The Girl Who Walked Home Alone
Bette Davis A Personal Biography
-
- £6.99
-
- £6.99
Publisher Description
Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, All About Eve, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Just this short list of Bette Davis' films gives an unmistakable sense of the role she played in twentieth-century cinema as one of the finest performers in Hollywood history.
Drawing on an extensive series of conversations that took place during the last decade of Bette Davis' life, this biography draws heavily on the actresses own words. Looking back over the decades, from her teenage decision to become an actress to the pain and outrage over her daughter's bitter portrayal of her, Davis speaks with extraordinary candour. She explains how her father's abandonment of her a child reverberated through her four marriages, and discusses the persistent Hollywood legend that she was difficult to work with. Immersing readers in the drama and glamour of movie-making's golden age, The Girl Who Walked Home Alone is a startling portrait of an enduring icon.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The eyes have it that cool, knowing gaze that doesn't quite conceal the wounded heart of a romantic but the words of golden age Hollywood's grande dame also have their charms in this beguiling biography. Chandler, biographer of Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, interviewed Davis (1908 1989) shortly before her death and simply presents her reminiscences with a minimum of scene setting, along with (inadequate) synopses of her movies. Davis meanderingly recounts a life worthy of the great melodramas she specialized in, revisiting her financially precarious childhood, her rise to fame and wealth, her four failed marriages, countless affairs, two abortions and a heartbreaking rift with her daughter after the latter wrote a spiteful tell-all. Eternally boy-crazy, she waxes dreamy and bawdy about various leading men including Errol Flynn ("a beautiful thing"), Laurence Olivier ("an Adonis") and Howard Hughes ("Howard Huge he was not"). Davis is alternately imperious, catty, generous and self-dramatizing; the reader never forgets that she is an actress, and Chandler complicates her version of events with commentary by colleagues, lovers and enemies. Still, artifice is the soul of Tinseltown, and in Davis's memoirs one hears the authentic, engrossing, gloriously manipulative voice of Old Hollywood. Photos.
