I Was Better Last Night (Book)

Books about Viola Davis, Harvey Fierstein, Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward and more take us “into performance and creativity, slipping down old lanes, conducting close readings.”Millie von PlatenThe one thing we want to know about art is the one thing no one seems to be able to tell us. How, exactly, does the magic happen? It seems to be a site for danger and vulnerability, and the people who do it keep secrets inside them — sometimes biographical ones, certainly creative ones — that they aren’t always able to convey. But still, we read hungrily about them, trying to understand how some eyes see more than ours do.A set of books this season takes us into performance and creativity, slipping down old lanes, conducting close readings of a career, a character, even the pandemic-as-theater. The ones that go furthest from the present are the most comforting. But perhaps because they’re all written by academics, journalists and actors, they each contain a little shudder of the apocalyptic.Catching at gossamer is what the film critic David Thomson has been doing for decades, in editions of his “Biographical Dictionary of Film” and his more than 20 books, like last year’s elliptical lament about film directing, “A Light in the Dark.” Movies are a memory machine, and Thomson is a master at writing about his own inner screen. The last two years (the last six, the last 30) have been a mess, and Thomson’s DISASTER MON AMOUR (Yale University, 212 pp., $25) carries you backward into them. Of course, film is always his thought-companion, but it is a little surprising that Thomson goes so deep so fast on the Rock schlock “San Andreas.” Still, you cannot fault him; he lives on the West Coast, so thoughts of “the big one” are never far off. This book — chatty, discursive, essayish — is his way of surviving under such shadows.The devastation of a school in Aberfan, South Wales, 1966.Mirrorpix/Getty ImagesOther catastrophes Thomson addresses here include the 1966 Aberfan slag heap disaster, our fast-burning environmental collapse, and, of course, the Covid pandemic and its pre-existing condition, the Trump administration. He makes telling reference to Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” which recorded the plague in 1665; I think Thomson believes his own book, slim and digressive, is just that kind of briskly conducted, pocket-size diary, applicable to our current crisis. After a bracing cold-air quote by Defoe, though, Thomson’s thinking can seem a little less … toothsome. “Sometimes one can think that people are the great disaster, and innocence the essential affectation,” he writes. Lot of qualifiers in that.One of the least pleasant stylistic touches in the book is an ongoing imagined conversation with an old lady, a figure he borrows from Hemingway’s “Death in the Afternoon,” who sits at the author’s shoulder and asks him questions, congratulates him on his son’s intelligence and makes cracks. “May I share an amusing remark with you?” she asks.Author: It would be most welcome.Old lady: That Dr. Birx — if she knotted together all her scarves and shawls, she might be able to escape from the prison.Author: A Rapunzel?That’s it. The chapter ends there. Thomson knows everything there is to know about film; he has been taking dutiful notes on disasters. He does not, though, know how to write a button.If you dance over that stuff, the short book moves rapidly, like film rewinding through a projector. It’s certainly a record of a mind that runs a bit faster than the rest of ours, one crowded with frames from films and lines from books. The finest section is an in-depth examination of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” first the film, then the novel, and Thomson’s passion for it stirs the book. He demonstrates for us something quite practical: In times of catastrophe, art gives us an object in the near view to focus on. Struck by the glare of a great sentence, our eyes can’t see the horror just beyond the page — and in some blessed moments, the book offers exactly that kind of dazzled respite.The Gravitas and Vulnerability of Viola DavisThe Oscar-winning actress has become one of the bestof her generation, one powerful performance at a time.Inside Out: Viola Davis has faced trauma and grief throughout her life. The painful experiences have left a mark on her performances.By the Book: In an interview, the actress shared what recording the audiobook version of her new memoir, “Finding Me,” was like.An Iconic Character: In “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Davis brings the 1920s blues trailblazer, Ma Rainey, to life. Here is what she had to say about the role.‘The First Lady’: The artist plays Michelle Obama in the Showtime series, which explores the lives and fashion of three U.S. first ladies.What about one of the people who have been on the screen, showing Thomson (and the rest of us) our humanity? There are two things hidden in a performer: their art and everything else. The great actor Viola Davis’s memoir, FINDING ME (Ebony/HarperOne, 291 pp., $28.99), restrains itself to the everything else, plunging us again and again into her childhood, which was a cauldron of pain. The memoir thins when it moves away from trauma, taking on speed and lightness like a runner breaking free of a muddy stretch of track. It means that apart from some thoughtful meditations on her Juilliard experience (How did being trained to play in exclusively European “classics” help or limit her? She weighs it carefully), we can read and read and find very little about how Davis actually achieved her spectacular performances in “Doubt,” in “Fences,” in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”Viola Davis at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty ImagesInstead you read “Finding Me” to discover how she got her courage. She does not need to tell us at the outset that the book originated in her public speaking engagements — each chapter moves toward self-discovery, and even the worst revelations (including sexual assaults, domestic abuse, violence, hunger and a variety of poverty-related humiliations) come with an arrow pointing out of them. Look, each chapter says, I survived and thrived. Davis’s from-the-shoulder prose doesn’t pretty it up: Her father, MaDaddy, was a source of terror. But he changed, and she allowed him to shift his place in her heart. She brings this fierce, cleareyed refusal-to-forget and willingness-to-forgive to her time in the industry, too. She cites the statistics and her own experiences of racism, including some self-abnegating choices to play roles she knew were beneath her. The best parts of the book have this angry clarity; they sound like a call to arms. For fans of her artistry, though, you will have to look elsewhere to understand the mechanisms of her craft.Likewise, you won’t find a key to Harvey Fierstein’s creative mysteries in his kicky memoir, I WAS BETTER LAST NIGHT (Knopf, 384 pp., $30), though you will find boatloads of charm and gossip and some sudden ice-water drops into fury. His playwright’s mind is always keeping notes, and, as Fierstein says, “The jockey never recalls using a whip. The horse never forgets.” He certainly hasn’t forgotten his childhood or time in the 1970s and ’80s downtown theater scene, both of which he describes in lush detail. These unmissable chapters are slick with makeup and sweat: acting in Brooklyn, anonymous sex at the Trucks, a scarifying coming-out experience (do not leave certain kinds of photos around your house), late-night snacks on the Warhol Factory’s tab, his first drag costume, AIDS, love, crushes, grief and the first stirrings of a triumphant talent.Once we reach the greased-rails part of his career — after he broke through, he succeeded fast and young and often — Fierstein assumes a certain amount of familiarity from his reader. So any neo-Harvey-phytes will need to rent “Torch Song Trilogy” and “La Cage aux Folles”; you might want to find a bootleg of his Broadway performances in “Hairspray” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” too, just to fully understand what he’s talking about. He cheerfully addresses frequently asked questions (Why does Arnold have so much bunny paraphernalia in “Torch Song”?), but reader, beware: These might not be universally asked questions.From left, Mary Woronov, Nancy McCormick, Fred Savage and Harvey Fierstein in Ron Tavel’s “Kitchenette,” from “I Was Better Last Night.”Harvey TavelAlso, in his Big Star period, he writes with more caution and delicacy, as he does when he briefly talks about Robin Williams, whom he cherished as a brother. Now, I say “delicacy,” yet there’s a late, hilarious bit about a revival of “Torch Song,” in which he yells at the actor Michael Urie about how to bottom. So there’s delicacy, and there’s delicacy — but “I Was Better Last Night” does ease up in its second half. The last section, after he becomes sober, has a certain tact about it, a refusal to strike hard. I don’t regret this palpable kindness but rather his correspondingly light touch as he talks about his craft. He learned a great deal from Jerry Herman and Arthur Laurents, but what was it, exactly? His accounts of, say, Ron Tavel, an early mentor and dear friend who co-created the Theater of the Ridiculous, are so much more revealing. For some reason, he sees most clearly when he looks back 40 years and more. In other words — it’s an autobiography.If you look further back than that, you start to see different contours — maybe even the big shapes, like landscapes. Mark Rozzo’s EVERYBODY THOUGHT WE WERE CRAZY: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles (Ecco, 454 pp., $29.99) is a sweeping account of a marriage that lasted only from 1961 to 1969 but nonetheless changed the culture. “Everybody” is written like a novel, appropriately, since Hayward (a talent connected to a tortured performance dynasty) and Hopper (the gonzo actor, director and photographer) could both be the subjects of books all on their own. Together, they were combustible, which is a nice way of saying Hopper (who died in 2010) tended to get very scary on drugs. And together, they were also important collectors in a Los Angeles art scene that was, in those days, as fragile as a plant by a freeway. Their house, a gathering place and refuge for many, became a miniature Pop Art museum — full of Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg — and their Hollywood glamour informed and infused the scene.Peter Fonda strums his Gibson 12-string, circa 1965, from “Everybody Thought We Were Crazy.”Dennis Hopper/Hopper Art TrustEven in a busy spring, I have returned to “Everybody” repeatedly since I finished it, eager to sink back into its weird, smoggy, heated atmosphere. Rozzo is a scrupulous researcher and evocative writer — though his descriptions of the artworks too often give way to accounts of their value. (Everything the Hayward-Hopper household bought is now worth a ton, suffice it to say.) Where Rozzo excels is in his description of inner landscape and external geography, whether he’s talking about a beach party at Jane Fonda’s, or Hopper’s upbringing in Kansas (where wheat “shimmered gold like a lion’s mane”), or bitter exchanges in a luxury-stuffed Upper East Side apartment. He takes us cruising along as if we’re in our own road movie — all the emotional abuse and violence safely behind a windshield. Rozzo also comes close to showing us how great art is actually made. Whether it’s a discarded Warhol silk-screen or Hopper’s magnum opus, “Easy Rider,” much of the magic is created by accident, using the things that other people want to throw away. Hayward herself was a devoted trawler of junk shops, her eye careful with treasures ignored in plain sight. Rozzo’s book helps retune our own vision by imparting some of her and Hopper’s art-is-everywhere attitude. You look up from the sensual pleasures of the book, and briefly the ugly old world shocks you — a gallery hung with masterpieces.Now, not every account of the past can contain so much outdoor spirit — a lot of our important American art was made in nightclubs, on the vaudeville circuit (as it broke apart) and on stages where the floor was sticky with beer. In Shawn Levy’s IN ON THE JOKE: The Original Queens of Stand-Up Comedy (Doubleday, 383 pp., $30), a sensitive and vivid study of early female stand-ups, he directs our attention into such dark rooms.Books that aggregate always face one terrible enemy: the introduction. All that research, all that depth, can be flattened so easily by a preface. Levy’s own sounds like a setup for a punchline. Quick: How are Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, Moms Mabley, Jean Carroll, Elaine May, Sarah Ophelia Colley (a.k.a. Minnie Pearl) all alike? To simply say they’re women who made their living in comedy can’t satisfy the demands of the introduction. So to account for the way he has assembled his cast of characters, Levy finds himself arguing that each of them left behind something of their “feminine” nature as they achieved success and fame. “For women to be accepted as comedians, they had to be constrained or distorted in such a way that the womanhood was bled out of them,” he writes.Moms Mabley, left, and Pearl Bailey on “The Pearl Bailey Show” in 1971.Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesHis own excellent research quickly counters the claim (many were ribald, frank, giggly, maternal, commanding, etc. from the jump) and rubbishes the slippery terms “feminine” and “womanhood” themselves. (When Jim Varney pretended to be a fool, was he bleeding the manhood out of himself? Don’t be a goof.) So it’s best to flip quickly past the awkwardness of those prefatory pages, to dive straight into his accounts of the women themselves. There he shines. His chapters, each one usually dedicated to a single biography, move with different speeds and pressures — his work on Mabley and Phyllis Diller, performers he clearly responds to, is the best at making the women seem to live again. As our painstaking, knowledgeable guide, he only occasionally shows his own hand as a deft comic writer. Describing Carroll’s sartorial conservatism, for instance, he says she was “walking up a down escalator,” a tidy image, perfectly (and tartly) appropriate. For a book about humor, it does this sort of thing too rarely. But the book, because it is really more interested in biography than comedy, must spend a great deal of its time talking about awful marriages, industry pressure and — in every case other than Elaine May’s — death. He’s right; there’s nothing funny about that.But when we look for meaning these days, usually our eyes land on the closest art at hand: television. Maybe it’s because I spend my days reading criticism, but it also seems to be the art that’s under everyone’s microscope at once. Our heads bump over the eyepiece; who will find something new in these much-examined shows? The introduction dilemma also frustrates our first few steps into Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman’s THE NEW FEMALE ANTIHERO: The Disruptive Women of Twenty-First-Century US Television (University of Chicago, 265 pp., paper, $26), a book with a more scholarly tone but a more popular (and widely known) set of subjects. The authors have expanded on a talk Hagelin gave at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, so while the book treats familiar characters from “peak TV” like “The Americans,” “Girls,” “Scandal” and “Broad City,” the piece still retains a sense of the lectern. Essentially, the essays are a series of close readings, and I yearned to be in a classroom with the authors, joining them in their careful appraisals. But that introduction! Again it falls prey to throat-clearing and overclaiming, and they wind up making windy arguments about women’s successes and failures in the workplace, when we can just feel they only want to get into an exegesis of nudity in “Girls.” So, again, I’d say flip on by.Lena Dunham, Zosia Mamet, Jemima Kirke and Allison Williams filming a scene for “Girls.”Anderson/Bauer-Griffin, via GC ImagesLike that microscope, “Antihero” is strongest when it examines something segment by segment. For instance, in the chapter on “Scandal,” the analysis of an episode from the fourth season, “The Lawn Chair,” contains a deeply felt, and deeply thought, description of a complex set of signifiers. At their best, the authors are connoisseurs of a very specific emotion — shame — and they follow its faint imprint from show to show, body to body. In my experience, though, the chapters on shows I haven’t watched seemed gray and unreadable; only with the ones where I had my own memory of a scene could I fully enter into their argument. As I read, it made me think longingly of “Disaster Mon Amour.” Boy, when Thomson tells you about “The Road,” it rolls out before you. There isn’t comfort in that, necessarily, but there is artistry. I still shudder when I think of it.Helen Shaw is the theater critic at New York magazine. More