Word: kanfer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Friendship likes a Dickensian glow, and so my friends and I, who have incorporated ourselves as the Chuck Jones Fan Club of America, Chester A. Arthur Post Number One, gathered the other day for our annual Christmas lunch, presided over by the distinguished author Stefan Kanfer, whom People magazine designated as "The Sexiest Man Alive" in 1947, and by the distinguished columnist John Leo, who is also cute as a button. The distinguished critic R.Z. Sheppard, for his part, is short-listed by People magazine as one of the "Most Intriguing People of 2001," although, frankly, I can't quite...
...turn to Stefan Kanfer's Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx (Knopf; 465 pages; $30) if you're looking for laughs. Kanfer, a former TIME critic, deserves no censure for failing to amuse with his large, serious and occasionally logy biography. For one thing, no writer could possibly explain what made Groucho Marx so funny. The printed page cannot show what he could do with a quick leap of his eyebrows, much less with his preposterous body, its upper half canted illogically forward from those scurrying legs. His voice? Let's not even...
...other, more imposing force working against Kanfer is the familiar truism: he who is funniest while performing is rarely appealing when the camera stops. In Groucho's case, his wit didn't abandon him off the set, but the man Kanfer discovers behind the joker is no fun at all. By the time he breaks up with Chico and Harpo, Groucho has become a crabby miser, shamefully manipulative of his wives and children. You wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have this guy as a member...
...best part of Kanfer's book is devoted to these later years, from You Bet Your Life through the great man's canonization in the '60s and finally into the horrifying battle over his property and his person waged between Groucho's children and the confused old man's last inamorata, Erin Fleming (he was 80; she was roughly 30). Kanfer excels in these saddest decades not because he's engaged in the black art of what Joyce Carol Oates calls "pathography," but because this is the period he can document most intimately through interviews with surviving witnesses. Necessarily, earlier...