bernstein receives a less critical shake from the author...

...Secrest grew up in Bath, England, and recalls the German bombing of that city with a child’s eye for detail: “Our house, on the hills south of the city, had a panoramic view of dozens of planes diving on the city, dropping bombs...

...She persisted in her research and wound up producing a book brimming with aperçus...

...Then she pounces: “his days were so full they had to be timed to the minute, with unvarying periods parceled out for correspondence, dictating, phone calls, writing, meetings, lectures, walks, the afternoon nap, the occasional toddle along to the pub for a jug of beer, and his secret vice, girlfriends...

...As Mary “began to reminisce with almost streamof-consciousness frankness, I realized she was one of them...

...Such unwillingness to venture into a subject’s bedroom led Mary Rodgers Guettel to believe she had found the ideal biographer for her father...

...Having seen the man in his prime, she dines with him in decline, the victim of what he calls a coup de vieux—Lord Clark’s euphemism for a stroke—and takes copious notes...

...The author, who can make an individual rise up from a page, is not betraying confidences...

...The same was true with her work about a living artist, the Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim...

...Why the odd dichotomy...

...Secrest was flattered by his compliments and conversation...

...The rumor is that the parents’ divorce was at least partly attributable to the house...

...He found it ominous that her name contained the words “Merely Secrets...

...Secrest’s Report of Frank Lloyd Wright contains a similarly sharp and iconoclastic view...

...For all her candor, however, Mary found it difficult to analyze her father, save as a man blessed by angels and beset by demons...

...But she was never seduced by them—or him...

...In his youth, she notes, Lord Clark had been a sprinter, and “It would not be too much of an overstatement to say that he could shoot out of bed take his morning tea, bathe, be dressed and ready for action in the time it took the rest of us to stagger to the front door for the morning paper...

...One day they will find you somewhere with your manuscript.’” Theatrical braggadocio...

...The double images, the hidden faces, the methode paranoïaque, memory’s persistence—who bothered to unravel their significance nowadays...

...I won’t do it myself but I’ve good connections...

...It is more relevant to note that her name also contains the words “Steel” and “Mercy”— requirements for every biographer...

...Her saline reminiscence ends on a melancholy note...

...It is promptly savaged by Clark’s son Alan (“tawdry . . . trashy . . . dreadfully banal”), and by highly placed friends of the deceased...

...Concludes Secrest, “He was kind, generous and funny, but he had phobias, was addicted to alcohol and nicotine, had breakdowns, was an incorrigible womanizer and was, most of the time, emotionally unavailable...

...And no one got shot...

...After his death Secrest writes the unauthorized biography...

...She begins with Kenneth Clark, aristocratic art critic and host of the PBS program Civilisation...

...Reviewed by Stefan Kanfer Meryle Secrest’s title derives from Justin Kaplan’s tongue-in-cheek aphorism...

...how they decided to get engaged informally, and how that idea had collapsed during a party...

...She obviously admired his ascent from Boston wunderkind to world celebrity, and sympathized with his long-suffering family...

...When I was working on my Sondheim project, she had described in detail how she had fallen in love with him when she was only 14 and would have married him, even knowing that he was a homosexual...

...One had to wonder, given his passion for the stopwatch, how satisfactory he was as a lover...

...not to write about anyone I knew well...

...Nevertheless, Secrest persisted, wrote the truth as she knew it¸ and met her deadline...

...How ironic, she continues, that Dalí’ s father had predicted “You will die alone, ruined and betrayed...

...Things started well enough...

...An old Broadway hand, replying to my question, said, ‘If you quote me, I won’t kill you but I’ll get you killed...

...The whole scene was lit up by clusters of flares, interspersed with sudden explosions of flame...

...Just as Narcissus drowned himself while amorously attempting to embrace his own image, so Dalí, who had constructed a grandiose self to compensate for the freak he secretly believed himself to be, was expressing some deep truths about his state of mind in this perfectly realized extraordinary painting...

...But few have ever told of our travails...

...No wonder Bernstein’s children were protective, she says...

...I was too fascinated by the roaring sounds and shooting lights to move and stood as if transfixed...

...In many ways, despite Secrest’s protests to the contrary, Somewhere for Me, the life of Richard Rodgers, is indeed her most successful book, not least because Mary was so forthcoming: “There was nothing I wanted to know that Mary would not tell me...

...stylistic advances...

...But the best biographers go on unfazed...

...Mary was as bitter about her imperious mother, Dorothy, as Sondheim had been about his own mother, Foxy...

...ODDLY ENOUGH, the book’s most compelling character is the reticent woman who studied other people’s personalities and achievements, and who, en route, tells us a bit about herself...

...she is resurrecting a career, a person and an epoch...

...The Wright house built for Herbert Jacobs, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, was “full of...

...when she closed in they must have felt “as John Arbuthnot observed in the 18th century, that biography is ‘one of the new terrors of death.’” Accordingly, Secrest was discreet in discussing Bernstein’s wild sexual proclivities...

...But there was another clue that came to light when the author parsed an obscure reference to Rodgers’ early connection with gangsters: “Exactly how Rodgers might have become enmeshed, I did not know...

...The inference is witty, deprecatory and completely untrue...

...Predictably,” she says laconically, “the [Rodgers] family was not pleased...

...Unquestionably the man had a genius for architecture (as well as for self-promotion), but he was not the visionary portrayed by his adoring followers...

...Perhaps, but Secrest recalls that when she was investigating the market frauds of Dalí’s manager, he finessed some awkward questions with the comment, “It’s too easy to put a gun in a man’s hand for $3,000...

...She chose instead to write about contemporary, controversial men whose careers often verged on the unsavory...

...Partly it came from the enormous pressures attendant on bringing show after show to the Main Stem...

...Salvador Dalí, for example, was traced to a hospital room in Spain, where he was involved with forgers and racketeers...

...Partly it arose from an unhappy adolescence during which Rodgers’ father, a doctor, sternly put down Richard’s attempt to become a songwriter...

...So far, so flattering...