An engrossing show-biz account, deftly mixing sexual energy with poignant character sketches.
A gay man looks back on innumerable sexual romps and a career as the sound and lighting director for A-list musical acts in this raucous memoir.
Vass begins with his boyhood growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s and ’60s in a family where his gay sexuality barely registered amid many other colorful dysfunctions. (To get him over his teenage romantic awkwardness, his older sister bullied her husband into teaching him to French kiss.) But the squalor of his environment proved edifying when, in high school, the author got jobs as a sound and lighting technician at Mafia-run strip joints, where he learned how to make the women’s stripteases look and sound good. Upon graduation in 1968, he moved to New York City, where he basked in the blithe promiscuity of the pre-AIDS gay scene. (He claims to have had two to three thousand sex partners.) After several detours, including a stint in prison for draft evasion that was “filled with great sex and life lessons,” he began a career as a lighting and music director for singers at Manhattan nightclubs and on tour. Much of the book features vignettes about the stars he worked with. These include a number of torch singers such as Anita O’Day, who was like a mother to him; a nasty, drunken Frank Sinatra, whom he told to “kiss my gay ass!”; and an imperious Bette Davis. (“She looked at me and said, ‘Shut up,’ with that voice only she had.”) The story concludes in the ’80s, when the author lost many friends to the AIDS epidemic and settled down with his future husband.
Vass’ reminiscences are in part an exuberant sexual picaresque conveyed in cheerfully lewd prose. (“‘I’m a bottom, is that OK with you?’ he asked. I almost laughed—he had the butt of my dreams so I replied, ‘Perfect, I’m a top and I can’t wait to plow you until you’re sore!’”) It’s also an absorbing account of the art of lighting and sound mixing in stage acts, with many vivid details and acerbic commentary: Peggy Lee’s “face was very shiny; that kind of makeup reflects facial lighting, which makes a performer’s face look like a death mask…She wore a gauzy white muumuu with an empire waist, which she must have thought would hide her weight issues, but I knew that she would look like a billboard in search of an ad once onstage.” Vass’ writing is full of brilliantly revealing, nuanced profiles of celebrities, informed by his years of raptly studying their flaws so as to soften them with artifice. (He told Ella Fitzgerald “the second night that she looked very handsome onstage. I didn’t use the word pretty because I knew she was not that, and she was a very smart cookie….She would look to the floor when I said things like that—it was sweet, but it came from insecurity, not from being demure. Ella told me that when she was getting started, a famous big-band leader said to her manager, ‘You’re not puttin’ that on my bandstand.’ That was at the beginning of her career and she still remembered it.”) The result is a perceptive examination of the truth lying beneath the entertainment industry’s surface fakery.
An engrossing show-biz account, deftly mixing sexual energy with poignant character sketches.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 295
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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