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      K-Pop Stars BTS Will Release a Book Telling Their Own Story in July

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      The announcement by their U.S. publisher, Flatiron Books, came after days of frantic speculation by their fervent fans.The K-pop juggernaut BTS will release an oral history of the group in South Korea and the United States on July 9, its U.S. publisher, Flatiron Books, said on Thursday.The book, “Beyond The Story: 10-Year Record of BTS,” was written by the journalist Myeongseok Kang and members of the group, and it will be published in South Korea by Big Hit Music.The news confirms intense fan speculation over several days that Flatiron would publish a nonfiction title about a pop culture phenomenon this summer. The rumor spread once booksellers in the United States noticed last weekend that a mystery title with a July 9 release date was coming. It had an initial print run of one million copies and required booksellers to sign an affidavit to stock copies on publication day.Fans searched for clues of who the mystery author might be, zeroing in at first on Taylor Swift and citing her frequent use of the number 13 as evidence. (The book’s original announcement was slated for June 13.) Swift had also highlighted the date July 9 in her most recent album announcement.But June 13 and July 9 are also significant dates in the BTS community. The group debuted on the first date, and BTS’s passionate fan base, Army — which stands for Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth — was founded on the second. The book’s release will coincide with the fan group’s 10th anniversary.As speculations mounted, preorders drove the still-untitled book up best-seller lists at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.The English translation of the book was led by Anton Hur, in collaboration with Clare Richards and Slin Jung. The U.S. edition will be 544 pages and contain exclusive photographs, according to Flatiron, and will have a first printing of one million copies.The group’s powerful, very online fandom has become famous worldwide, known for supporting the group by buying multiple versions of each physical release and running intricately coordinated social media campaigns. Devotees also assist each other by translating BTS content into English and other languages and providing robust fan communities.It is difficult to overstate BTS’s influence, in music and beyond. Last year, the seven members of the group — RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V and Jungkook — visited the White House to speak against anti-Asian American hate crimes.Since 2013, BTS has released nine albums and six EPs and helped K-pop become a dominant global force. In 2018, the group became the first K-pop act to hit No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart with “Love Yourself: Tear,” a feat it repeated twice in 2019 with “Love Yourself: Answer” and “Map of the Soul: Persona” — matching a record set by the Beatles.In June 2022, after yet another No. 1 album — the three-disc compilation “Proof” — BTS released a video on social media announcing it was going on hiatus so its members could focus on solo creative projects. “I should be writing about what I’m feeling and the stories I want to tell,” Suga said, “but I’m just forcefully squeezing out words because I need to satisfy someone.” The clip drew more than 16 million views in two days. In October of last year, the group’s label confirmed that its members would enlist in South Korea’s military as required by law. Some of them already have.The hiatus was devastating news not only for BTS’s fervent fan base, but also for the entertainment business. The day after the news broke, the stock price for Hybe, the South Korean entertainment company behind the group, dropped 28 percent, which shaved $1.7 billion off its market value. As the group’s popularity has grown, it has become a pillar of South Korea’s economy, contributing $3.5 billion annually by 2020, according to the Hyundai Research Institute.Many fans say that while they are drawn to BTS’s music and performances, they are also inspired by its messages of love and acceptance, which have led some to become more politically active. “They’re really, really passionate people who just fight for what they love,” Nicole Santero, a fan who ran a data-focused BTS Twitter account, told The Times in 2020. “Those characteristics translate well when you look at social issues.”Caryn Ganz More

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      in Movies

      Book Review: ‘The Making of Another Modern Motion Picture Masterpiece,’ by Tom Hanks

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      Whimsically chronicling the creation of a Marvel-style movie, “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” sags under a deluge of detail.THE MAKING OF ANOTHER MAJOR MOTION PICTURE MASTERPIECE, by Tom Hanks. Illustrated by R. Sikoryak.Sidelined by the pandemic, some actors fired up ceramics or sang fragments of “Imagine.” Tom Hanks, one of the most prominent to contract an early case of Covid, bounced back by making a run at the Great American Novel. Alas, it is more Forrest Gump trotting from coast to coast than Sully landing on the Hudson.Titled “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” the book arrives at a crossroads for Hollywood. The Writers Guild of America went on strike this past week, seeking pay increases in an age of streaming and protections from that thundering Godzilla, artificial intelligence. The consequent halt of film and TV production deprives not only audiences, but also the vast number of workers required to get stories onscreen: extras, editors, costume and lighting designers, makeup artists, caterers, drivers, gofers, key grips.“Masterpiece” is a loving homage to those workers, a true insiderly ensemble piece in the vein of “The Player” (written by Michael Tolkin in 1988, directed by Robert Altman in 1992), or Quentin Tarantino’s eventually self-novelized “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”Minus the murder and gore, of course — this is Tom Hanks.The novel also acknowledges a fading time when leading actors, even avatars of Everyman decency like the author, were royalty: their work shown not in living rooms but red-velvet-swagged “palaces.”It’s framed by one of the outlying courtiers of the industry: a fictional former freelance journalist and reviewer named Joe Shaw. Now teaching creative writing at a minor Montana college, he has been granted access to the set of “Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall” — a movie based on a comic from a Marvel-like company — along with the Gay Talese-like superpower of narrative omniscience. He recedes after a foreword, like John Ray Jr. from “Lolita.”“Masterpiece” then pans very slowly — with lots of emphatic italics, arch ellipses and a few footnotes — over the full arc of the fake movie’s development. So we begin with the back story of the comic’s writer, Robby Andersen (pen-name TREV-VORR), who had been inspired by an uncle, Bob Falls, a Marine in World War II, and follow a very long yellow brick road through the seemingly triumphant release of “Knightshade” at a fancifully imagined 1,114-seat theater, the Grand Cinema Center in Times Square, where “a fellow in a tuxedo” plays “New York, New York” on a house organ.Charm abounds — again, this is Tom Hanks — but “Masterpiece” is too often a maddeningly excursive endeavor that made me think, more than once, of a Richard Scarry book without the drawings. Alternate titles: “Hollywood: Busy, Busy Town” or “What Do Movie People Do All Day?” (Actually, it does have drawings, by R. Sikoryak: an old-timey comic the boy Robby reads at the corner drugstore, then another he created while working at Kool Katz Komix as TREV-VORR, and then a movie tie-in for “Knightshade,” all fine places to rest one’s detail-wearied eyes.)The novel’s multitude of characters includes Bill Johnson, the writer-director of “Knightshade” (a film more “Iron Man” than “Avengers”); an obnoxious leading man named O.K. Bailey (OKB for short), who’s cast as Firefall; and Wren Lane, who wins the part of Eve Knight, the alter ego of Knightshade, a heroine who like many modern women has trouble sleeping.“Sure, she wants to make her bed with a decent chap when the time is right, but the time is never right!” Lane tells Johnson’s assistant, Allicia Mac-Teer, anachronistically (Hanksishly). “Nor is the chap.”Advised to go by “Al” because of sexism, the assistant gets hired after mastering a time management system at community college, “L.I.S.T.eN.,” short for “Let It Settle, Then eNact,” and using it to order Johnson his favorite frozen yogurt. (Pomodoro technique, move over.) Then there is Ynez Gonzalez-Cruz, driver for a Lyft competitor, PONY, whose ingratiation into the “Knightshade” base camp will eventually get her an office of her own and, after years of struggling in the gig economy, a salary that’s “a joke of abundance.”Moviemaking, Hanks would remind us, can be a rising tide, not in the depressing new climate change way, but the old optimistic American lift-all-boats way.He also conveys successfully that this “Business of Show” in the “City of Angles,” as Johnson nicknames it, is thoroughly exhausting, a realm where everyone is Wren Lane, waiting for the golden hour shot, showing up to get fake blood applied at 2 a.m. The word “coffee” appears, by my count, on 85 pages: triple espressos from a Di Orso Negro machine with frothed half-and-half for Mac-Teer; HaKiDo with oat milk for OKB; Pirate drip for a Teamster named Ace Acevido. Highly specific smoothies are fetched; catering tables are lovingly inventoried.“The offerings are both substantial, healthy snacks and stuff that is horrible for you but so very, very much appreciated,” our omniscient narrator shares. Sometimes “Masterpiece” reads like the thank-you speech Hanks, consummate nice guy, would give if granted unlimited time at the Oscars. You might admire its rah-rah spirit, yet still want to press fast-forward.A note on the type: Hanks has spoken and written extensively before, including in The New York Times, about his obsession with typewriters. A different antique model was featured in each of the 17 stories contained in his last book, a collection called “Uncommon Type.” Encountering a vintage Smith-Corona Sterling, Johnson’s chosen instrument, on Page 96 of “Masterpiece,” I rolled my eyes tolerantly.After turning 50 pages more and finding a minor character selling “Royals, Underwoods, Remingtons, Hermes, Olivettis, all in working order,”as if in an Etsy shop, I had to fight a strong urge to close the book, fire up a triple espresso and see if anything was happening in the tiny palace of my iPhone.THE MAKING OF ANOTHER MAJOR MOTION PICTURE MASTERPIECE | By Tom Hanks | Illustrated by R. Sikoryak | 499 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $32.50 More

