Penguins in trouble

"And Tango Makes Three," a children's book about a penguin family with two dads, is again at the top of the list of the American Library Assn.'s most challenged books.

According to an article in the Advocate, the library association considers a book to be "challenged" when there has been a formal written request that "materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.''

The association's director of its Office for Intellectual Freedom, Judith Krug, told the Associated Press: "The complaints are that young children will believe that homosexuality is a lifestyle that is acceptable. The people complaining, of course, don't agree with that.''

This bit of news coincided with a book that arrived at our offices the other day. I can only imagine what opponents of "And Tango Makes Three" will think of Joel Derfner's "Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever," published this month by Broadway Books, if it makes it to their local libraries.

The library association also points out that other books on the challenged list include Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Philip Pullman's "The Golden Compass" and Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."


source:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com /jacketcopy/2008/05/penguins-in-tro.html

Elaine Dundy, 86; author wrote about life with Kenneth Tynan

Elaine Dundy, a novelist, biographer, journalist and memoirist who wrote about her turbulent marriage to legendary critic Kenneth Tynan and their life among the rich and famous, died May 1 at her Los Angeles home. She was 86.

The cause was a heart attack, according to her daughter, Tracy Tynan.

Dundy was the author of several books, the best known of which are "The Dud Avocado" (1958), a novel about a young woman much like herself, who comes of age in the 1950s through a series of misadventures in decadent Paris; and "Elvis and Gladys" (1985), a well-received biography of Elvis Presley that homes in on his relationship with his mother.

She also wrote "Life Itself!" (2001), a memoir that focuses on her 13-year marriage to Tynan, the brilliant theater critic and New Yorker writer who finally drove her away with his demands for sadomasochistic sex. In between the beatings and arguments was a charmed life amid the literati and Hollywood and theatrical elite, including Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Laurence Olivier, Gore Vidal and Orson Welles.

"She was a great wit," Vidal, who knew her for 50 years, said Monday. "There was no one else quite like her. She introduced a whole style, the freed American girl landing on old Europe, starting in Paris and moving on to London. She collected a lot of very interesting friends. . . . She had a lot of reality that was far more interesting than fiction."

Dundy was born Elaine Brimberg in 1921 into a prosperous New York City family. Her father was a successful businessman and philanthropist but was so abusive that she left home as soon as she could.

After graduating from Sweet Briar College in Virginia, where she studied acting, she moved to Europe, living first in Paris and later in London. In 1950, she met the flamboyant Tynan, an Oxford graduate who would soon terrorize the theater world with his brilliant and lacerating reviews for the London Observer. Soon after, as Dundy wrote in her memoir, he proposed to her with these words: "I am the illegitimate son of the late Sir Peter Peacock. I have an annual income. I'm 23 and I will either die or kill myself when I reach 30 because by then I will have said everything I have to say. Will you marry me?"

They were married in 1951.

Dundy worked as an actress but found only moderate success. Tynan encouraged her to try writing a novel and promised he would not read it until she was done.

The result was the semi-autobiographical "Dud Avocado," the title of which was meant to suggest the naivete of the American woman abroad: tough on the outside but green on the inside. The book opens on a late morning in Paris with a young American actress named Sally Jay "drifting down the Boulevard St. Michel, thoughts rising in my head like little puffs of smoke," who was dressed formally despite the hour in an evening gown from a previous soiree.

"That was Elaine to a T," said actress Rosemary Harris, who knew Dundy for more than half a century. "She was madcap. She lived life to the fullest."

"The Dud Avocado" goes on to chronicle the protagonist's search for love and enlightenment in boozy exploits and sexual encounters that made her an unusual heroine for the late 1950s. It earned enthusiastic reviews -- "A good many shafts of bright satire illuminate these prancing pages," the New York Times wrote -- and became a bestseller in the United States and abroad.

When the book was reissued last year in the New York Review Books classics series, critic Terry Teachout described Sally Jay as the "spiritual grandmother of Bridget Jones," a characterization that Dundy relished.

She wrote two other novels and a couple of plays before turning to biography in 1980 with "Finch, Bloody Finch" about actor Peter Finch.

Her next subject, to the horror of her sophisticated friends, was Elvis Presley, whom she did not discover until after his death in 1977.

"She was absolutely mesmerized by his voice," said Roy Turner, Dundy's literary executor and a historian in Tupelo, Miss., where Presley was born. She spent five months in Tupelo conducting research, uncovering little-known facts about the iconic performer's life, such as his Jewish and Cherokee heritage. The book was considered a definitive contribution to Presley scholarship, with the Boston Globe praising it as "nothing less than the best Elvis book yet."

Researching Presley led her to her next book, "Ferriday, Louisiana," about the small Louisiana town that spawned an inordinate number of celebrities, including singer Jerry Lee Lewis, World War II Gen. Claire Chennault and evangelist Jimmy Swaggart.

None of those efforts reaped as much attention as her memoir "Life Itself!" with its frothy anecdotes about her glamorous public life, such as the time photographer Richard Avedon flew her and Tynan to New York, nailed them inside large crates and presented them as birthday gifts at a party for director Mike Nichols.

There were also the shocking revelations about her husband's desire to have sex while caning her. She submitted to his punishment several times, explaining that she stayed in the relationship partly because of his threats to kill himself if she left him and partly because of her own sickness, which she described as "the thrill of an accomplice collaborating at her own ruin."

They broke up several times, always returning to each other. Harris recalled Tynan saying that he and Dundy were "like two predatory birds with their jaws stuck into each other. It was easier to stay there than break away." They finally divorced in 1964. Tynan died in 1980.

Dundy never remarried and in later years overcame alcohol and drug problems. According to Harris, Dundy's discovery of Presley "gave her a whole new lease on life and a whole new slew of friends" who were not literati or glitterati.

In her last years she struggled with macular degeneration until she was introduced to a magnifying device called the Optelec, which enabled her to read and write again. She wrote movingly about coping with her vision loss in "Out of the Darkness," a 2006 article for the London Guardian.

A few weeks before her death, she sent Harris a poem she had written. "It was an amazing poem," Harris said. "It was about . . . looking into the mirror and not finding herself in her reflection. She said, 'Rosie, do you ever do that, think who are you, where have you gone? I just don't recognize the me anymore.' It was as if she was telling me something, that her life was coming to an end."

In addition to her daughter, Dundy is survived by grandchildren Matthew and Ruby McBride of Los Angeles; a sister, Betty Lorwin of New York City; and two nieces. Another sister, noted independent filmmaker and UCLA professor Shirley Clarke, died in 1997. A memorial service will be held at Westwood Memorial Park at 2 p.m. on June 12.


source:
http://www.latimes.com /features/books/la-me-dundy8-2008may08,0,2761768.story

Hard Sell, Soft Touch and the Right Question

On the same page in Barbara Walters’s big, bean-spilling memoir there are photographs of Ms. Walters, the undisputed queen of the television interview, and Cha Cha Walters, her dog. One of them looks businesslike. She wears glasses and sits perched at a computer keyboard. The other is perfectly groomed, coiffed and fluffed. She looks ready for her blue ribbon as best in show.

Who’s who? Well, Cha Cha is the one who risks eyestrain. And the glamorously posed, taffeta-draped Ms. Walters is displaying what “Audition,” this legitimately star-studded autobiography, has identified as her most useful professional qualities. She has spent more than five decades shattering glass ceilings in the world of television news, using social skills and ladylike persistence just as handily as she has used on-the-air reportorial acumen. From her first shot at doing a big news report on “Today” (the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria), she has unstoppably combined the soft touch and the hard sell.

