It’s Always Something by Gilda Radner

Reviewed by Gerti

For those who don’t know, Gilda Radner was a famous comedian from the early days of the television show “Saturday Night Live,” which has been a staple on TV for decades now. As such, the reader might expect this book to be a comedy riot, along the lines of written offerings from other comedians like Ron White or Chelsea Handler. But it is not, yet that doesn’t make it a bad book.

“It’s Always Something” is more the story of how Gilda Radner went through ups and downs during her eventually losing battle against ovarian cancer. It is one of those books where even though you know how it ends (she is dead, after all), the glory is in the struggle itself, and here Radner lays out her fight against the disease in sometimes agonizing personal detail. She talks about her moods, the doctors and nurses who helped her, her husband, fellow comedian Gene Wilder and HIS struggles with her and her disease, and well as what many of these medical procedures and treatments felt like to her. She shows each stage of the process unflinchingly, laying herself open to criticism even while she talks about her mad search for alternative treatments and her evil and depressive moods.

Yes, she does talk about her unconventional upbringing and her early career, and finally the triumphs that made her a household name and a recognizable face while she was on TV. But that is a small portion of the book. More often, she talks candidly about people from The Wellness Community, the cancer support group she meets with, and her hero worship of the man who founded it, and her relationship with Gene Wilder. She is frank about her lengthy struggle to get Wilder to marry her in the first place, and then about their struggles to keep it together when they have alternate ideas about her cancer treatment modalities. Gilda is beyond honest, always leaving herself painfully vulnerable to the prying eyes of the casual reader. But how can anyone read this story and not be sympathetic to the person who went through so much pain and yet brought so much laughter to the world? It is heartbreaking to see her go through this.

“It’s Always Something” is not a funny book, although there are funny scenes in it. I think it should be read rather by those going through cancer treatments, or the family members and friends of those people, than a typical SNL fan looking for a laugh, as it is more informative than funny. My father died of cancer a few years back, and this book explains in detail what he and other cancer patients experience. Reading it was helpful and healing to me because he never talked about what he was going through at the time. In the end, I’m sorry Gilda Radner died, because even though she succumbed to this terrible disease, she goes on helping people not by sharing laughs, but by sharing the story of her struggle with cancer so candidly.

Jane Austen: Obstinate Heart  by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

Reviewed by Gerti

Having read all of Jane Austen’s novels and letters, I felt it was about time to do some in-depth research on the great British author’s life. The first biography that caught my interest was that by Valerie Grosvenor Myer, as it had the intriguing phrase “Obstinate Heart” attached to her name. What it seems Jane was most obstinate about was refusing to marry without love, and although Myer doesn’t pin things down as much as I’d like, she implies that several different men proposed to Jane and were turned down.

Why would that be the focus of my reading this 200+ page bio? I think that Jane’s own romances formed the basis for the plots of her 6 finished novels, especially as they concerned the love matches made by her heroines. Many of the novels include proposals, but they are each very different, and I read the book to try and investigate that issue – whether the novel proposals were so different because Jane herself had received nearly a half dozen varied offers of marriage.

The book is thorough in many ways, talking about where Jane lived and how she got from one location to another, usually travelling via the kindness of friends and family, as she rarely had enough money to pay for her own conveyance. That too harkens back to her novels like “Sense and Sensibility” and “Mansfield Park”, in which her heroines have limited resources and are often dependent on the largesse of relatives. But just like the featured ladies in her novels refused to marry for money although it would make their lives and the lives of their families easier, Jane refused at least one proposal that would have made her the mistress of a large country house and ended her monetary woes.

Of course, near the end of her life, Jane was making a healthy amount of money from her writing, but by then her health had been compromised. She died at age 41 from what is believed to be an adrenal gland disease. She died before 2 of her novels were even published, and I enjoyed learning that it was her brother Henry who named those works “Northanger Abbey” and “Persuasion.” In short, I loved learning details of Jane Austen’s life, even if Myer’s writing was sometimes dry and her paragraphs occasionally seemed misplaced, as if they had been tacked into the story without a concern about flow or continuity. It almost felt as though there had not been a final edit to this book, as odd facts would pop up during a discussion of something entirely different, which was jarring.

Unlike other critics however I enjoyed Myer trying to connect Jane’s novels with her life experiences, as it is something I do, too. I only wish we had more facts available about Austen’s life to fill in the time gaps that exist, and I sincerely wish that her sister Cassandra had not destroyed so many of her letters! Still, Myer has put together an educational, fact-filled and satisfying biography, and I recommend it.

If This Was Happiness

If This Was Happiness by Barbara Leaming

Reviewed by Gerti

Rita Hayworth was an actress before my time, but I had seen her in various movies over the years, including films where she acted with top-notch male stars like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. I also knew a little of her personal life - she had been married to other famous men, like Orson Welles and Prince Aly Khan, but I never knew that she was married more often than that (and to some real rats!) or that she had been sexually abused as a child by her father. All these things and more are the hot topics in Barbara Leaming’s biography of Hayworth, whose real name was Margarita Cansino.

The title gives away the gist of the book, though, as Hayworth’s life was filled with more unhappiness than one person should have to deal with. Starting with the sexual abuse which started when Rita had to be her father’s dance partner in their vaudeville shows, Rita became the breadwinner for her family after she got into movies. Studio head Harry Cohn tried to control her life after that. She tried to get married thinking that would get her away from being a puppet to her family and Columbia Pictures. However, her first husband, Eddie Judson, used her as a cash cow, as did her last husband, Dick Haymes, part-time crooner and crook.

The only real happiness Rita is said to have had is with second husband Orson Welles, but even he is surprised that she could have considered their short union to have been a happy one. He was quite a playboy, as was her third husband, Prince Aly Khan the millionaire son of the Aga Khan. She had children with both Welles and Khan, but never spent much time with the girls. Welles ignored his daughter with her, Rebecca, almost completely. Aly engaged in seemingly endless lawsuits to see his daughter, Yasmin, but by that point Rita was paranoid about his stealing the girl away since he was abroad more often than in the US.

Perhaps that paranoia was part of her incipient Alzheimer’s disease, but perhaps it was attributable to her drinking. The girls eventually become wards of the state because Rita and her man of the moment couldn’t be bothered to keep them around, and she left them with a babysitter of sorts who let them be dirty and unsupervised. A funny way for a Princess to grow up! It’s strange to see Rita looking disheveled and disoriented in the pictures from this period in her life. But Alzheimer’s would gradually claim her mind, and she became unable to make movies, or even to make public appearances. Fortunately for her, daughter Yasmin took care of her in her later years, as she was unable to care for herself.

The biography is anything but happy reading, as poor beautiful but uneducated Rita is always having terrible things happen to her. It makes you think about what it really means to be a “Love Goddess” (her nickname) and a Hollywood star, with everyone you meet trying to use you for your body, money or fame, rather than helping to make your life happy and fulfilling. A truly tragic story.

My Horizontal Life

Gerti’s Review of "My Horizontal Life" by Chelsea Handler

“My Horitzontal Life” is a book you can read and feel guilty about in the morning. Was it funny? Yes, occasionally Chelsea Handler’s collection of stories about her one-night stands was funny. But I’d have to say my enjoyment at her occasionally humorous turns of phrase was mitigated at my being appalled at her lack of a moral center. I am a middle-aged woman, and perhaps that is why I should not have been reading a book called “My Horizontal Life” at all. I just wanted to know who Chelsea Handler was since I’d never watched her comedy show, and the title was just ambiguous enough to lure me into buying the book.

Well, now I feel I know all too well who she is. But the problem with the book is that I don’t care. I really don’t want to know whether someone Chelsea went to bed with had large or small pudenda. I don’t really want to know whether she is turned on by midgets or black men. It’s the reason I don’t go into bars and get into conversations with boozy whores, because I don’t care what they’re doing with their nights, either. This book falls into the category of “too much information”, and like comic Ron White’s written account of how often he takes drugs and has oral sex, sometimes the amount I’m disgusted by a person’s behavior outweighs my enjoyment of how cleverly they can express themselves.

I would recommend this book only for people whose comical leanings are highly voyeuristic. Not suitable for young teens, or for anyone, really. I think I’ve finally found a book that legally qualifies to be called obscene, as this is smut lit with no redeeming social value.