So Far, So Good: A Memoir

Can't believe I'm the first one in history to review this memoir by one of Hollywood's brightest stars! And I'll be the first to admit, I have never been a big Burgess Meredith fan. But now I think I'll pay more attention. For many, he is that man who people confuse with the late Hume Cronyn and they played roughly similar parts. Born in poverty, Burgess Meredith (a boy folks called Buzz, or Bugs) was the victim of sexual and physical abuse in a monastery-run orphanage, but somehow he wound up a scholarship boy at Amherst, where he was likewise patronized by the rich kids who ran the school as their own personal playground However, once he joined the theater of Eva Le Gallienne and met Maxwell Anderson, he became Broadway's youngest star, and changed his life around, stopped feeling sorry for himself and spent much time unionizing and fighting for leftist causes. He is startlingly frank about his sexual development. As for women, he didn't go for the pretty ones per se. What he valued in a woman was her muscular frame, and he tells us that he couldn't control his erections when the ugly, yet superbly fit, games mistress showed the boys archery. In later life he had a thing for plain, strong women, due to imprinting rather strange. He also managed to score with some lookers, including Hedy Lamarr and Paulette Goddard, whom he married in a surprise wedding that still has people wondering, why, Paulette, why? Buzz and Paulette spent much time with John Steinbeck and two ofhis wives, and there's a lot of dope in this book about a Steinbeck project hitherto unknown to me--a play for Goddard to star in at a Dublin playhouse called THE LAST JOAN, about Joan of Arc. But Buzz lost the only copy! I liked hearing about his friends, Charles Laughton, Kurt Weill, Katherine Cornell, Orson Welles. He and Welles quarrelled terribly when Buzz left Welles' troubled production of FIVE KINGS. He also knew Ernie Pyle and James Thurber--there are great stories about Thurber here. The book sort of falls to pieces at the end, and one gets tired hearing of Buzz's daydreams about a failed project that never got ofthe ground, a film version of THE SEA OF CORTEZ which sounds like the dumbest movie in the world--dumber than James Cameron's sea documentaries. I wonder why he never mentions Otto Preminger, the man wo kept his movie career alive buy casting him over and over again--and hardly anything about Rocky. But all in all, this is a cool book, and it is that rare thing, a book by an actor that seems honest and no axe to grind.