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Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood | 
 enlarge | Author: Arthur Laurents
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 803701
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 6.6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0375400559
Dewey Decimal Number: 812.52
EAN: 9780375400551
ASIN: 0375400559
Publication Date: March 28, 2000
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Condition: Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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Amazon.com Review
Best known as the author of scripts for such hit musicals as West Side Story and Gypsy, Arthur Laurents began his career writing strong, socially conscious plays like Home of the Brave and Time of the Cuckoo; he also has impressive credits as a screenwriter (The Way We Were) and stage director (La Cage aux Folles). Such a varied professional life makes for absorbing reading in this lively autobiography stuffed with famous names, including George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, and Stephen Sondheim, all of whom emerge vividly in thumbnail portraits ranging from affectionately frank (Stella Adler) to frankly unflattering (Jerome Robbins). Laurents, born in 1917, was a Marxist during his college years at Cornell, and he retains strong political opinions to this day: he has no use for bigots of any kind, and his memoir displays no inclination to forgive people like Elia Kazan, who named names during the 1950s. Yet the author also has a marvelous sense of humor (after critic Frank Rich inadvertently made public reference to Laurents's homosexuality, Laurents introduced him at a charity lunch as "the man who outed me as a liberal") and a zest for life that shines particularly in a loving portrait of his longtime companion, Tom Hatcher. --Wendy Smith
Product Description
Director, playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents -- author of Gypsy, West Side Story, Anastasia, The Turning Point, and other plays and films -- takes us into his life, and into the dazzling world in which he worked, among the artists, directors, actors and personalities who came of age in the theatre and in Hollywood after the Second World War.
He takes us into his boyhood in Flatbush and his days at Cornell, where he learned to write plays, learned he was homosexual, learned what his politics would be as he organized support for the Spanish Civil War and protests against campus witch hunts (these undergraduate years became the basis for The Way We Were). He takes us into his days in the Army as a sergeant (in Astoria, Queens), writing training films with Irwin Shaw, William Saroyan, John Cheever, sunbathing with Bill Holden and competing to see which of them could outdrink the other.
Laurents describes a wartime New York City that was vibrant, eager and sexually alive, where he wrote for radio (The Man Behind the Gun; Lux Radio Theater). He confesses his methods for devising plots: make a list of twists and turns from successful movies, number them from one to fifteen, choose at random and link them up. He describes the writing of his first successful play, Home of the Brave, about anti-Semitism (later made into a movie about racism by Stanley Kramer), and writes about getting on with pals -- among them Jerome Robbins (an imp who loved to play parlour games, the sillier the better; later he testified before the House Committee of Un-American Activities and named names), Leonard Bernstein and Nora Kaye, later Laurent's lover and beloved friend, then a new star in Antony Tudor's Ballet Theatre.
In and out of bed with men as well as women, in and out of success with his work, Laurents describes his Freudian analysis with Theodore Reik, who insisted he could "cure" Laurents of his homosexuality, and cure him of what Reik diagnosed as Laurents's "selfishness" by being paid "ten percent of vot you make." Laurents gave; Reik took.
We see Laurents going off to Hollywood, reporting for duty at MGM, then a "feudal domain, a prisonlike fortress behind stone walls" . . . driving up to Irene Mayer Selznick's house for the first time and having a sense of deja vu (he had seen it all before in MGM pictures of tastefully grand English country houses -- "No bulter but yards of maids") . . . writing the script for The Snake Pit . . . Laurnets playing volleyball and charades at Gene Kelly's with lots of liberal talk and pot-luck meals . . . playing in Charlie Chaplin's round-robin "Cockamamie Tennis Tournaments" . . . going fora Memorial Day weekend sail with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy on a 125-foot yacht, Hepburn changing into identical spotless white ducks and shirts every hour on the hour with Tracy lolling in a chair, crocked the whole trip, and Hepburn patting pillows behind his neck . . . Laurents writing the script for Rope, a movie with three homosexual men at its center, just as he is beginning a long affair with one of the picture's stars, Farley Granger, as well as an intense, complicated but happy collaboration with the picture's director, Alfred Hitchcock . . . and being propelled out of Hollywood for a life in Paris when his agent, Swifty Lazar, tells him, "You're blacklisted, dear boy . . . thestudio said you're too expensive before I mentioned money."
