Some Great Autobiographies
We’re back to books this month because I’ve got three really great autobiographies to share with you, two from show-business legends and one from a very humble man who only learned to read at the age of 98. But all intriguing reads!
I’m going to start with Mel Brooks’s fun take on his brilliant career, All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business (2023). This one doesn’t plumb the depths of emotion and it doesn’t contain a lot of MB’s signature rather silly humour, although there’s plenty of smiles along the way. What it is is a charming and fascinating account of a man who has navigated a life in comedy that has lasted for decades and shows no real sign of slowing down.
Along the way, the talented Mr. Brooks marries Anne Bancroft, sticks his neck out for causes and projects he believes in, and becomes a producer of a number of classic movies, some of them surprisingly dramatic for a man known for his Dad jokes. Among the films he produced was a hidden gem that I just love called 84 Charing Cross Road. Worth seeking out if you haven’t seen it.
Mel Brooks is one of the few people on earth to be an EGOT winner. That’s Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards. Even more impressive, he’s won multiple awards in several of those categories. He’s worked with the cream of artistic talent over his life and I particularly enjoyed getting a glimpse behind the scenes at his creative relationships. At 95, he has a lot of reminiscing to do!
If you’re interested in the movies or comedy or TV classics like Get Smart or Broadway (the list could go on!), this one’s worth picking up!
Life Is So Good: One Man’s Extraordinary Journey Through the 20th Century and How He Learned to Read at Age 98 (2000) by Richard Dawson and Richard Glaubman is a really moving account of an African American man’s life through the events of the turbulent previous century. A friend of mine lent me this after picking it up in a second-hand shop and then being unable to put it down once she started to read it. I had the same reaction. What a beautiful story.
Mr. Dawson (1898-2001) was the grandson of slaves. He grew up in Texas in a poor but loving family. Circumstances meant he worked from the age of 4 to support his family which meant he never had the opportunity to go to school and learn to read. Having said that, he managed to have a life full of interest and incident. He traveled widely, and while illiterate, he used his exceptional social skills and native wisdom to maintain himself and his dependants.
Mr. Dawson married twice and had 7 children. At the age of 65, he retired from the dairy in Texas where he’d worked since 1938. In 1995, when he was 98, he enrolled in the local adult literacy center and fulfilled his lifelong ambition to learn to read. He ended up receiving his GED in 1998.
Between Life Is So Good coming out to excellent sales and widespread acclaim and his death at the age of 103 in 2001, George Dawson was feted across America, appearing on Oprah and having a middle-grade school in Texas named after him. He became, in the words of his Los Angeles Times obituary, “America’s favorite poster child for literacy.”
This lovely book is simply told and offers a grassroots view of history. I found it touching, inspiring and compulsive reading. Full credit to Richard Glaubman, Mr. Dawson’s collaborator on the autobiography, who manages to stand clear enough to allow the subject’s authentic, gentle voice to emerge so vividly.
My last choice is a real hoot. Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers (2022) details the event-filled life of composer Richard Rodgers’s oldest daughter. Starting as an awkward, unhappy child in an appallingly dysfunctional family, Mary ends up making a name for herself not just as a Broadway composer in her own right, but as a young adult writer and a philanthropist and arts administrator.
In many ways, this story is as inspiring as George Dawson’s, even if it takes place at a stratospheric socioeconomic level that he could hardly have imagined existing. Ms. Rodgers’s collaborator in this book, Jesse Green, takes a much more front and center role than Richard Glaubman in Life Is So Good. And Mr. Green was the person with the final supervision of the manuscript for publication as MR died in 2014 at the age of 83. There’s a lovely push and pull between the two, largely conducted in entertaining footnotes that I encourage you to read.
Every so often you read a memoir and your principal reaction is a frustrated wish to have met the writer in person. This is how I felt about this one. Mary Rodgers is just so darn funny! To give you an example, she says of writer Arthur Laurents, who she despised, that “he could count his friends on no hands.” Isn’t that clever? I laughed aloud quite often, in between feeling for the lost little girl and the confused teenager, and the strong woman who had to struggle against sexism and her father’s overwhelming success to express her own powerful creativity.
In between falling in love with Stephen Sondheim in her girlhood, a number of unhappy love affairs, 2 marriages – one unsuccessful, one happy – composing Once Upon a Mattress that became a major Broadway success, writing Freaky Friday and its sequels, and serving as chairman of the Juilliard School, MR manages to meet a good cross section of the great and talented of the artistic world. So there are great vignettes about luminaries like Leonard Bernstein, Oscar Hammerstein, Mary Martin, and Bing Crosby.
This is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in ages and I was sorry when I finished it. Even if you’re not interested in Broadway, give it a go. It’s a wonderful portrait of a smart, creative woman who wouldn’t take the easy way and who ended up triumphing. I just wish I’d had a chance to meet her!