The Cultural Hard Sellers Return

In my home town of Pittsburgh’s Barnes & Noble book store (in the Squirrel Hill section, to be exact) there resides the paperback version of Barbara Walters’s autobiography Audition. Her tome, frankly, is disturbing. Not because, I hasten to say, of anything in the book itself–I have not read Walters’s tome nor, honestly, do I intend to; the woman, as you will eventually gather, does not interest me. What’s disturbing concerning Audition resides upon the front cover.

Upon Audition’s front cover posits the following rave from The New York Times: “She’s been there, done that, met everyone and seen everything in the course of a 50-year television career…the year’s dishiest memoir…tower(s) above the rest.”

The first and second parts of that (in effect) advertisement are, by and large, harmless–and can be attributed to The Times’s customary TV cheerleading. It’s the last part–”tower(s) above the rest”–that disturbs.

Is The Times really saying that Barbara Walters’s autobiography “tower(s) above the rest”? This regarding a life/career story turned out by the woman who gave us The View, which, basically, is another Live With Regis and Kelly, only with no Regis, multiple Kellys, and with sociopolitical pretensions? I myself have read scores and scores of memoirs. And there have been many that have genuinely caught my fancy, that have truly enraptured me (Let me hasten to clarify that I am not speaking of Literary Masterpieces; I am referring to personal/professional memoirs that have had voices that were funny, educational, entertaining, whatever). Of such memoirs there have been four that have particularly captured my heart, a quartet of tomes that, in particular, have warmed me, have raised my fondness quotient. In order of preference, here they are:

.Jessica Canseco’s Juicy: Confessions of a Former Baseball Wife–The ex-baseball-wife-cum-Playboy-hottie tells of her life and her past with charm, warmth, and, not infrequently, humor. She draws us in as she relates her past family life, which consisted of a father who came home from work at the end of each day, parked himself in front of the television set, and remained there, apparently “remarkably uninterested in the lives of his wife and three little girls,” and a mother who, to compensate, “focused on [Jessica and her sisters] almost to a fault.” We continue to be enthralled as Jessica tells us concerning her life with her then-husband, steriod-addicted baseball player Jose Canseco (as far as he was concerned, the gorgeous and sexy Jessica was handy man candy, always there for sex any time, anywhere), including his getting hooked on steroids. And, finally, we remain in her grasp as she writes of her subsequent divorce and her struggle to build a new life for herself and her daughter Josie. In all, the portrait that emerges from Juicy is that of a beautiful, sexual, and, at the same time, thoughtful and multidimensional young woman who has experienced a stressful life and has come out unscathed;

.Robin Givens’s Grace Will Lead Me Home–The TV/film/theater she-babe takes us through her familial history and her own personal history (there is, refreshingly, very little regarding her performing career) with grace and style. She’s sensitive and incisive as she tells us of her grandmother Grace, a forthright and deeply religious woman who, when she knew for sure that she was expecting, “knew that you got the baby God wanted you to have.” Her sensitivity and incisiveness remain with her as she relates her mother Ruth’s adolescence when said girl would while away the hours inside the shop which was situated in back of her mother’s house and where she was its sole beautician (A significant plus concerning Grace, besides Robin’s direct and skillful writing, is that, like she herself, it never gets bogged down in racial issues, never majorly flashes the crisis/grievance/victimization race card). And when Robin turns to her life story, she continues to hold us, whether discoursing on her early love for acting–among other things, when she was in the bathtub, she’d read the conditioner and shampoo botttles and enact a commercial–or looking back upon her early courtship of Mike Tyson, who, surprisingly, was courteous and gentle and loving during this period. Grace ends with Robin emerging triumphant, having divorced the later-irrational-and-violent Tyson, settling in with her kids, and when they ask, she having returned home from the theater where she would be the first African-American woman to portray Roxie Hart in the Broadway play Chicago and giving them their croissants and their journals, “Mom, what took you so long?,” happily responding: “I’ve been asking myself the same thing.” We’re intensely happy to made the journey with, as revealed in Grace, a compassionate yet determined woman who has felt the slings and arrows of life yet refuses to be defeated;

.Wendy Merrill’s Falling Into Manholes: The Memoir of a Bad/Good Girl (a “menmoir”)–The leader of a California communications company–her only forays into writing beforehand were coming up with two different autobiographical essays for two different female-headed compilations, thus giving her an aura of freshness and independence that is, to me, quite alluring–lets us in on her past with humor and charm. Whether she’s confronting her deep fear of being naked (”After years of avoiding these types of situations or enduring them, I went to a retreat at Easlen in Big Sur, California, where it is standard to take group showers before running around bare-assed naked in the hot tub area”) or accompanying her “very enthusiastic born-again Christian friend, Alex” to San Quentin prison for a tennis game with its inmates (”I knew from personal experience that Alex was very creative in his efforts to convert nonbelievers, and it sounded a little like he was pimping out for the Lord”), Wendy displays a welcome humorous bent and an equally-welcome sense of perspective. At Manhole’s end, we are left with a funny, spicy, intensely levelheaded young lady who has looked at love and life from both sides now–to paraphrase a line from the famous 1970s song–and has come out the wiser for it. Also: The fact that Wendy has led a dysfunctional life, having gone through, among other things, alcoholism and a slew of unsuccessful relationships with men, makes her, to a large degree, a soulmate;

.Maureen McCormick’s Here’s The Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice–The former “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” clears the air concerning her familial/personal/professional past with easy charm and graceful intelligence. Among the topics she takes up are, of course, her time as a Brady, covering her “father” Bob Reed’s legendary crusade to make the Brady show as realistic as possible (”On the set, Bob Reed waged a one-man war with [producers] Sherwood [Schwartz] and Lloyd [Schwartz] to keep the show from losing all credibility…Poor Bob. He wanted to make [the show] Shakespeare”) and Reed and the other Bradys’ push to make the program more contemporary (”Like Bob [Reed], we [Bradys] also wanted more mature scripts. Barry [Williams] and I still played kids living at home even though he was nineteen and I was seventeen”); her dysfunctional family, consisting of ever-battling parents, an ever-confused middle brother, an achieving older brother, and another brother who was mentally challenged; and her post-Brady acting career, which included periods of fierce substance abuse and, at one point, benig stuck with a psychiatrist who stayed with her 24/7 and would give her almost no freedom. Maureen’s book concludes with her drawing strength and salvation from Mary, a fourteen-year-old girl she and her husband encounter while the latter two are in Zambia, in east Africa, on behalf of Children International. We’re glad to have encountered a lady with resilence and a strong will who has been some uber-tough times and has, as Barry Manilow is famous for singing, made it through the rain.

Reading any of these tomes by any of these women is akin to spending time with a beloved gal pal over coffee and Danish in your favorite cafe. To blatantly assert that Walters’s book is superior to any of these memoirs, and to literally all the memoirs that have come before it, as The Times so gushes, is to minimize the entire memoir genre and is demeaning to readers (Such minimization and demeaning occurred, in a different sense, in “reality TV” camera slut Omarosa Manigult-Stallworth’s “guide” to female empowerment, The Bitch Switch: Knowing How To Turn It On And Off, wherein former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was quoted as contending: “If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.” That, frankly, was not the statement of somebody seeking fairness or equality but of somebody who solely, solely wanted to kick white male ass).

It was Douglas Adams, originator of the classic radio play The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galxy, who once asserted to an interviewer: “I think media are at their most interesting before anybody has thought of calling them art, when people still think they’re just a load of junk.” Such media, need it be said, are not encouraged by free-flowing cooing from critical panderers.