Laurents writes about his return to New York and his smash hit play, The Time of the Cuckoo, with Shirley Booth, later made into a movie called Summertime with Katharine Hepburn, then into a musical (Do I Hear a Waltz?, with music by Richard Rogers, words by Stephen Sondheim). He writes about jump-starting Barbra Streisand's career by casting her in her first Broadway show, I Can Get It for You Wholesale ("There was one part available -- a fifty-year-old spinster. Streisand was nineteen. She came in with her bird's nest of scraggly hair and her gawky disorganized body, clumped across the stage, took her wad of gum out of her mouth, stuck it under the chair and began to sing; eight bars into the song, I knew she had to be in the show. I checked later, no gum"). He writes about the creation of Gypsy with Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim (Laurents to Ethel Merman: "Rose is a monster. How far are you willing to go?" Merman to Laurents: "I'll do anything you want.") . . .about the directing of La Cage aux Folles . . . and about coming together in a complex, fraught collaboration with his three old pals Robbins, Bernstein and Sondheim for West Side Story
Funny, fierce, honest -- a life richly lived and told.
(With 80 photographs)
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Engrossing but self-absorbed January 3, 2005
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I just finished reading this fascinating but maddening autobiography last night. There is no doubt about it - Arthur has quite a story to tell. His storytelling pulls you in, making you feel as if he's telling the stories directly to you. He's met or worked with virtually every major star of the past 60 years so he's definitely got tales to tell. However, after reading for awhile, I found several things off-putting. Early on, Arthur starts to regale us with endless stories of sexual conquests. He inevitably describes his partners as "handsome", "beautiful", etc. A few stories like this would have gotten the point across, but I eventually came to the conclusion that Arthur was very insecure about his attractiveness and had to make sure that we readers knew that he was very desirable (even if pictures don't seem to tell that story). Then there's the sexual encounter he has with an old friend and sex partner who was starring in a play that Arthur was directing - it was simply creepy to me. As I continued reading, it just seemed that Arthur wanted to dissect and criticize almost everyone he came across, especially those who had disappointed him, and on several occasions I thought he was incredibly unkind. His portrait of Jerry Robbins is one-sided at best and mean at worst - he definitely comes across as if he has an ax to grind with Jerry. His coldness upon Jerry's death struck me as amazingly hard-hearted, considering all that they had done together in their lives. Arthur also never seemed to turn that critical eye onto himself. He generally comes off as good in all encounters, while others are usually immoral, dishonest, etc. I also had the sense that Arthur might have embellished the details to help himself come out so well in his stories. (This is especially ironic, considering his comments about how Gypsy Rose Lee did the same in her autobiography.) If you're interested in Broadway and the movies in the second half of the 20th century, this is a great read. Just beware the shortcomings of the author.
 The truth. January 6, 2003
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
An 86-year-old friend who grew up in Beverly Hills and Hollywood, and who had her own works on Broadway, gave me this book for help with my writing (I'm 42). Laurents is remarkably inspiring, even when he doesn't necessarily intend to be. His stories about writing for the war effort, writing radio plays, mapping plots of popular films, and turning out work for deadline demonstrate a TREMENDOUS work ethic and a resilient willingness to write and re-write...., but gay lives weren't well documented in that era. Worse, "liberal" Hollywood was thought to be generally accepting, when in fact the opposite was true. Laurents was under enormous pressure to stay in the closet, as were most writers and stars. The narrative hops around a bit, but he's a gifted writer, and soon you'll settle in. If you want to be a screenwriter, read this. Some of the political nonsense that goes into making a motion picture still happens, even in 2003! Arthur Laurents is an amazing man whom I hope has a magnificent decade as an octogenarian. If his vibrant words are any indication, then in spirit he'll always be 33 and ready for the next adventure.
Damned good..Go out and Read it! September 12, 2001
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The best thing a book can have is the author's voice, and Laurents' autobiography certainly has his: argumentative, discrening, opinionated, political, sexy, candid. He has a bristly side to him and he doesn't hide it. And this makes his book seem genuine and compelling, not the kind of "I loved them all..we had a great time" gush that many older entertainment types write. His take on the blacklist is wonderful. His backstage stories about how his play ("Time of the Cuckoo") was a hit and his movie ("The Way We Were") got chewed up in the editing room are fascinating. And he doesn't hold back: Sydney Pollack comes off a clever swine, Jerome Robbins is shown warts and all. You may find that Laurents is the kind of man you might have trouble liking in real life, but you won't be able to put his book down. That's because he's a real writer with a voice...and it's in these pages. One of the best theatre books in quite a while, certainly the best since Neil Simon's first book. Seems like good playwrites make good memoir writers. Read this!
