Volume 51, Number 1 · January 15, 2004
STAR!
By John Gregory Dunne
Natalie Wood: A Life
by Gavin Lambert
Knopf, 370 pp., $25.95
Gavin Lambert was the first person in the movie business my wife and I met when we moved to Los Angeles in 1964. It was at a small outdoor Sunday lunch in Beverly Hills given by my brother and sister-in-law, both peers in Hollywood's version of Debrett's. There were six of us, the fifth and sixth being Gavin and his New York literary agent, Helen Strauss, who was also my wife's book agent. Gavin had careful, hooded, missing-nothing eyes, spoke so softly that one could hardly hear him, and looked, as he does to this day, as if he were trying to suppress a laugh and only half succeeding. He was gay, but hiding in the closet was something actors did, not an expatriate English writer who had come out at age eleven. In his wonderfully indirect memoir, Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, Lambert described reporting for conscription as an Oxford undergraduate during World War II, when pederasty was still a criminal offense in England. 'I decided to dress and behave with the utmost normality,' he wrote, 'except for painting my eyelids gold.'
Review, 4365 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |