David Levy’s February 6, 2000 obituary in The New York Times was 250 words. This was too brief by far. After all, the guy was a television producer during Hollywood’s Golden Age who gave the world Bonanza, Dr. Kildare, and the Addams Family and was, according to the obit, “instrumental in elevating Johnny Carson to host of ‘The Tonight Show.’” His wife, Lucille Wilds, was also famous, a supermodel in the employ of Walter Thornton, the mid-century mogul whose other clients included Lauren Bacall, Susan Hayward, and Grace Kelly. The Times doesn’t even mention her.
Now comes FAMILY MATTERS, a mammoth 444-page memoir written by Levy and Wilds’s son, Lance Lee, which feels like overcompensation. Lee immerses us inside his privileged New York and California upbringing, showing us a mother who was vulnerable but calculating, and a father who was “distinguished looking” yet “emotionally abusive,” whose “criticisms” and “serial infidelities” eventually drove Wilds away. Lee opens with this schism in the summer of 1968–he was married with children by then–before settling in to tell the family story. And a fascinating story it is, and one that has scarcely been told, as the meager Times obituary attests. Yet Lee dilutes it with a lot of asides and rabbit holes, interrupting the narrative with sentences like this: “Inevitably our mythicizing begins in infancy, and as we settle into a recognizable personality with a recognizable outlook based on our and our families’ objective situations and personal circumstances, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to change our self/story/myth however much of it actually is not uniquely our own.” Throw in discussions of Nietzsche, Jung, Freud, Joseph Campbell, and T. S. Eliot, and suddenly, we’re not in a family history but a graduate seminar. His theme, announced early on, is to deconstruct “the way a set of myths conditioned my family and our varied inheritances of character and identity.” This is at the heart of most Hollywood memoirs, yet the best of them stick to the story, allowing the narrative to imply that theme. In other words, they show; they don’t tell. Lee doesn’t stick to that formula all the time, but when he does, his tale is as grand as any.
Rambling in places but still a fascinating narrative, Lance Lee’s FAMILY MATTERS is a worthy addition to the Hollywood memoir genre.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader