Coast to Coast: A Family Romance

My eleven year old daughter and I read The World Of Henry Orient, another work of this author, as part of our tradition of reading books together over summer vacation. We so enjoyed that book that I quickly ordered another of Ms. Johnson's books - this one just for my own reading. Coast To Coast is just as much fun for adults as Henry O was for myself and my daughter. I now have a third book of Nora's on order and it will not be the last. Highly Recommended!

It seems as though Nora Johnson already wrote this book before, though now she's telling the story in a new way with a new focus on experimentation, as though Virginia Woolf were writing THE LAST TYCOON. The accent is on her younger years, and what is what like growing up in Hollywood and New York, the child of a broken home and the daughter of an accomplished, even famous screenwriter. Quick, impressionistic sketches of a time long gone by intermingle with the author's private reflections on the events she lived through, and some of them she helped create. Fans of the lyricist Johnny Mercer are not going to like the way he comes across in this book, as a poisonous Buddha who apparently hates women and is drunkenly, insanely cruel to a young girl at a "sophisticated" party. Talk about a mean drunk! At the same party the girl is rescued by none other than Humphrey Bogart, who betrays the sensitivity and the thoughtfulness we always "knew" lurked behind his touch guy image. To me, the greatest disappointment was Johnson's chapter on poet Sylvia Plath, with whom she attended Smith College back in the day. It's not that Johnson doesn't give a new angle on Plath, for she does (she, Nora, must have been one of those privileged, spoiled rich co-eds whom Sylvia envied, feared and adored), it's only that Plath still manages to elude description properly. Of all the great Hollywood and Broadway legends whom young Nora knew, isn't it odd that the most provocative and charismatic turns out to be none other than our Sylvia?

If this is a genre, I don't have any experience with it. Part confession, an insightful portrait of her times and engaging picture of very human personalities, whatever it is I found this memoir to be charming as it was frank, and poignant. The brushes with late fifties Hollywood royalty bring the era alive. The author brings us into her encounters with friends of her beloved father Nunnally (famed screenwriter of the day) with an immediacy that I could touch. Her wry rending of the struggles of an adolescent and young woman of her life including (tactfully) frank discussion of coming to grips with sex bring the story alive and make me look forward to the sequel. I want to know how she and the characters she introduces us fair in the many worlds she travels.