Well, after going through the papers (and everything else) of my late mother,the writer Charlotte Zolotow, then those my late partner, David, I thought I was about done with other peoples stuff. And relieved at the prospect. But, something rankled. I was also my late literary executor to my late father, Maurice Zolotow, A show business biographer. And I had not done much with his archives. Having tackled -- and gotten so much from so doing, and discovered so many treasures --- Charlottes papers, it was time to give my fathers at least a first pass. After Ned, my husband, died in 2000, I had given University of Arkansas Special Collections my own papers. They had also been so good as to store my fathers, in a safe, climate controlled environment, as a favor to me. And there those papers had sat. For at least 14 years. So, today, I spent an hour and a half at the U of A Special Collections, opening boxes and simply swooning. Maurices letters! To me, to my mother! And hers, and mine, to him! And all the photographs… Many I had never seen before. My mother and I, after a lifetime of loving each other but always in a fraught and difficult way, fell in love in the last years of her life, for which I will be forever grateful down to the marrow of my bones. But Maurice? Id more or less always loved him, and he me. Straight up, no ambivalence. Reading his letters, I plunged right back into why and how. His love for me, and mine for him, about as close to unconditional as it gets in this life, crackled right across the pages and the years. This is leaving aside the files of manuscripts and research on the countless celebrities he interviewed and profiled --- 5 files on Grace Kelly, 2 on Brigitte Bardot. Jack Benny. Jerry Lewis, Dudley Moore, Allan Sherman (whose autobiography he ghosted --- the manuscript and correspondence are right there). James Stewart. Billy Wilder and John Wayne (two more subjects of book length bios). Perry Como. Arlene Francis. Henry Fonda. Sunatra. Musicians from Heifetz to Duke Ellington.Ad infinitum. But it is the personal letters, of course, and the photographs, that really got me. More work ahead. And more questions. And more joy.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 02:36:43 +0000
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