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Nancy Reagan, Elvis, Howard Hughes and Hirohito …

The Chain-saw Biographer

Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography Kitty Kelley

But why didn’t the astrologers see this coming? The sunsets above Mulholland Drive must be an even more electric pink these days as the whole of Bel Air blushes for Nancy. By now everyone knows about her White House affair with Frank Sinatra, her legendary meanness as she recycled unwanted presents, her reckless spending of the taxpayer’s money and Imelda Marcos-sized extravagance on designer clothes, her chilling relationships with her own children during the ruthless climb to success and, most damning of all, the astrologers who decided the dates of international conferences and determined those ‘bad’ days when Ronnie was not allowed to leave the White House at all.

Kitty Kelley is an exponent of the chain-saw school of biography, and through the blizzard of sawdust it is hard to make out the real woman within this devastating portrait. But the real was always a doubtful commodity in the case of the Reagans – so much of the President’s image was manufactured, and so self-deluding his own notions of the world as he confused reality with the half-remembered movies of his youth, that it scarcely matters if the facts in this biography are true or not.

Observers of the Reagans often commented on ‘the gaze’, the look of rapt attention that Nancy turned upon the President whenever he spoke in public, but masks of various kinds had long been used by Nancy to screen her from anything she preferred to forget. Huge sections of her past had been freeze-dried and hidden away in a dark locker of her mind, never to be opened again. The daughter of an ambitious repertory actress and a failed car salesman – whom Nancy claimed to have been a Princeton graduate – she was brought up during her early childhood by her aunt and uncle when her parents divorced, a period of forced separation that seems to have numbed her for ever. In later life Nancy never contacted her natural father, transferring all her affection to Dr

Loyal Davis, a taciturn Chicago neurosurgeon whom her mother married when her career had ebbed.

This ultra-right wing and viciously racist man – he could never bring himself even to utter the word Jew – was later credited with shaping Ronald Reagan’s political world-view and transforming him from a Democrat into a deep-blue Republican. Dr Davis had treated Spencer Tracy’s crippled son, and after graduating from college the aspiring actress Nancy Davis (she had forced through her legal adoption against the wishes of her reluctant step-father while still a teenager) set off for Hollywood and an MGM screen test arranged by Tracy. Always rather old-fashioned, Nancy chose a traditional route to launch her career, opting for the casting couch when she began a long affair with Benny Thau, the MGM executive in charge of casting. A number of undistinguished films followed, in which she tended to play plucky housewives in maternity smocks, while off the set she enjoyed affairs with a succession of Hollywood’s leading men, among them Robert Walker and Peter Lawford, who particularly prized her talents for oral sex.

But destiny finally dialled in the shape of another fading B-actor with an unhappy childhood, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan. Soon Hollywood was behind them, as the Reagans set their eyes on the governorship of California and, beyond that, the leading roles in the ultimate movie of them all, the presidency of the United States, in which he would star and she would direct, with a supporting cast of European monarchs, Russian statesmen and California millionaires.

Reading this wonderfully sleazy account of the Reagans’ rise to power, of their relentless ambition and ruthless social climbing, one is still surprised by the confidence with which American politicians set about exploiting the fruits of office. Dissatisfied with the Sacramento governor’s mansion, Nancy ordered another, a $1.4 million monstrosity that later stood empty for ten years. Once in the White House she began to amass a vast wardrobe of couture gowns and furs, all on indefinite ‘loan’ until the Internal Revenue Service panicked her into returning them. Tactlessly, she announced the purchase of a $200,000 china set on the same day that the President cut school lunches and declared that ketchup would be counted as a vegetable in the federally subsidized programme. She recycled inferior presents, and accidentally sent a gift-wrapped birthday present to her grandson of the teddy bear he had left in the White House. At the same time, Nancy’s ruthlessness extended to herself. On hearing that she had a cancerous breast nodule, she demanded a total mastectomy against the advice of her doctors. But as one of the surgeons commented, the Reagans were not afraid of the knife. ‘Both have had numerous facelifts. From the scars behind his ears, I’d say the President has had two lifts, and she’s probably had three or four.’

Reagan’s presidency was a mystery to Europeans, though Americans were happy to see this amiable if goofy former sportscaster on their TV screens rather than the moralizing Carter, and took him much more easily in their stride. But how could a man so intellectually third-rate, an empty stage-set of a personality across which moved cartoon figures, dragon ladies and demons of the evil empire, ever have become President of the world’s most powerful nation? Was the image everything now, and who would be next – Colonel Sanders, Jimmy Osmond, Donald Duck? Is the USA so strong and so soundly constituted, so effectively ruled by its great bureaucracies, that politics and the presidency are an entertaining irrelevancy?