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      in Music

      Bebe Buell, Rock ’n’ Roll Muse, Sings Her Own Song

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      Decades after those wild nights at Max’s Kansas City and her many rock-star romances, she is making the case for herself.Bebe Buell was back in town.On a recent evening, about 75 people gathered at the National Arts Club, a private club in a landmark building on East 20th Street in Manhattan, to see her read from her new memoir, “Rebel Soul: Musings, Music, & Magic,” and sing some of her songs.The neighborhood was familiar to Ms. Buell. Soon after she arrived in New York from Camp Lejeune, N.C., in 1972, she became a regular at Max’s Kansas City, the famed night spot just a few blocks away. At the time she was an 18-year-old model signed to the Eileen Ford Agency who lived at the St. Mary’s Residence on the Upper East Side. The place had a curfew enforced by nuns, but one night Ms. Buell slipped out and made her way to Max’s, where she would end up partying with Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and David Johansen and Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls.She went from It Girl of Manhattan to Miss November in Playboy magazine. She had relationships with Todd Rundgren, Elvis Costello, Steven Tyler, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart in the years when they did some of their best work, but she writes in her book that she was more than a muse and was unfairly labeled a groupie by the press.The people who went to see her at the National Arts Club seemed to feel the same way. One of them, Dick Wingate, a former music executive, said that, back in 1980, he had tried to get his colleagues at Epic Records to release Ms. Buell’s four-song EP, “Covers Girl,” but ran into resistance. “I really think she was a trailblazer in many ways,” Mr. Wingate said. “She just said, ‘I’m going to do what I’m going to do and I don’t care what people think,’ and it wasn’t easy at that point in time.”From left to right, Stevie Nicks, Rod Stewart and Bebe Buell at Regine’s in New York City, circa. 1977.GThese days, Ms. Buell, 69, lives near Nashville with her husband, James Wallerstein (stage name: Jimmy Walls), 56, a soft-spoken guitarist and director of concierge services at a luxury residential building. The couple said they had made the long drive to Manhattan in a rented S.U.V. with their two dogs, Chicken Burger, 15, and Lola, 11, in the back seat. Late Wednesday afternoon, in the high-ceiling suite where they were staying on the seventh floor of the National Arts Club, Ms. Buell was getting ready for the party.At 6 p.m. the early arrivals trickled into the brightly lit East Gallery on the ground floor. David Croland, a photographer and fashion illustrator, said he had met Ms. Buell in 1972, when he was hired to body-paint her for a Ziegfeld Follies-inspired benefit. “She was never a groupie,” he said. “She had her own groupies. She would just appear and people would line up.”He saw someone across the room: “Danny! Danny!” It was Danny Fields, a pivotal rock music figure who had managed or worked closely with Jim Morrison, the Stooges, the Velvet Underground and the Ramones. “She was a champion of discovering and allying herself with beautiful and talented and wonderful people,” Mr. Fields said of Ms. Buell. “She was smart, sexy and beautiful, with elegant taste. I never wondered why everyone was in love with her.”The guest of honor stepped into the room dressed in black: a Calvin Klein jacket, fringed opera gloves that she had made herself, and a vintage Norma Kamali skirt.“I’m nervous,” Ms. Buell said.Ms. Buell performs her songs accompanied by Gyasi Heus, left, and her husband, James Wallerstein.Leor Miller for The New York TimesShe planted herself at Mr. Wingate’s side. Long after the fact, she still appreciated his efforts on behalf of “Covers Girl,” which came out in 1981 on Rhino Records, then an independent label known for novelty releases.“When everybody in the business was wondering if that rock-star girlfriend, that Playboy girl, can be a rock person, or whatever, Dick Wingate had vision,” Ms. Buell said. “He was smart.”“Oh, Bebe,” he said, “you’re so sweet to say that.”“How am I going to make you proud tonight?” she said. “I’ve worked hard for this moment. I know that we can’t do records together anymore.”“You know, you’re a real inspiration to a lot of people.”“Don’t make me cry before I go on,” she said.The guests took their seats as Ms. Buell climbed onto a small stage.