Hollywood hit that’s crying out for a sequel
It is so much to the credit of this memoir that its dissonant materials of family tragedy and Hollywood gossip make an apparently seamless whole. Susanna Moore, model-turned-writer, had an explosive hit in the 1990s with her erotic thriller In The Cut, later made into a film by Jane Campion. Miss Aluminium is a different order of achievement entirely, both in its scalding honesty and its sly, watchful humour. I haven’t read a book like it in years.
The defining event of Moore’s life came aged 12 when her mother died after a struggle with depression and a philandering husband. The idyll of her Hawaiian childhood then vanished completely when her father married a woman who embraced the role of wicked stepmother with relish. Moore (right, in 1960) fled aged 17 to her grandmother in Philadelphia. ‘I took nothing with me when I left,’ is the opening sentence of the book, which blooms into a compelling rags-to-riches story.
The ‘rags’ in fact were trunkloads of designer clothes – cast-offs of a rich older friend. They became her disguise and a passport to another life, first as a salesgirl at a snooty New York department store and then as a model. Sexually naive, she marries the first man she sleeps with, a Chicago graduate student who later beat her unconscious when she asked for a divorce. Moving to L.A. she gets a bit part in a Dean Martin film – ‘If I was not at ease as a model I was particularly bad as an actress’ – and is raped by Oleg Cassini, favourite designer of Jackie Kennedy. Happier times await thanks to the patronage of society hostess Connie Wald: she becomes a script reader for Warren Beatty, shares a house with Roman Polanski, and has an affair with Jack Nicholson (‘Our time in bed did not go badly, but it was not thrilling’). Her marriage to production designer Dick Sylbert collapses in disarray. Amid this swirl of revelation and anecdote, a shadow is always present. The mystery of her mother’s death, and her unresolved anger with her father, return to haunt the final pages. In a way, the Hollywood high life she has chronicled seems not merely a distraction from her agony of loss but an anaesthetic to it. Once its effects wear off the pain surges back, undiminished. The book ends abruptly in 1976, when Moore is only 30, now a single mother facing an uncertain future. A second volume of these memoirs feels as necessary as it is desirable.