Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story

ANNOTATION

A prominent activist lawyer of the 1930s and 1940s, Bartley Crum fell into disgrace and eventually committed suicide in the McCarthy era. This mesmerizing portrait by his daughter, acclaimed biographer Patricia Bosworth, offers an intimate, shocking, tragic work which embodies the spirit of a generation. 16 pp. of photos. 416 pp. National print ads. National author publicity. 25,000 print.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Through the prism of the life of her father--lawyer and well-known political activist Bartley Crum--Patricia Bosworth sheds light on an important era in modern American history--from the heady, hope-filled days of Roosevelt's New Deal to the dawn of the Cold War. of photos.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

"Is there a sixth sense, Daddy?" Bosworth once asked her father. "Sure," he joked. "There's panic." A high-wire artist, as his wife, Cutsie, called him, Bartley Crum (1900-1959) could not afford panic, but at 59 the elegant, well-connected celebrity lawyer succumbed to it. Approaching a financial and political dead end, Bosworth's father took an overdose of Seconal and washed it down with whiskey. Recklessly engaged in an alcoholic and drugged high life on both coasts, he had worked for big business, even campaigning for Wendell Wilkie in 1940, while taking up labor and leftist cases. Undercut by State Department anti-Semites, notes the author, he obsessively promoted the cause of Israel. Dogged by J. Edgar Hoover's agents, he defended the blacklisted Hollywood Ten. While everything he took on added zip to his life, his roller-coaster career adversely affected his income. Bosworth (Montgomery Clift; Diane Arbus) has written a memorable chronicle of a dysfunctional family, illuminating her offbeat relationships with her father, her mother (a failed novelist) and her brother (also a suicide), and juxtaposing their lives of tawdry glamour against the backdrop of the '30s, '40s and '50s. Where she fails, often jeopardizing her credibility, is in "remembering" events she could not have been privy to and inventing dialogue to go along with them. What lingers is a tone almost reflecting daughter-father emotional incest. The memoir, told in voices intended to suggest the author's ages at various times, has some of the cinematic ingredients of a Daddy Dearest. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Apr.)

Library Journal

Writers of familial reminiscences often reveal a taste for treacly superlatives and insincere endearments. No such charge can be leveled here against Bosworth (e.g., Diane Arbus, LJ 6/1/84), the daughter of Bartley C. Crum. Crum was perhaps best known as one of the six lawyers who defended the Hollywood Ten when the House Un-American Activities Committee was pursuing its investigations of the "Communist peril" at the start of the Cold War in 1947. In presenting the story of Crum's remarkable career as lawyer to such notables as Rita Hayworth, adviser to President Truman, publisher of a liberal tabloid, and champion of the First Amendment, Bosworth maintains an admirable combination of sympathetic understanding and never-cold detachment. One feels that she has accomplished what she evidently set out to do: come to terms with her brother's and her father's suicides and reconcile herself to her father's having named names to prove his own loyalty. An engrossing study of personalities and motivations; strongly recommended.A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston

Kirkus Reviews

Amid the current flood of dysfunctional-family memoirs, this one by biographer Bosworth (Diane Arbus, 1984, etc.) stands out for its lack of self-pity and its magnetic central figure, her father, Bartley Crum—a habitué in the realms of celebrity and power who was finally destroyed by personal weakness and devotion to principle.

With their talent, elegance, and glamour, Bart and wife, Anna Gertrude Bosworth (known as "Cutsie"), a former San Francisco reporter and novelist, must have resembled Dick and Nicole Diver to their friends. Approaching life with "supreme self-confidence and an attitude of entitlement," Bart used his connections as a prominent San Francisco lawyer to gain entrée to Hollywood and Washington. Patricia and her brother, Bart Jr., grew up near the glow of celebrity, with visitors such as Montgomery Clift, Rita Hayworth (whom Bart represented in her divorce from Aly Kahn), and Wendell Willkie (whom Bart advised in the 1940 presidential campaign). Yet their father continually passed in and out on either business trips or one of his perpetual political crusades; a dismayed Cutsie retreated into sullenness and affairs. Then, when Bart denounced the House Un-American Activities Committee as an attorney for two members of the blacklisted "Hollywood Ten," he was trailed by the FBI. Family troubles followed: insolvency, Bart's worsening addiction to alcohol and pills, Patricia's marital difficulties, Bart Jr.'s troubled youth and suicide, and, in 1959, after a disastrous appearance before the Senate Rackets Committee investigating Jimmy Hoffa, Bart Sr.'s own appointment in Samarra. In the aftermath, using her mother's diaries, interviews with colleagues, and her father's FBI dossier, Bosworth had to square her "fantasy image of Daddy as Superman" with the reality of a decent man forced to inform secretly to the FBI.

An unflinchingly honest depiction of a family undone by the whirlwind revolving around an ebullient, compassionate man who was also a weak husband and father.