My copy of "A Fortunate Life" is on order. I have read excerpts - the U.N.C.L.E. section, of course, but I found the stories about Natalie Wood particularly interesting. I was not aware that Robert Vaughn had dated her.
Cousins, what are your thoughts about the book? Was anything particularly surprising to you, or was there anything you expected to read that wasn't included in the book?
3 comments:
I enjoyed A FORTUNATE LIFE. Vaughn is a very good storyteller and he tells some really interesting ones here. He does ramble at points and sometimes gets a bit too existential, and I found the putting forth of yet another conspiracy theory on JFK's death a bit tedious (and as unbelieveable as the rest of them).
Vaughn does keep the book in some ways very detached from his current self, however. Mostly his stories involve persons already dead and he keeps things light in almost every instance he relates. There is a fascinating bit about his first and only experiment with drugs (a bad trip which made him determined never to try anything like that again). And he does talk slightly about the depression which overtook him after Robert Kennedy was killed. Yet on the whole he glances over those kind of deeply personal details. There is nothing at all, as a for instance, on how he met his wife. The only reference to his children is in passing regarding his son now referring to him as "technologically challenged" when it comes to setting up eletronics of any kind.
His relationship with Natalie Wood when he was a struggling young actor is intriguing and it seems her memory rests in quite a soft spot in his recollections. His tale about meeting Bette Davis is even more intriguing. And the recounting of the unexpected groping he received from Judy Garland on the dance floor at an MGM event was hilarious. On the whole in the book, Vaughn is rather open (though far from detailed of course) about his sexual adventures.
The fact he apparently is quite the method actor did surprise me a bit as he always seems so comfortable about acting. But I guess his reliance on the method is not as melodramatic as that of folks more generally associated with that technique. It does appear, from what he writes, that his self-immersion into roles is always very deep though. And he also apparently taught classes on method acting at quite a young age (20s) to a actors who became quite well-known later on.
What totally left me wondering in the book is his description of his childhood as chaotic but basically happy. He says at one point that he always knew he was loved. Yet in interviews from back during the MFU era, that was not the impression he gave.
I know of one interview in particular from that era (I didn't read it at the time but only many years afterwards) where he talked about being kept on a rope fastened to the clothes line in his grandparents' backyard when he was 3-4 years old. He definitely sounded bitter about the experience in that interview, but there is none of that bitterness when referencing any of his family in the book. I guess time has resulted in him seeing things in a kinder light. Or maybe he decided those kind of unhappy incidents were not what he wanted his audience to know about his past anymore.
I also recall him referring to himself in more than one interview as something of a juvenile delinquent in his teenaged years, but there is no hint of that in the book either.
All-in-all I did enjoy the book, though it stops just after the MFU years. It goes into Robert Kennedy's assassination, BULLITT and THE BRIDGE TO REMARGEN from after that, but nothing else really except some odds-and-ends brief tidbits from later years in the final chapter.
It's an interesting autobiography, but again on some levels it is very detached from him as a person. It has always been said that Robert Vaughn is a very private person, and the book -- despite a lot of name mentions and a great deal of frankness about his sexual adventures in his 20s/30s -- does prove that out I think.
I'm in the midst of reading it right now. I am enjoying it and was quite surprised to find out how very much involved in the antiwar movement he appeared to be. I was a bit young for all of that, 9 when UNCLE premiered in 1964, but I still don't remember him ever being mentioned as an antiwar person at the time.
I do wish that the book had gone on into the future. It does pretty much stop with the tanks rolling into Prague, as far as I can tell. That's where I'm at and there are less than 50 pages to go!
Anne
He was definitely anti-Vietnam War and really made no bones about it. He was one of the first celebrities to speak openly against the war, and that was one of the reasons he laughingly commented at one point that he would never get a tour of the White House the way McCallum did. President Johnson apparently really disliked him because of his frankness on the War.
Post a Comment