But the dream buckled with the Irangate-Contra affair and the revelation that summit meetings with Gorbachev were scheduled by Nancy and her $3,000-a-month astrologer. Since then the grey men have moved in again, led by George Bush (‘Whiney’ to Mrs Reagan). But perhaps the real lesson of the Reagan presidency is the sinister example he offers to future film actors and media manipulators with presidential ambitions and all too clearly defined ideas, and every intention of producing a thousand-year movie out of them.

Guardian 1991

Survival Instincts

Wild Swans Jung Chang

The women of China must be among the most oppressed and, paradoxically, the most strong-willed in the world, as this harrowing account of three desperate lives proves on every extraordinary page. I can remember the bad-tempered amahs of my childhood, ruthless and hard-fisted little women darting about on their bound feet. At the other end of the social scale were the dragon ladies – tycoons’ wives or successful businesswomen – in their long fur coats and immaculate make-up, who could petrify a small boy at fifty paces with their baleful stares.

Returning to China last summer, I was startled to find an advance guard of dragon ladies apparently waiting for me in the Cathay Pacific lounge at Heathrow. But there were none on the streets of Shanghai, and, fortunately, their places were taken by thousands of relaxed and cheerful young women in pretty frocks, strolling arm-in-arm with their husbands and friends. The sight would have warmed the hearts of Jung Chang’s mother and grandmother, the two women whose tragically abused lives occupy the centre of this heart-rending book. Together they tell the story of China during the twentieth century, an epic of privation, cruelty and dashed hopes that makes one despair of politics as the answer to anything. China’s greatest political leader and ideologue, Mao Zedong, brought an end to decades of devastation and civil war under the corrupt rule of Chiang Kai-shek, but in turn Mao, his wife and henchmen brought equally appalling cruelties to the Chinese people.

Jung Chang begins her memoir with Yu-fang, her grandmother, who at the age of fifteen, in 1924, became the concubine of an elderly Man-churian warlord. She herself was the daughter of a woman so unvalued, like all female children, that she had never been given a name and was known simply as ‘number two girl’ – like the servants of my own childhood whom I addressed for years as ‘number two boy’ and ‘number two coolie’. Despite her bound feet, with their broken arches and crushed toes, Jung’s grandmother was considered a beauty by her war-lord general. Virtually a prisoner in a large harem, she bore a child, Jung’s mother De-hong. After the general’s death, when his wife might have sold her off to a brothel, she married a 65-year-old doctor, and enjoyed a brief happiness. However, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, and began to ransack the cities and countryside. Years of destitution followed, but somehow mother and daughter survived the deliberate brutalization of an entire people. At last, in 1944, American B-29S appeared in the sky, followed by a Russian occupation force who presided over yet another regime of terror and repression.

But the first Chinese communists also arrived. Ragged and ill-equipped, they looked poorer and scruffier than beggars. None the less, they soon restored order, restarted the economy and improved the food supply. When civil war broke out between Mao’s forces and Chiang’s Kuomintang armies, the teenage daughter threw in her lot with the communists, the only political group that promised an end to the barbarous treatment of women.

The late 1940s were a time of runaway inflation, when emaciated women pinned signs on their children: ‘Daughter for sale for 10 kilos of rice.’ Jung’s mother became active in the underground, but was arrested by the Kuomintang. Miraculously, she survived a firing squad when the prisoner next to her was shot dead. Soon after, she fell in love with a romantic communist guerrilla who gave her Russian novels to read and – a point very much in his favour – knew the difference between Flaubert and Maupassant.

With Mao’s conquest of the country, and the flight of Chiang to Formosa, a new and fairer China seemed waiting to be born. But the conservative peasant women, survivors of the Long March, resented the young and strong-willed students such as Jung’s mother who attracted the communist menfolk. Mind-numbing sessions of public ‘self-criticism’ began to occupy much of the revolution’s time. Everything was now politicized, as the regime suppressed the last vestiges of spirit and independence that had drawn Jung’s mother to the communist cause in the first place. Suspected of bourgeois leanings, she and her husband were transferred to the remote western province of Sichuan, where they began to work their way up the party’s administrative ladder. Even now their idealism still prevailed over the Orwellian logic of Maoist ‘thought reform’. Cleanliness was regarded as unproletarian, ignorance was celebrated as freedom from bourgeois thinking, and constant meetings left no time for inward reflection, virtually eliminating the private sphere.

