Confronting “The Beast in Me”

Since around the time that my Roger Corman biography came out, I’ve been part of a lively group called Biographers International Organization. This group, officially founded in 2010 by the indefatigable James McGrath Morris and some of his biographer peers, is devoted to the art and craft of biography. BIO’s advisory council has included a who’s who of famous biographers (including Pulitzer Prize winners like Debby Applegate, Robert Caro, Ron Chernow, and Stacy Schiff), but anyone who finds biography of interest is welcome to join for a nominal fee. Perks include an annual conference, an informative monthly newsletter, and Zoom gatherings galore. And, of course, a Facebook group in which biographers from around the globe trade info, cheer one another on, and generally stay in touch.   

 I bring this up here because of a hot recent topic on the BIO Facebook page: the limited Netflix series called The Beast in Me. The dauntless biographer Carl Rollyson (who’s credited with almost as many books as Heinz has varieties) was, I believe, the first to encourage his fellow members to check out the eight-part series. It’s a cracking good thriller, featuring two of filmdom’s finest, Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys. Danes plays Aggie Wiggs, a best-selling author grieving the loss of her young son in an accident involving a drunk driver. Rhys (a Welsh actor who speaks flawless American English in this series) plays Nile Jarvis, a wealthy entrepreneur notorious in the press because of the mysterious disappearance of his wife.

 One reason Rollyson and other serious biographers are keen on The Beast in Me is because Aggie’s fame comes from her publication of a non-fiction book about her late father. When the series opens, she’s struggling to move ahead on a joint biography of two recent Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who were both courtroom adversaries and personal friends. A fertile topic for a book, perhaps, but maybe not one that Aggie’s equipped to handle. So when her new neighbor, the cheerfully sinister Nile Jarvis, proposes himself as her new biographical subject, she pays attention. Next thing you know, they’re having long tête-à-têtes in which, while proclaiming himself innocent of serious crimes, Nile Continues to find ways to get under Aggie’s skin.

 The series is riveting, though maybe its wrap-up is not quite as effective as it might be. It’s exciting to see Danes (who surpasses even Keri Russell of The Diplomat in looking worried and disheveled) struggling to know how to handle the disarmingly chummy new next-door pal she’s pledged to present to the world on the page. As Carl Rollyson has pointed out to his fellow authors, biography can also be seen as autobiography. The way a biographer approaches his or her subject is very much a secret glimpse into that biographer’s own psyche. Aggie, for instance, must ultimately admit to seeing in herself something resembling Nile’s cold-blooded approach to the world.

 I agree completely. I’d even say that my three books reveal to the reader three very different aspects of my own path through life. Writing about my longtime boss, filmmaker Roger Corman, I was something of a cynic: sassy and even snarky. My Ron Howard bio brought out the optimist in me. Suddenly I was hopeful about the human capacity for goodness. My 2017 study of The Graduate, officially titled Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, saw me as a member of a youthful generation  hugely influenced by this smart little comedy, but also—fifty years later—as someone who had learned a great deal about life as the decades wore on.

 

 

 

Ronald Colman: A Durable Life

The actor Ronald Colman, known for his dapper mustache and his mellifluous speaking voice, left us in 1958. But lovers of old cinema classics still remember him fondly. I recall my parents chuckling over their memories of 1947’s The Late George Apley and my mother developing a romantic fascination with Shangri-La, thanks to a hit Colman film from 1937, Lost Horizon. I’ve also come across Carol Burnett’s rambunctious take on a 1942 Colman romantic weepy, Random Harvest. (Burnett’s version, called Rancid Harvest, has heaps of fun with the story of a British ex-soldier, suffering from amnesia, who has totally forgotten his marriage to perky Greer Garson.) 

Colman’s film career, which stretched from the silent era to 1957, gave him a wide variety of roles. He was a courtly would-be lover in Lady Windermere’s Fan, a silent adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play directed back in 1925 by the great Ernst Lubitsch. He starred as a soldier, a jewel thief, a heroic doctor, an esteemed law professor, and a painter who has gone blind.  After multiple Oscar nominations, he finally took home the golden statuette in 1948 for A Double Life, in which he played a Broadway actor so caught up in his portrayal of Othello that he nearly murders his on-stage Desdemona. 

How to take in the whole scope of Colman’s illustrious career? My exceedingly prolific colleague Carl Rollyson has written a Colman biography, published in 2024, that’s both extremely thorough and unique in its focus. He has titled it Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero. Rollyson’s book contains the elements of many classic biographies: a timeline, a photo section, several useful appendices, a list of sources, and so on. But Rollyson chooses not to start with the familiar cradle-to-grave narrative. Instead, he devotes the long first section of his book to what he calls “A Gentleman’s Work.” Starting with the classic eighteenth-century delineation of gentlemanly behavior in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, he considers Colman’s film career as a creative working out of an English gentleman’s approach to life. Not that Colman always plays an Englishman; not that he’s wholly typecast as a wealthy aristocrat. Rollyson sees in Colman’s film roles an exploration of truly gentlemanly behavior, often featuring a character who must repent of his flaws and find true nobility within  himself. (Colman’s Sydney Carton in 1935’s A Tale of Two Cities certainly rises to the occasion as he heads toward the guillotine.) A particularly interesting section focuses on Lost Horizon, in which Colman’s role as an esteemed British statesman who becomes entranced by the promise of a life of seclusion and peace becomes, in his daughter’s words, “Ronald Colman stepping into his own image.”   

After thoroughly exploring the implications of Colman’s career, Rollyson delves deeply into the life itself, helped by input from Hollywood colleagues and from Colman’s daughter Juliet, who in 1975 probed her late father’s psyche in Ronald Colman: A Very Private Person. My favorite discovery is that Colman and his second wife, English actress Benita Hume, had a long, loving, exceedingly playful relationship, one captured in their popular radio broadcast, The Halls of Ivy (1950-52). The show briefly moved to television, but radio was their favorite medium as a couple, because in their later years it gave them more time for friends and for one another. And—who would have thought it?—the pair had a ball playing themselves as supposed next-door-neighbors of the cheap and cranky Jack Benny. He featured them frequently on his own radio broadcasts, with Benny heckling a dignified but prickly Colman, and Benita desperately striving to keep the peace.