Patricia Bosworth, biographer of Brando, Cliff, Jane Fonda

Writer dies at 86 from coronavirus complications

Patricia Bosworth, a once-promising actress who later became a journalist and an acclaimed author of biographical studies of self-destructive figures, including members of her own family, died April 2 in New York City. She was 86.

Her death was announced in an appreciation on the website of Vanity Fair, the magazine to which she was a longtime contributor. She died of complications of coronavirus disease.

Bosworth had a gilded childhood in San Francisco, where her glamorous parents gave parties that included writers and celebrities. Her mother was a novelist, and her father was a well-connected lawyer and White House adviser whose clients included Hollywood stars.

Bosworth later explored her parents’ complicated lives in a pair of acclaimed memoirs written 20 years apart, “Anything Your Little Heart Desires” and “The Men in My Life.”

From childhood on, she grew up in a milieu in which she routinely encountered people who were rich, famous and influential. Her parents’ dinner parties included labor leaders, politicians and such cultural figures as Dorothy Parker, Orson Welles and Paul Robeson.

“I had been raised privileged and spoiled rotten,” she wrote in “The Men in My Life” (2017), “a combination that gives you a weird perspective about life, as well as an unrealistic confidence and sense of entitlement . ... I just plunged into situations, experiences, adventures without ever considering the consequences.”

Bosworth was in her teens when she saved a discarded cigarette that had touched the lips of actor Montgomery Clift — one of her father’s clients. She went on to become a fashion model while still in college, then studied at the Actors Studio with Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe and Steve McQueen, who drove her through Central Park on the back of his motorcycle.

Had acting career

She acted on Broadway and portrayed Audrey Hepburn’s best friend in the 1959 film “The Nun’s Story” before becoming a chronicler of celebrities’ lives in the pages of Vanity Fair and in books.

Her first biography, published in 1978, was about the mercurial and closeted Clift, whose intense performances in such films as “A Place in the Sun,” “From Here to Eternity” and “The Misfits” influenced a later generation of film actors. Bosworth next wrote a biography of photographer Diane Arbus, whom she called “the most mysterious” of her subjects.

“I modeled for her when I was eighteen,” Bosworth later wrote. “She’d be barefoot, and with her husband, Allan, would duck under the focusing cloth of their heavy eight-by-ten view camera and start whispering conspiratorially before they photographed me.”

Her other biographical subjects included actors Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda. Only belatedly did Bosworth realize that many of her subjects’ lives — and her own — had been haunted by suicide or reckless behavior.

Arbus took her life at 48; Fonda was 12 when her mother died by suicide; Clift had been in a near-fatal car accident that disfigured his face.

In her first memoir, “Anything Your Little Heart Desires,” published in 1997, Bosworth turned her curiosity toward her own family.

“I have not in years read an account of the ’40s and

’50s that has told me so much about the lives of the rich, influential and famous,” cultural commentator Todd Gitlin wrote in a review in the Chicago Tribune. “Bosworth has produced a distinguished and gripping American saga.”

In that book, she exposed the shadows lurking behind her family’s outwardly sunny world, revealing that her younger brother and her father — who shared the same name, Bartley Crum — both died by suicide.

Bosworth’s brother shot himself in 1953, when he was an 18-year-old college student — perhaps because, Bosworth speculated, he was afraid of publicly acknowledging that he was gay.

Her father, who had negotiated actress Rita Hayworth’s million-dollar divorce settlement with Aly Khan and helped relocate Holocaust refugees to the territory that became the state of Israel, battled drug and alcohol addiction throughout his life. He swallowed a bottle of pills, chased by liquor, in 1959. His family said at the time that he died of a heart attack.

“I excused his drinking, his evasions,” Bosworth wrote in “Anything Your Little Heart Desires.” “I had never known any other kind of father. He charmed and seduced me with endless compliments, funny anecdotes, extravagant presents.”

Father named names

At the height of his career, Bartley Crum had assisted with the founding of the United Nations. After defending Hollywood figures caught up in the anti-communist witch hunt of the early 1950s, he found himself under surveillance by the FBI. Only later did Bosworth learn that he had cooperated with the FBI, giving up the names of suspected communist collaborators.

“When I found out about his informing,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1997, “I thought he had betrayed not only me, but my impossible fantasies of him. He’s a puzzle to me I can’t explain.’’

Patricia Bosworth Crum was born April 24, 1933, in San Francisco. She grew up in a cavernous house overlooking San Francisco Bay before moving with her family to New York in the late 1940s.

Her father became publisher of the PM newspaper, later changing its name to the Star before it folded.

During her first year at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Bosworth married a would-be artist, whom she identified in her 2017 memoir as Jason Bean. She described him as violent and abusive.

While attending college, she worked as a model, supporting her husband until their divorce after less than two years.

After graduating in 1955, Bosworth turned to acting and dropped her last name because her father suggested that critics might be inclined to call her performances “crummy.”

She appeared in regional theaters with Helen Hayes in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.” The same day she landed her biggest film role in “The Nun’s Story,” she learned she was pregnant and underwent an illegal abortion, she later wrote.

On a flight to Rome to make the movie, she began to hemorrhage. A Catholic nun who was an adviser on the film helped rush her to a hospital for emergency treatment that saved her life.

“I said to her, ‘Sister, I could have died,’” Bosworth told NPR in 2017. “And she said, ‘Well, you didn’t die because God has plans for you.”’

In the 1960s, Bosworth gave up acting for journalism, working as a writer and editor at Woman’s Day, McCall’s and Harper’s Bazaar magazines.