MISS ALUMINIUM
SUSANNA MOORE
Weidenfeld, 228pp, £9.99, ebook £5.99
Before she became a bestselling author with her 1995 erotic thriller In the Cut, Susanna Moore was a Sixties model and a behind-thescenes figure in Seventies Hollywood, working as a script reader for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, and marrying production designer Richard Sylbert. This is her memoir of those years.
‘It’s a tale of shimmering, glamorous surfaces that conceal something darker and more painful,’ wrote Katie Rosseinsky in the
Evening Standard. ‘Moore doesn’t try to frame her experiences through
The book ‘bursts with brilliantly gossipy titbits, recounted with wry understatement’
the lens of #Metoo and Time’s Up, inviting us instead to fill in the gaps.’ Moore’s ‘descriptive writing is a joy,’ said Laura Pullman in her Sunday
Times review. ‘The pianist Oscar Levant is “gray all over, with peeling, deeply creased skin, and apparently no spine. He looked as if he were about to slide from his chair onto the floor and then die.” While he is swimming naked with [Art] Garfunkel, [Jack] Nicholson’s penis is “as small and pink as a nestling”.’
For the Guardian’s reviewer, Fiona Sturges, the book ‘bursts with brilliantly gossipy titbits, recounted with wry understatement, from James Stewart’s use of a toupee to the story spread by the mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale – he of the department store – that he “liked to sit in a custom-made high chair in baby clothes and a bib while she threw cold pablum [baby porridge] at him”.’
While Moore’s ‘tales of the Hollywood high life certainly provide giggles and glitz... the real story is the ripple effect of grief, a woman’s self-invention and the awful deeds of powerful men.