“I feel like I’m getting married here,” she said. “I’ve already cried twice. So I probably look like a wreck.”Someone in the crowd said, “Noooo!”“I’ve always been a ‘rebel, rebel,’ right?” Ms. Buell said, alluding to the David Bowie song. “My face is a mess.”Liv Tyler at the 1996 premiere of “Stealing Beauty,” flanked by her parents, Steven Tyler and Ms. Buell.GShe was joined onstage by a longtime friend, the publicist Liz Derringer, the ex-wife of the rock guitarist Rick Derringer. Decades ago she introduced Ms. Buell to a high school friend, Mr. Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith, who became the father of Ms. Buell’s daughter, the actress Liv Tyler.Ms. Derringer led Ms. Buell through some highlights of “Rebel Soul,” which covers her nights with various rockers as it charts her progress toward finding her own voice. The book also goes into what Ms. Buell describes as her “many experiences with extraterrestrial entities.” For the National Arts Club crowd, she mixed in claims of her U.F.O. encounters with stories about Mr. Rundgren and other exes.“I’ve been painted as this wild filly that was running around with the rock stars,” Ms. Buell said. “People don’t realize that wasn’t the reality of what was going on. I was a young girl that would talk her head off. I wanted Todd to be a boyfriend that didn’t go out with other women but that was impossible in those times.”“We were so young,” Ms. Derringer said, “and it was the early ’70s.”“I was 18, he was 23, and we were all gorgeous,” Ms. Buell said. “The hormones were raging. There was so much beauty in New York. When Johnny Thunders walked across the room when he was 19, it caused you to take a breath. The Italian stallion, just something about him. And he had on pink satin pants and my girlfriend’s boots!”“I also had a lot of platonic relationships,” she continued. “Friendships with Bowie and others that were deep.”Ms. Buell read a chapter on her friendship with Prince, whom she said she had met backstage in the mid-70s when Mr. Rundgren’s band Utopia was playing in Minneapolis. Prince was shy, not yet famous, and he told Ms. Buell that she would one day see his name in lights. Before they parted, according to her book, he whispered that he thought the pictures of her in Playboy were very pretty.Ms. Buell teared up as she finished the chapter: “I still cry about him and Bowie,” she said.Ms. Buell signs copies of her book after her performance.Leor Miller for The New York TimesMr. Wallerstein, carrying a Gibson acoustic guitar, stepped close to her, as did another guitarist, Gyasi Heus, who, with his flowing locks and red pants, looked as if he would have been at home in the Max’s Kansas City of yore. They played as Ms. Buell sang songs she had written with her husband and others in Nashville — “By a Woman,” “Cross My Legs” and “Can You Forgive,” among others.Toward the end of her set, she turned to her accompanists, saying, “All right, guys, I’m doing this a cappella.” After asking them not to leave the stage, she told the crowd: “I just think they should stay there, because they look so gorgeous. Gorgeous rock boys. There’s nothing like gorgeous rock boys!”The final song was “Superstar,” a 1971 hit for the Carpenters about a lonesome groupie pining away for a rock star. Ms. Buell encouraged everyone to join her for the chorus:Don’t you remember you told me you loved me, babyYou said you’d be coming back this way again, babyBaby, baby, baby, baby, oh, baby, I love you, I really do.Big applause.Ms. Buell’s last song was “Superstar,” a hit for the Carpenters in 1971.Leor Miller for The New York TimesBeverly Keel, a friend of Ms. Buell’s who is a dean at Middle Tennessee State University, said: “To me, her whole life has been defined by her relationships with other people. She’s Liv’s mom, Todd Rundgren’s girlfriend, Steven Tyler, mother of his child. And now she’s finally being recognized for who she’s been all along.”After signing copies of her book, Ms. Buell seemed ready to call it a night. “I’m done,” she said. “I got a 15-year-old dog upstairs. I’ve got to check on Chicken Burger and I’ve got to change clothes.”The entertainment journalist Roger Friedman, a longtime champion of Ms. Buell, had a suggestion: “You know what you need? You need an electric violin.”“Yeah, I could get that,” she said.“You need an electric violin,” he repeated. “That would be perfect.”“Well, you can’t overuse those suckers,” Ms. Buell said. “You only bring them in when you need to cry.” More