“What a horrible experience you’ve been through,” she recalls saying to survivors of that 1956 disaster. “You must be feeling terrible. But could you come into our studio tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. to tell us about it?” Ever since then Ms. Walters has gone big-game hunting for the major interviews of her day and been amazingly dependable in bagging her prey.

To give some sense of just how much terrain “Audition” covers, these are some of its many index entries on the subject of interviewing: “with celebrities,” “with difficult people,” “with foreign heads of state,” “impossible-to-get,” “with murderers and alleged murderers,” “with presidents,” “with royalty” and “with people Walters could talk to again and again.”

While she acknowledges that even her own eyes glaze over at the prospect of revisiting all that material, she has managed (with some collaboration from Linda Bird Francke) to fit much of it into “Audition” without too much awkward shoehorning. And this book is very much about her private life too.

When she recalls her work, Ms. Walters presents herself as someone who thrives on competition. She is happy to point out that when she went mano a mano with Walter Cronkite to bag both Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin in 1977 (after a behind-the-scenes feat of personal diplomacy that is described here in prideful detail), her ABC story got onto the air seconds before CBS showed its version. And “at the end of his interview Cronkite is clearly heard saying: ‘Did Barbara get anything I didn’t get?’ ”

She sure did. Among the extra perks accumulated by Ms. Walters over time have been both a string of flirtations (“You know,” Sadat’s widow, Jehan, would eventually tell her, “you were the only one I was ever jealous of because Anwar liked you so much”), offset here with grace notes that can be excessively gracious. “What a lovely compliment from a lovely woman who remains my friend to this day,” she says of Mrs. Sadat, who is one of an apparently staggering number of Walters friends and acquaintances.

As “Audition” makes clear, Ms. Walters is careful to keep in touch with many of these people, even if they have, say, killed their parents. She will be right there if Lyle Menendez can ever give her an interview from prison or if O. J. Simpson confesses. Tone-deaf to the implications of doing such stories, she points out, about her heavily protested interview with John Lennon’s killer, that the interview didn’t do Mark David Chapman any good.

If any single thing keeps “Audition” from achieving the stature of Katharine Graham’s “Personal History,” the book that set the high-water mark for memoirs of the politically and socially well-connected, it is the excess decorousness built into Ms. Walters’s conversation. That is not to say that she lacks sharp elbows or that she is shy about remembering grievances or settling scores. Woe to the men who underestimated her, even in the days when she was the only woman writing for “Today” and wrote for the show’s only female on-the-air personality. A little more barbed frankness would have gone rather far in a book that uses “rather” as its favorite modifier.

But Ms. Walters’s story is greatly humanized by the family memoir that colors her long litany of professional successes. She writes about her father, Lou Walters, the nightclub impresario whose stage shows featured what were called “petite mamzelles,” as an overwhelmingly important influence, first for his great success and then for reversals of fortune. Watching her father, she developed what she says was an ease around celebrities that would serve her well in her own professional life. Incidentally, although Ms. Walters is not specific about her age (or about the youth-preserving surgery of anyone other than Roy Cohn, the young Ms. Walters’s weirdest suitor), she will acknowledge this much: She’s old enough to have had the daughter of one of the Three Stooges as a childhood friend.

Ms. Walters’s father also left her with a Daddy thing: a susceptibility to older, sometimes married men. (Her story of a long, secret affair with Edward W. Brooke, the former United States senator from Massachusetts, is the first such “Audition” revelation to hit the tabloids.) Her troubled histories with her sister and daughter, both named Jacqueline, are also confessional parts of this story.

What emerges is the portrait of a deftly calculating woman with an impeccable sense of timing, which is why she has largely retreated from the battle for big-name interviews. When ABC had to decide whether Ms. Walters’s last piece on “20/20” would be with President Bush or with a teacher who went to prison for her sexual relationship with an under-age boy, the child molester won out. “I rest my case,” Ms. Walters writes.

