Anything Your Little Heart Desires
An American Family Story
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A memoir by the daughter of famous attorney Bartley C. Crum: “A gripping account not only of Crum but of McCarthyism and its devastating effects” (SFGate).
The FBI kept a secret dossier on him. He was a confidante to stars; adviser to politicians; and lawyer to the likes of William Randolph Hearst, Rita Hayworth, and the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, whom he defended during the House Un-American Activities Committee trials of 1947. Bartley C. Crum was also Patricia Bosworth’s father—a frequently absent, unrelentingly principled, and stubbornly self-destructive one. Anything Your Little Heart Desires is Bosworth’s memoir of life with him, and of the momentous events that shaped his lifetime, from the New Deal to the Cold War and the anti-Communist fervor that jolted American life. Using interviews, journals, letters, and her father’s own files, Bosworth delivers a profoundly personal portrait of the father she never fully knew, and the political forces that shaped a nation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Is there a sixth sense, Daddy?" Bosworth once asked her father. "Sure," he joked. "There's panic." A high-wire artist, as his wife, Cutsie, called him, Bartley Crum (1900-1959) could not afford panic, but at 59 the elegant, well-connected celebrity lawyer succumbed to it. Approaching a financial and political dead end, Bosworth's father took an overdose of Seconal and washed it down with whiskey. Recklessly engaged in an alcoholic and drugged high life on both coasts, he had worked for big business, even campaigning for Wendell Wilkie in 1940, while taking up labor and leftist cases. Undercut by State Department anti-Semites, notes the author, he obsessively promoted the cause of Israel. Dogged by J. Edgar Hoover's agents, he defended the blacklisted Hollywood Ten. While everything he took on added zip to his life, his roller-coaster career adversely affected his income. Bosworth (Montgomery Clift; Diane Arbus) has written a memorable chronicle of a dysfunctional family, illuminating her offbeat relationships with her father, her mother (a failed novelist) and her brother (also a suicide), and juxtaposing their lives of tawdry glamour against the backdrop of the '30s, '40s and '50s. Where she fails, often jeopardizing her credibility, is in "remembering" events she could not have been privy to and inventing dialogue to go along with them. What lingers is a tone almost reflecting daughter-father emotional incest. The memoir, told in voices intended to suggest the author's ages at various times, has some of the cinematic ingredients of a Daddy Dearest. Illustrations not seen by PW.