VITAL, JUICY AND BLUNT April 13, 2001
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Now THIS is an autobiography! It is the story of a man, the last of his peer group, who, at 81, is healthy, athletic, sexual, productive in his craft, and in love. He is joyous and it reflects in his writing. Vitriol, if not burned away, has often been reduced to pithy one-liners that zing with word-play. Apathy seems to have replaced anger. Mr. Laurents is too busy living to show resignation or to bemoan the passing of relationships, so his book is vital, alive.He is blunt and ruthless and he shows us the sage as scrappy youth and unformed man as well as (bad)businessman and lover, plus playwright, director and Hollywood hack. He has little respect for the movie industry and when black-listed,was more relieved than aggrieved! He spares himself nothing, is quick to offer accolades and in stories that are pay-backs, with time and acoomplishment to back him up, chummy fact can be damning! He has a gift for knowing that someone loves and respects the famous people he mentions and he writes accordingly, whether he shares their regard or not, and even when a relationship has lapsed, if praise is due, he generously heaps it on. Incidentals are rampant. Some add to the whole, like how Geraldine Brooks' breast cancer led to her marriage with HUAC informer Budd Schulberg and how this impaced her friendship with Mr. Laurents, or how Lillian Roth's fight with alcoholism helped Mr. Laurents direct her in I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE. Other tidbits just make juicy reading, like the stoicism of Hal Prince learning to water-ski. It is so easy to link the vision of Prince dropping rather than veer out of the boat's wake, with his dogged direction of PARADE a few years back! It is fascinating to hear how life experiences made their way into his work, to hear the power 'stars' had to pervert an author's intent, and to see how some events became motivations or mere moments of dialogue in a play, while others became entire works. Sometimes, Mr. Laurents himself was unaware of where a line or a thought came from, and when he recognizes the origin, his delight is triumphant! Bad psycho-analysts become saccharine characters in admittedly mediocre plays, a handsome Jew in love with a Nazi becomes a portly Italian shopkeeper/love interest, and the Hollywood Witch Hunt becomes THE WAY WE WERE, before politics were 'expunged', Robert Redford collided with his role and the climax of the movie (not film) was edited out. (It seems Katherine Hepburn had a knack for turning her character into herself too, not the reverse!) Included too, is director Laurents' dealings with star-in-waiting Barbara Streisand, manipulative producer David Merrick, sweating co-star Elliot Gould, and costuming goddess Theoni V. Aldredge. He loved working with Jule Styne, Len Bernstein and Steve Sondheim and has high praise for master craftsmen Shirley Booth and Angella Lansbury. It was fascinating to hear him revisit GYPSY over the years as his role changed from author to director. Reading about Miss Lansbury performing the bows at the end of "Rose's Turn" was electric. I wish I could have seen an actual performance! There is over-lap between Laurents and the ballet world through Jerome Robbins, Nora Kaye, and Harold Lang, and superstar Erik Bruhn makes a moon-lit naked appearance. Robbins seems to be the only one of the four Laurents didn't sleep with, and I question his use of 'balletomane' as a verb! His friendship with Robbins runs as deeply as Nora Kaye's and Robbins plays a major part in the book, as friend, informer, collaborator on famous works, and betrayer. To hear his stories of W.W. II, where he wrote training films, gays in the military should NEVER be an issue. Actually, he finds handsome men all over the world and his search to not only accept what he is, but to prefer it, turns up in much of his writing. Too much so in fact, if there is anything to criticize about ths book. His exploits during the war read like fiction! Early on, he announces his intolerance of bigotry of any kind, especially against homosexuals, Negroes and Jews but I find this odd since he flatly dismisses his Bar Mitzvah as 'meaningless.' This is really the first book I've read that deals pointedly with McCarthyism and the Hollywood Witch Hunt. He voices what many must have felt, sharing freely his feelings of the time and his feelings now! Informers are pariah, yet some who informed remained Laurents' friend, some did not and we learn the whys of each, first hand. Judgments are presented factually along with consequences of decisions that were made. This book is a wealth of history but for those interested in fair play and looking at all sides of an issue, don't bother picking it up. This is Arthur Laurents' story, and I not only respect his right to tell it, I revel in it! Five stars for this one, and the moon has come out again!
Enjoy the Ride! January 17, 2001
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
If you live to be 82 years old and fortunate enough to have lived the life that Arthur Laurents has then you've earned the right to say what you damn well please. Arther Laurents does just that in his autobiography and in a very honest an entertaining style. Sit back and enjoy the ride, you just might learn something along the way!
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