I didn't like NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, and as for DARK SHADOWS, I haven't seen many episodes, only the two films. I went into this book not knowing much about Grayson Hall except that all of my friends love her. As the story continued, I realized it was one I had read about already, to other actresses and women who grew up in a certain time. In fact, a lot of what happened to Grayson Hall (or Shirley Grossman) already had happened to Jacqueline Susann, the same sorts of trials and sorrows, especially in a theatrical world in which a certain kind of beauty was celebrated and those who lacked it had to use other sorts of skills to get ahead.
R. J. Jamison's research is pretty amazing, even though some of the gaps remain startling. Years go by without Jamison being able to account for what Grayson Hall was doing. But at a certain point in the late 1950s, we see all the disparate parts of her character come together and a star is born, sort of; she was a late bloomer and paid the price late bloomers do, all of a sudden producers look at you and you're playing Madwoman of Chaillot roles. It came to me that I had seen Grayson Hall on stage in the early 1970s, when I was just a boy, and I attended the legendary premiers of Genet's play THE SCREENS in an experimental production at the Chelsea Theater Center at the BAM. It was a scary show, and I didn't understand a word of it, and it seemed there were more people up on the stage than there were in the audience, but Grayson Hall made an impression on me; she frightened me with her deadbeat madness and her cigarette voice, like a man in drag. She was not on the side of the revolution--or was she? A committed actress, she didn't seek identification or sympathy from her audiences. Jamison's biography makes me want to seek out more of her work, even the SATAN IN HIGH HEELS Hall denied she'd ever made.
She seems like a brave person who had her share of troubles. In a way, she raised her boy Matt like Auntie Mame, but it seems to have paid off as his voice, wisely spotlit by Jamison, dominates the book as that of a loving son whose mother was worth all the trouble it took to bring her up.
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