And within a year I would fall in love again. I had a lot of beaus and saw a lot of friends and got all dressed up every night after the theater to go dancing. Matthau writes: Having a book published was a big thing in my life, and it might have been a turning point if Id kept on writing. It was easier to have a drink with Karen Blixen than to be Karen Blixen. But like many women of her generation, she seems not to have had the encouragement, or the courage, to keep that edge honed. This is her first book since 1955, when under the name Carol Grace she published The Secret in the Daisy, a novella about her childhood. Matthau to reflect on professional roads not taken. Perhaps it is too painful or distasteful for Mrs. I know that that does not mean a perfect person, yet I want to be the best that I can. I would like to become the best person that I can be. Everyone, she says, has somewhere perhaps deeply hidden a private ambition. It can too often read like the diary of a teen-ager. This unseemly wish to remain a child, denying the cost and the triumph of becoming an adult, robs her book of depth. She remembered our first meeting very clearly and said a very sweet thing to me: Why, Carol, you didnt grow up. after being twice married and twice divorced from Bill. Matthau comes during her recollection of an encounter with Karen Blixen, who wrote under the name Isak Dinesen. But while that method might have worked magic at El Morocco, a full dance card does not a memoir make. Who exactly is this movie-magazine Scheherazade? What about her elicited such passion from such prominent men? It seems, sadly, that she was a genius at talking to them about themselves, to the exclusion of herself. Matthau is such a practiced dinner partner, who can regale you so engagingly with an account of Kay Kendall flinging her drink in the face of her lover, Rex Harrison, that she distracts you from the fact that she never comes up with the goods on herself. Matthau, she seems oddly absent at the center of her own story. Although she recounts events of her childhood, incidents from both marriages to Saroyan, her work as an actress in the New York theater in the 1950s and her ensuing years in Hollywood with Mr. Matthau writes about herself that her book feels anemic. Matthau interjects, For Gods sake, Walter, why dont you chop off her legs and read the rings? Matthau, though her barbs here are never as biting as the one Capote specifically attributed to her in the section of Answered Prayers called La Cote Basque: When a Swedish starlet with a beautiful face, ample bosom and unusually heavy legs takes her flirting too far and Mr. She especially dislikes anyone who comes on to Mr. Her insights into other people can be keen and incisive, especially when she doesnt like them and doesnt feel compelled to compliment them. Matthau was a good audience, and she has a master hand with an anecdote. Didnt I ever find anyone interesting who was not famous? Actually, no, I didnt. Matthau writes: It seems strange that everyone Im writing about was very famous. Then she gave up on writers and married Walter Matthau. Kenneth Tynan was also a beau, but she never had sex with him, either. She was madly in love with James Agee, but wouldnt have sex with him because he had a bad heart. Truman Capote was a lifelong friend who used her and her white-blond hair as a basis for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys. She married William Saroyan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, twice, despite a quotient of mental cruelty that could fill hours of Donahue. There she made fast friends with a debutante set that included Gloria Vanderbilt and Oona ONeill, and developed a taste for writers. It begins with a bleak childhood spent in foster homes until the age of 8, when she was rescued, Cinderella-style, by her mothers second marriage (to a co-founder of the Bendix Corporation) and relocated to an 18-room apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her memoir, Among the Porcupines, reads like the story outline for a sweeps-period mini-series. So says Carol Matthau, wife of the actor Walter Matthau, who has spent her life among the rich and famous. WILLIAM SAROYAN was lousy in bed except on his wedding night, when he skipped sex and read Gullivers Travels instead. The New York Times Review by Alex Witchel July 19, 1992
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