Anything Your Little Heart Desires

March 31, 1997
"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.