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      in Music

      Book Review: ‘Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,’ by Lucinda Williams

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      In “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” the raw-voiced singer looks back on a contentious artistic life.DON’T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU: A Memoir, by Lucinda WilliamsLucinda Williams, the Grammy-winning 70-year-old songwriter, was born in Lake Charles, La. Her grandfathers were both preachers; one was a civil rights advocate. Her father, Miller Williams, was an award-winning poet. Her mother loved music and played the piano. Williams grew up in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Utah, Chile and Mexico. On paper, it was an ideal upbringing for the artist she became: a nomadic touring musician whose songs draw on deep Southern roots, using matter-of-fact imagery to conjure tempestuous emotions.But her pedigree didn’t make her life fall neatly into place, as Williams recalls in her memoir, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.” “I’ve held back from talking about my childhood over the decades of my life,” she notes. “I’ve written songs about it instead.” Williams’s mother was sexually abused as a child, she writes, and lived with schizophrenia and alcoholism. Her poet-professor father was a mentor and protector, but he also had a temper. Williams’s parents divorced after her father took up with one of his teenage students.In the title song of her best-selling album, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” Williams sings about being a “Child in the back seat ’bout four or five years/Lookin’ out the window, little bit of dirt mixed with tears.” When her father first heard it, he told Williams that she was that crying little girl; until then, Williams hadn’t realized she was writing about herself. Williams’s memoir is as flinty, earthy and plain-spoken as her songs. She reveals the autobiographical underpinnings of some of her darkest lyrics, but she also tells a larger tale: of artistic determination battling personal insecurity; of misjudging and being misjudged by men and by the music business; and of steadfastly holding her own.She doesn’t give in: not on a trendy remix, not on her album cover photos, not on her instincts. She can handle being called difficult or “insane” even though, she admits, “There are times when I can bring an extra layer of unpredictable emotion to a situation that is already tough to begin with.” The lasting results are in her songs.Williams envisioned life as a musician soon after she picked up a guitar. She started performing folk songs in her teens. But even as she honed her own songwriting and built local reputations — in Texas and then in Los Angeles — she worked day jobs well into her 30s. Major labels rejected her, again and again, as being “too country for rock” but “too rock for country.”From the beginning — two low-budget Folkways albums she made in 1979 and 1980 — Williams sang about elemental subjects: desire, sorrow, love, traveling, survival, death. Some of her songs are kiss-offs; some offer regrets; some are elegies; some are takedowns. They’re always grounded in homely details. In “Hot Blood,” a bluesy outpouring of female lust, she sings about feeling “a cold chill” as she watches a guy just “fixin’ your flat with a tire iron.”It took an English punk label, Rough Trade, to release “Lucinda Williams,” her 1988 breakthrough album. A decade later, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” marked her commercial peak. But recording that album, she recalls in the memoir, was lengthy and fraught. Making records, she writes, “can test the limits and boundaries of everyone involved. I now understand that is normal.” Getting the sound Williams wanted on “Car Wheels” led to the breakup of her longtime band and clashes with two producers. Then contractual tangles delayed the release of the finished album for two years. Williams also nixed a video concept from the director Paul Schrader, deciding, “He was just another guy trying to impose his vision on a female artist. ‘Car Wheels’ did fine without a video.”Throughout her book, Williams recognizes her own appetites and mistakes. She writes about suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder and bouts of depression, and she recognizes her weakness for the kind of boyfriend she calls “a poet on a motorcycle,” guys who often turned out to be cheaters, addicts or worse.She came through anyway. “That relationship was done, but I got a good song out of it,” she writes about one romantic debacle. Williams has been married since 2009 to her manager, producer and songwriting collaborator, Tom Overby.Although Williams finished her book in 2022, it doesn’t mention her 2020 stroke; she can no longer play guitar. But she returned to touring in 2021 and persists in writing songs; she’s releasing a new album in June. Her memoir shows how deep that grit runs.DON’T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU: A Memoir | By Lucinda Williams | 272 pp. | Illustrated | Crown | $28 More

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      in Movies

      ‘Judy Blume Forever’ Review: The Y.A. Author Who Went There First

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      The documentary, streaming on Amazon Prime Video, features Blume narrating the milestones of her life and career, along with interviews of her famous fans.There are few living children’s authors who have connected as deeply to their readers as Judy Blume. That’s the argument of “Judy Blume Forever,” a new documentary from Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok that pays unwavering tribute to Blume and her imprint on young adult literature. The film, streaming on Amazon Prime Video starting Friday, features the 85-year-old writer narrating the major milestones of her life and career, cut together with interviews of famous Blume acolytes such as the writer and director Lena Dunham, the comedian Samantha Bee, the writer Jacqueline Woodson and Anna Konkle, the co-creator of “PEN15.”Since the publication of her breakthrough novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” in 1970, while she was a young housewife in suburban New Jersey, Blume has maintained a fiercely devoted audience that has found enlightenment and understanding through her preteen and teenage characters. It’s not uncommon to hear fans of Blume’s work say that reading her books felt as though she was speaking directly to them through the pages. This is thanks, in no small part, to her frank discussion of mature themes that, at the time she was writing, were considered unusual for what we now call Y.A. novels: adolescent sexuality, religion, disability, bullying, and — in many of her books — the unfair expectations of purity and obedience that parents and society place on children.“Judy Blume Forever” does a fine job of synthesizing the influences that Blume’s life had on her writing — in particular her father’s death when she was 21, as well as the marriage and divorce that inspired her first adult-oriented novel, “Wifey.” Blume, a longtime free-speech advocate, also has no qualms about drawing parallels between the Reagan-era book censorship campaigns she endured and the hundreds of attempts to ban books in just the past year.In a successful showcase of what might be lost if Blume’s books were removed from libraries and schools, the film returns to one of the most compelling aspects of career: her correspondence with thousands of children, whose letters to her span 50 years and are now archived at Yale. Pardo and Wolchok interview two of Blume’s pen pals, now adults themselves, and their recounting of her impact on their lives encompasses some of the film’s most moving portions.At times, “Judy Blume Forever” can resemble a highlight reel of Blume’s bibliography, with large sections dedicated to her books’ most memorable excerpts, such as the masturbation sequence in “Deenie.” Given her vast literary output, it’s hard to give complex stories like “Blubber” and “Forever” the nuance they deserve in a short documentary, especially one this preoccupied with showing Judy Blume the person, jogging on the beach and owning a small bookstore in Key West. Compared with her most obvious predecessor, Maurice Sendak, who led an intensely private life, Blume has always been an open book, despite the flurry of controversy around her. That may not make for the most exciting documentary, but it does make Blume herself even more endearing.Judy Blume ForeverNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      in Music

      Why Madhur Jaffrey and Michelle Zauner ‘Fell Toward Each Other’

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      Madhur Jaffrey: I learned about Michelle through my granddaughter. I read her book [“Crying in H Mart,” 2021] and listened to her music, and I thought she seemed like me. Our relationships to our mothers are in many ways similar — when she said in her book that her mother used to watch QVC and buy face creams, I thought of my own mother, who would have my sisters and me rub the cow’s milk from our own cows into our faces because she heard that Cleopatra bathed in the milk of an ass for her milky complexion. Our fathers were similar, too: Michelle’s father never took her music seriously, which reminded me of my father, who told the president of India that acting was just my hobby.culture banner More

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      in Television

      Blair Tindall, Whose Music Memoir Scandalized, Dies at 63

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      Her 2005 book, “Mozart in the Jungle,” lived up to its subtitle, “Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” and was later made into an Amazon TV series.Blair Tindall, a freelance oboist and journalist who drew on both of those abilities to write “Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” an eyebrow-raising 2005 memoir that became an award-winning television series, died on April 12 in Los Angeles. She was 63.Her fiancé, the photographer Chris Sattlberger, said the cause was cardiovascular disease.Ms. Tindall had played in various ensembles and Broadway pit orchestras and was writing regularly for publications including The New York Times when “Mozart in the Jungle” appeared. Any reader holding a pristine view of the people who make classical music was quickly relieved of it: The book opens with Ms. Tindall’s visit to a cocaine-fueled party of musicians and goes on to detail assorted escapades, among them her own sexual liaisons, including an early one, with a middle-aged instructor, when she was a teenager studying at the North Carolina School of the Arts.“I got hired for most of my gigs in bed,” she wrote.The book set tongues wagging in the classical music world and divided critics.“Written with pop culture-savvy flair — a feat for a musician who, at one point, admits to being ‘proud that I couldn’t identify a pop song from Beatles to Blondie’ — ‘Mozart’ is a delightfully unlikely page-turner,” Ali Marshall wrote in Mountain Xpress, an alternative newspaper in North Carolina. “And, even if it doesn’t encourage readers to listen to classical music, it’s sure to instill in them an unprecedented admiration of this deviant art.”But the music writer Anne Midgette, in The New York Times, was not impressed.“The book’s biggest weakness is that it smacks of sour grapes,” she wrote. “By writing it as an autobiography, Ms. Tindall seems to be saying that everything that went wrong in her life is the fault of the classical music world.”Ms. Tindall’s book set tongues wagging in the classical music world. It also divided critics.In interviews after the book came out, Ms. Tindall was unapologetic about the salacious parts.“I did notice when I became involved in a relationship with someone in the business that my work picked up,” she told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2005. “You need all the friends you can get. The music world is very incestuous.”Speaking with The Daily News of New York the same year, she was matter-of-fact.“People always seem shocked that musicians would have sex,” she said. “I mean, where do little musicians come from?”The sensational content drew much of the attention, but Ms. Tindall said she was making serious points in the book about dysfunction in the classical-music world — pay inequities, for instance, that had a few star conductors and musicians making big money while musicians like her scraped by, and music schools that built up false hopes among students.“If you take all the major orchestras in America together, there are jobs for only 100 full-time oboists,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “Yet there are 300 union oboists in the New York area alone.”And the wild times she chronicled, she said, weren’t quite the same as the better-known excesses of rock ’n’ roll.“Sex and drugs are a show of exuberance in rock,” she said. “In the world of classical music, they are more of an escape from a sense of confinement and depression.”She told The Daily Telegraph that she hoped the book might interest someone in Hollywood. But she said she wasn’t optimistic: No actress would want to play her, since drawing music from an oboe requires puffed-out cheeks and leaves the musician bug-eyed.“Unfortunately, nobody looks good playing the oboe,” she said.Lola Kirke and Gael García Bernal in an episode of “Mozart in the Jungle,” the Amazon TV series based on Ms. Tindall’s book.Amazon StudiosYet nine years later, she got her wish: Amazon, still relatively new to the business of making television shows, used “Mozart in the Jungle” as the basis for a series of the same name that premiered in 2014 and ran for four seasons. Lola Kirke played a young oboist, Gael García Bernal was the sexy conductor of a New York orchestra, and the show became a talking point for musicians everywhere. It won the Golden Globe in 2016 for best television series, comedy or musical.Blair Alston Mercer Tindall was born on Feb. 2, 1960, in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her father, George B. Tindall, was a noted historian who taught at the University of North Carolina, and her mother, Carliss Blossom (McGarrity) Tindall, had a master’s degree and assisted her husband in his research.Her parents made her study piano when she was young, though she wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the instrument. One day, she recalled in her book, someone from a music store brought instruments to her elementary school, and the band teacher allowed each student to choose one, going alphabetically.“By the time he got to Tindall, my options had narrowed to two unfamiliar instruments, oboe and bassoon,” she wrote. She chose the oboe.As she grew increasingly proficient on the instrument, she realized it had its advantages.“Composers wrote juicy solos for oboes that sent band directors into ecstasy,” she wrote. She also got excused from class for band competitions and tours.After finishing high school at the School of the Arts in 1978, Ms. Tindall earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Manhattan School of Music. She played in the pit orchestras of “Miss Saigon” and “Les Misérables” and performed with the ensembles Orpheus and Music Amici, the all-oboe trio Oboe Fusion and various orchestras. In 1991, at Weill Recital Hall in Manhattan, she played “a clever, stylistically varied debut program,” as Allan Kozinn put it in a review in The Times.In 1999, Ms. Tindall, who was becoming disenchanted with the musician’s life, received a fellowship to study journalism at Stanford and relocated to the West Coast. She earned a master’s degree in journalism there and worked for West Coast newspapers, including The Contra Costa Times and The San Francisco Examiner.In 2006, newspapers reported that Ms. Tindall had married Bill Nye, TV’s “Science Guy,” though seven weeks later the license was declared invalid and the union dissolved.Mr. Sattlberger said he and Ms. Tindall had planned to marry on May 1. She leaves no other survivors.Ms. Tindall wrote for numerous publications on a variety of subjects. Her articles for The Times were most often about music.When Broadway musicians went on strike in March 2003 over the efforts of producers to reduce the number of musicians required at shows and replace them with digital music, Ms. Tindall wrote in an essay for The Times about her final night in the pit of “Man of La Mancha” before the walkout.“This night, the music responded to the actors — and the audience,” she wrote. “If virtual orchestras take over, it will be mechanical and unyielding — measured by keyboard velocity, musical software interfaces, and the zeros and ones of digital musical samples.“We looked around the pit, grabbed our instruments, and shut out the lights.” More

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      A Dancer’s Life: Chita Rivera on Working Hard and Learning From the Best

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      In her new memoir, Chita Rivera says she could never relate to the song “I’m Still Here,” Stephen Sondheim’s beloved ode to persevering despite the odds. She liked the song just fine, but, as a nose-to-the-grindstone professional, there was no time for nostalgia — she was always looking ahead to the next gig. Then the pandemic arrived and, “like the rest of the world, there I was.”Even when the pandemic presented her with an occasion to hit pause, her urge to look back was borne out of a desire to pay it forward. “I really wanted a memoir that kids could read and apply themselves to,” Rivera, 90, said over tea last month at the Laurie Beechman Theater in Midtown Manhattan. “It’s not as much of a memoir as it is an opportunity for kids to realize that if they want this, they can have it — but they have to work hard.”“Chita: A Memoir,” written with the journalist Patrick Pacheco and available on April 25, traces the three-time Tony Award winner’s life with a veteran’s clarity and insouciance. Over its 320 pages, the Puerto Rican-American performer, who was raised in Washington, D.C., fondly recalls her early dance classes, her move to New York City to study at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, her breakthrough as Anita in “West Side Story” and her continued success on Broadway (18 appearances total) and beyond.Chita Rivera, right, and Liane Plane in a scene from the Broadway production of “West Side Story.”Hank Walker/The LIFE Picture Collection, via ShutterstockUpon reflecting on all she learned from the likes of Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse, Rivera, who had long been approached about writing a memoir, decided finally to tell her story. She’s no stranger to sharing her experiences and playing mentor. The actress Laura Benanti, with whom Rivera starred in the 2003 Broadway revival of “Nine,” said in a phone interview that Rivera’s generosity during the production was almost maternal.“She makes you feel immediately part of a team,” Benanti said. “She’s not just out there for herself. She taught me that you’re only as good as the person you’re playing opposite, so you want everybody to thrive.”The book also delves into Rivera’s fruitful collaborations with the composer John Kander and the lyricist Fred Ebb. Their “triumvirate,” as Kander described it over the phone, led to her Tony-nominated performances as the publicity-hungry murderess Velma Kelly in “Chicago”; Anna, the roller-skating rink owner who makes amends with her daughter, in “The Rink”; and Aurora, the object of a gay prisoner’s diva worship, in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” She often joined the national or international tours of those productions, which deepened Rivera’s ties to her best-known roles.Kander called her a composer’s blessing. “When you hear Chita, you see Chita. When you work with somebody like that, their range is so enormous that there’s nothing you can’t write,” he said of developing characters with Rivera. “It’s a spirit that I hear. If there’s a natural feeling when you imagine Chita singing it, then you’re on the right track.”Rivera, with her sharp, sensuous agility, has been a regular stage presence, from her professional debut in 1952 as a featured dancer in the national tour of “Call Me Madam” to her final Broadway bow in 2015 for “The Visit,” another collaboration with Kander and Ebb (and their frequent book writer Terrence McNally). She’s never gone more than three years without a major, regional or touring production — even when raising her daughter with Tony Mordente, Lisa, though her birth did delay the London premiere of “West Side Story” — and she continues to perform her cabaret act. This constant work is all she knows, Rivera said, though it has left her with a slight blind spot when it comes to the business she so loves.“Whenever you hear that vamp, you think of ‘Jazz,’” she said.Philip Montgomery for The New York Times“Who sang ‘Jazz’? I did.”Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesShe first saw her friend Fosse’s 1978 revue, “Dancin’,” for example, when it was revived on Broadway this spring. “I didn’t have much time to see the shows,” she said. “That’s how the golden age was for me: one show after another, one fabulous lyricist after another fabulous composer, all growing up at the same time. It was great for me because I learned constantly.”The “Dancin’” revival, directed by one of the original cast members, Wayne Cilento, reminded her of her heyday. “Because it’s full of fabulous dancers that work really hard, and that’s all they do, is dance.”To help her revisit that time for the memoir, Rivera turned to Pacheco, whom she met in 1975 while he was writing about her nightclub act at the Grand Finale cabaret for the entertainment magazine After Dark. They also got together over cosmopolitans in 2005, when Pacheco interviewed her at length; his notes shaped McNally’s book for her solo Broadway show, “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life.”Rivera first worked with Patrick Pacheco almost two decades ago, when he interviewed her as part of the development process for her 2005 show, “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life,” above.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“He’s funny, he likes the spirit to be uplifted, and he found me amusing,” Rivera said. Pacheco later added that the two bonded over being Latino and Catholic — “a key to her personality,” he said. Interviews for the memoir began in the summer of 2020, from her home in Rockland County, N.Y., originally as informal conversations. They pitched it to publishers once a narrative structure came together.“I don’t think she would have ever done it if Covid hadn’t come around,” Pacheco said, “because she is unstoppable when it comes to her career. That’s what she really lives for — to be on that stage.”“She was less enthusiastic about revealing her private life,” Pacheco continued, noting her reluctance to discuss her romance with Sammy Davis Jr. “But she really was a good sport. Once we read a chapter together, she rarely asked for any changes. I would say, in 100,000 words if she asked me to delete 50, that would be major.”Those seeking gossip might be disappointed, though. Aside from some light naughtiness when describing her love affairs and weakness for Italian men, the book’s juiciest disclosure might be that Rivera turned down the playwright Arthur Laurents’s request to star as Rose in the London premiere of “Gypsy” in the early 1960s.In her 30s at the time, Rivera writes she felt she was too young, polite and distant from her inner “renegade” to play an overbearing stage mother. That renegade emerges in the book as her alter ego, Dolores. (Rivera was born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero Anderson.) Whereas Chita is the sweet one “who tries to bring everything together, solve problems and likes to laugh,” she said, Dolores doesn’t hold back, and gets her jobs. “She was the one that protected me,” she said. “Thanks to Patrick, we brought her out.”“I feel that you can’t replace the person that originates a role,” Rivera said of being replaced in the film versions of “West Side Story” and “Chicago.” Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesThese personas sit atop her shoulders, Rivera said, battling it out like a Boricua Jekyll and Hyde. When mulling over replacing her friend Gwen Verdon in the title role of “Sweet Charity” for its national tour, she remembered, “The two angels on my shoulders were saying, ‘You can’t.’ ‘Well, yes, you can — if you bring your own shoes.’”It is Dolores who provides the bulk of the book’s snarky wit and shrugs off being passed over for film adaptations, though she originated the characters onstage. “They’re always winning Oscars for roles that I’ve done, but that’s cool,” Rivera said with a confident smirk, referring to a comment in the book about Rita Moreno’s and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s wins for “West Side Story” and “Chicago.”“I feel that you can’t replace the person that originates a role,” she continued. “I say in my act: ‘Catherine, you keep your Oscar, I’ll keep my vamp.’ And it’s a great vamp. I would hold it as long as the first two rows would let me.”She recalled the vamp — Kander’s introduction to “All That Jazz” from “Chicago,” a seductive eight-count that can be teased out forever — and how, when performing that signature number, she would glare at the audience and “just pulse.”“Whenever you hear that vamp, you think of ‘Jazz,’” she said, tapping her fingers like a drumroll. “And who sang ‘Jazz’? I did.” More