Lives and Letters

Squalid demises are unusually common in these lively, sardonic sketches of creative types%E2%80%94heavily weighted toward long-dead writers, Old Hollywood icons and dance pioneers%E2%80%94gathered from magazine pieces by Gottlieb, former editor-in-chief of Knopf and the New Yorker (he closes with a bitter retort to Renata Adler%E2%80%99s acid-etched memoir of his tenure at the magazine). Gottlieb claims he is "not drawn to sagas of self-destructing divas," but that is false: Judy Garland ("illness, addiction and degradation"), Isadora Duncan (a "ghastly wreck"), Katharine Hepburn ("vulgar and pathetic desperation to stay up to date and in the limelight"), and Tallulah Bankhead (last words: "'codeine%E2%80%94bourbon%E2%80%99") are among the many tragic figures he profiles. Fortunately, his ambivalent, sometimes intimate appreciations of his subjects, many of whom he edited or otherwise knew, deftly illuminate the talent that preceded the denouement. Many of the pieces are reviews of biographies that serve as foils to Gottlieb%E2%80%99s own interpretation; they let him deplore salacious scandal-mongering while quoting it, and embrace psychoanalysis%E2%80%94Charles Dickens%E2%80%99s mother issues, Harry Houdini%E2%80%99s bondage fetish%E2%80%94while mocking it. These essays are really criticisms of their subjects%E2%80%99 lives%E2%80%94amusing and engaged, but somewhat cool and dissatisfied, ready with praise but attuned to the revealing flaw. 20 b&w illus. (May)