Promises to Keep

In this interesting but uneven memoir, Sanford celebrates his marriage of more than 50 years to screenwriter Maggie Roberts, a union that ended with her death in 1989. A highly paid screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Roberts provided Sanford with financial support while he pursued a writing career. (Their efforts bore fruit: he won a 1989 nonfiction PEN award for The Color of the Air: Scenes from the Life of an American Jew. ) Sanford's account of his wife's courageous appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951 is vividly told: Roberts was blacklisted by the studios, and was unemployed for 10 years. Returning to work in the 1960s, she wrote such screenplays as the award-winning True Grit. Sanford's occasionally self-congratulatory tone, as well as the jarring inclusion of political essays on Charles Chaplin, Fidel Castro and others, detracts from his otherwise affecting reminiscences. (Sept.)