Jung was born in 1952, but she saw little of her mother, who was struggling to survive the successive purges of ‘hidden counter-revolutionists, rightists and capitalist-roaders’. In this nonsense-world, grass, flowers and pets were deemed to be bourgeois. Red traffic-lights now signalled go, but the ensuing traffic chaos was merely a comical prelude to the sinister cruelties of the cultural revolution. Estranged from her husband, who feared that emotional support for her would be anti-party, Jung’s mother, by now a senior education administrator, was forced to kneel on broken glass and parade with a dunce’s cap on her head. The daughter was banished to the Himalayas to work as a barefoot doctor. At last, with the death of Mao, rehabilitation followed, but Jung’s father died soon after, hounded to his grave by petty spite and envy.

As his daughter remarks, the hallmark of Maoism was the reign of ignorance and hatred, and I suspect that Mao’s real achievement was to allow the Chinese, a supremely stoic and unemotional people, to express emotion fully for the first time. When Jung escapes to the West, a century-long nightmare seems to end. Immensely moving and unsettling, Wild Swans is an unforgettable portrait of the brain-death of a nation, and a tribute to the superhuman endurance of Chinese women. Sanity seems to have returned to China, but, as Jung reminds us, Mao’s portrait still hangs in Tiananmen Square.

Sunday Times 1992

Fallen Idol

Elvis Albert Goldman

The Hollywood cynic who commented, on hearing of Elvis Presley’s death in 1977, ‘Good career move,’ might well have second thoughts after reading this ruthless exposé. Everyone watching Presley on television in his last years, as he swayed across the stage of the Las Vegas Hilton in his Prince Valiant suit, a bloated parody of himself who now and then treated his blue-rinsed audience to a canny leer, knew that something was wrong. But the memory of the young Presley remained, an electric charge that still pulls all the current out of the mains.

According to Albert Goldman, for at least the last decade of his life Presley was a hopeless drug addict, a walking pharmacopoeia of powerful stimulants and opiates that a coterie of compliant doctors injected into him at all hours of the day and night. Although the autopsy results were never published, it was probably a huge overdose that killed him during the long night of 17 August 1977, as he sat alone in his bathroom at Graceland, his stoned entourage asleep in their nearby bedrooms.

But by then, according to Goldman, the real Presley had been moribund for years, in effect since the death of his mother Gladys in 1958. Goldman clearly relishes his tale of Presley’s slow and lurid decline, elaborating a long catalogue of those sins that seem particularly heinous to Americans. Mama’s boy and bed-wetter, prude and glutton, voyeur and obsessive gun-fancier, Presley alienates his biographer’s sympathies at every turn. In fact, almost everything about Presley is present in this biography except his enormous talent, and an influence on popular culture greater than that of any other musical performer this century.

Goldman makes much of the close relationship between Presley and his mother, lingering over their extreme physical intimacy – they slept in the same bed until his puberty. But despite her own well-developed taste for drugs and alcohol, Gladys seems to have offered Presley rock-like support throughout her short life. Again, Goldman reveals that Presley was a natural blond, and based his legendary black hairstyle on that worn by the young Tony Curtis in the 1949 film City Across the River. Does this diminish Presley, or show his astuteness in the way he assembled his potent stage image as that archetypal 1950s figure, the juvenile delinquent?

Goldman’s attempt to demolish the Presley myth seems an attack on the whole popular culture of the period (he is now working on a book about John Lennon – watch out). Curiously Goldman seems obsessed with Presley’s sexuality. In his first view of Presley, he describes him in his bedroom at Graceland towards the end, ‘propped up like a big fat woman recovering from some operation on her reproductive organs’. He harps endlessly on Presley’s voyeurism, his liking for two-way mirrors and closed-circuit TV through which he watched the Guys (the Tennessee buddies who formed his entourage) making it with their girls.

Still, not as wild or as sad as the end. By the age of forty, Presley had earned $100 million. He gave away Cadillacs to passing strangers, threw expensive jewellery to his audiences, once flew from Memphis to Denver in his private jet to buy a peanut butter sandwich. In a trance of drugs and terminal boredom, he fell asleep with his face in a bowl of chicken soup. He was constantly watched by his guards in case he choked on a piece of food, became incontinent and had to be carried to the lavatory and tied into diapers. At the end he was so obese that he used a golf cart to carry him from the elevator to the stage of the Hilton.

For some reason, though, I find myself admiring Presley all the more. That knowing smile, those savvy eyes and that talent transcend everything, even this book.

Guardian 1981

The Killing Time

The Executioner’s Song Norman Mailer

Ours is a season for assassins. How far does our fascination with Oswald and Charles Manson, Gary Gilmore and James Earl Ray play on the edgy dreams of other lonely psychopaths, encourage them to gamble their trigger fingers on a very special kind of late twentieth century celebrity? Will everyone in the future, to adapt Warhol, be infamous for fifteen minutes? Given the immense glare of publicity, a virtual deification by the world’s press and television, and the remarkable talents these rootless and half-educated men can show for manipulating the mass media, their actual crimes soon seem to sink to a lower, merely human realm.

Lee Harvey Oswald, had he not been shot by Jack Ruby, would presumably now be up for parole, ready to play his part – as TV anchorman, or special assignment writer for Guns and Ammo? – in the election of yet another Kennedy. With luck any would-be assassins in the future will give themselves away haggling with their agents for the biggest film advance and the right prime-time TV coverage.

The Executioner’s Song is Norman Mailer’s account of the crimes, trial and execution in 1977 of Gary Gilmore, the first convicted murderer to be put to death in the United States after a ten-year moratorium. Dedicated to Mailer’s agent, at first sight the book is off-putting, perhaps the last chapter in the very system of exploitation that Mailer criticizes. Mailer never met Gilmore, and the 1,000-page text is based on a mass of extended interviews by Lawrence Schiller, an ex-Life photographer turned Hollywood entrepreneur. The result is a vast cast of largely minor characters and an excess of parallel narration never properly fused together, which makes nonsense of Mailer’s attempt to call it a novel.

But in fact the repetitions and the flat documentary style allow Mailer to build up a masterly portrait of the murderer – Gilmore might well have been one of the morose GIs in The Naked and the Dead. By the time of his release from an Illinois penitentiary at the age of thirty-five, Gilmore had spent eighteen of the previous twenty-two years in prison and reform school. The illegitimate son of a sometime convict and a mother who resented him from earliest childhood, Gilmore had already tasted celebrity. During a prison riot in Illinois the local TV crew ‘selected’ him as one of the leaders and put him on television to say a few words. His looks and the way he spoke attracted attention and the first fan mail from women admirers.

Returning to Provo, Utah, and a life of drugs, beer-drinking and petty theft, he cold-bloodedly murdered a gas station attendant and a motel clerk for little more than the equivalent of £50, and was arrested almost immediately by the police. Sustained by his girl-friend, Nicole, a remarkable young woman who would stand outside the jail, bellowing ‘Gary Gilmore, I love you!’ he accepted his death penalty and settled down to await his execution. The police psychiatrists diagnosed Gilmore as a psychopathic personality, and he seems to have felt no anger or hostility towards the men he murdered, regarding them with the same total blankness that he felt for himself. Already in the death cell he was planning both Nicole’s suicide and his own execution – he wanted to be shot in the dark with tracer bullets, so that he could watch them coming towards him. Even the horrendous conditions on Death Row, a long way from Cagney and George Raft, hardly affected him. Mailer vividly describes this depraved zoo, a bedlam of cries and rage, the condemned men exposing their genitalia through the bars, hurling cups of urine into the faces of any intruders.

Gilmore’s refusal to appeal against his death penalty soon made him a local celebrity. The first curious journalists interviewed him, the advance guard of an army of hustlers and agents, veteran wheeler-dealers from the Manson and Ruby cases, film and TV executives who swarmed in from all over the world. Gilmore’s own lawyer, who doubled as his literary agent, defended his right to die, claiming: ‘I think executions should be on prime-time TV.’ The first hard cash, $500, was paid by the Daily Express (‘When the British are here en masse,’ said one excited newsman, ‘the stamp is on the meat’).

In a strange but impressive way, Gilmore expanded to fill the roles assigned him. One journalist noted that there was racist Gary, Country and Western Gary, artist manque Gary, self-destructive Gary, Karma Gary and Gary the movie star. He quoted Shelley and Hermann Hesse, and would ask visitors ‘Are you familiar with Nietzsche?’

The end came as he wanted it. The climax, and greatest set-piece in the book, is Mailer’s account of the last night before the execution, a virtuoso description of the deranged prison party held around the drugged Gilmore, wearing a comical Robin Hood hat and brandishing pornographic photos of his girl-friend, while a huge TV and press encampment waited outside the prison.

Soon after dawn the party ended. To the tune of ‘Una Paloma Blanca’, Gilmore was taken to the execution yard in the prison cannery. As a TV commentator bawled: ‘You’ll be able to hear the shots, I promise!’ Gilmore was tied to a chair in front of the concealed firing squad. After the shots, in the first silence since Gilmore’s arrest, the only sound was the blood dripping on to his tennis shoes below the seat. Perhaps not surprisingly, only one witness managed to be sick.

Guardian 1979