As for the lasting lessons of “Audition,” here are some: There will never be another television news career like this one. It was just fine for Ms. Walters to be called a “pushy cookie.” And there are right ways and wrong ways to ask touchy questions. When dealing with a heinous killer, for instance, Ms. Walters advises against asking “How could you be such a monster?” Far better to do it this way: “There are people who think you are a monster. How do you respond to that?”

And Ms. Walters’s favorite kiss-off, learned from Bing Crosby when he spoke about disowning any of his children for having premarital sex, comes in handy throughout “Audition” for anyone who ever made the foolish mistake of underestimating its author. “Aloha, on the steel guitar,” Mr. Crosby said.

source:
http://www.nytimes.com /2008/05/05/books/05masl.html?ref=books

His Father’s Siren, Still Singing

BEFORE Vladimir Nabokov, the author of “Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” “Speak, Memory” and other masterworks, died in Lausanne, Switzerland, in July 1977, he had been hard at work on another novel. The previous December, he told The New York Times that the “not quite finished manuscript” was called “The Original of Laura,” that it had already been “completed in my mind” and that during a recent hospital stay, “in my diurnal delirium,” he had “kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden.” Shortly afterward, Nabokov’s editor at McGraw-Hill revealed that the author was about to do the actual writing, in pencil on 3-by-5-inch index cards (Nabokov never worked with a typewriter). Then, in words parroted by the editor, Nabokov would “deal himself a novel.”

Nabokov, however, was able to build only part of the complete deck — 138 index cards, with many erasures and much emendation — before falling ill for the last time. Known as an artistic perfectionist and a literary purist, he left behind instructions that the cards were to be destroyed. But neither his wife, Véra, nor his son, Dmitri, now nearly 74, could bring themselves to carry out Nabokov’s injunction. Since Véra’s death in 1991, Dmitri — who was also a translator of his father’s early work and is now his literary executor — had by some accounts been wrestling mightily with the question of whether to follow his father’s wishes and consign the cards to the flames, or to preserve the manuscript for posterity.

The last work of a modern master, however fragmentary, is a matter of public interest and scholarly importance. The nuances of “Laura” and her fate have been hotly debated on bookish Web sites and elsewhere, with Tom Stoppard, for example, calling for the matches and John Banville urging clemency in The Times of London. Now, Dmitri Nabokov has announced that “Laura” will indeed be published, and suggests in a Q. and A. conducted by e-mail with the Week in Review that, in fact, her peril has been exaggerated. STEVE COATES

•

It’s been three decades since your father’s death. Why did it take you so long to decide the fate of “Laura,” and how did you come to your final decision? How difficult has it been?

In the words of one blogger, 30 years is tantamount to eternity in the given context, which would absolve me from any disobedience of my father’s wishes. More seriously, it did not take me 30 years to come to a decision with regard to burning the manuscript. I had never imagined myself as a “literary arsonist.” I also recalled, parenthetically, that when my father was asked, not very long before his death, what three books he considered indispensable, he named them in climactic order, concluding with “The Original of Laura” — could he have ever seriously contemplated its destruction?

It took the passing of time, the input of a few good advisers, and, above all, some concentrated thinking on my part, for the idea to crystallize of what exactly to do with the precious cards. Safekeeping, no matter how secure, would never guarantee their permanent immunity from revelation. To publish, then, but how?

How do you respond to those who suspect a financial motivation?

It’s true that my wheelchair requires some costly modifications to fit into the trunk of a Maserati coupe.

Why would your father have wanted “Laura” destroyed?

In a calmer moment, if he were no longer in a race against death to complete the work, I think, sincerely, that he would not. By the same token, if one wants to finish something before dying, one perseveres to the utmost, rather than destroying it. This should be an obvious answer to a rather fatuous question some have posed: Why didn’t he burn it well ahead of time and have done with it?

Your mother didn’t have the heart to burn it either. There’s a famous story about how she stopped your father from burning his manuscript of “Lolita.”

source:
http://www.nytimes.com /2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabokov.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin