Review: In Joan Juliet Buck’s Memoir, a Parade of Stars and Styles
As a young girl, she knew only that “Peter Autoul,” as she thought of him, was an Irishman with brown, curly hair and a slightly crooked nose who had something to do with her father’s business and might be a big success some day. That was before Autoul — actually Peter O’Toole, who had formed a production company with Buck’s father — appeared in his first conspicuous movie and agreed to the hair color and nose changes that would land him the role of T. E. Lawrence in a big desert spectacle. “Lawrence of Arabia” was the only O’Toole movie that Jules Buck did not produce between 1959 and 1975, the glory years of the actor’s career.
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Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
When O’Toole squired Joan to the premiere of “Lord Jim,” he gave her enduring advice for how, at least, to look like him in the spotlight: “Shut your mouth and look surprised.” But he “gave no clue as to how to raise the inner edges of his eyebrows to create the expression of amused disdain that made him look like a prince,” Buck remembers now.
During her teens, as she tells it, Buck became a romantic magnet for talent. In London, at 17, she met a writer who was just beginning to become very well known. “What is the most important thing in the world?” she asked him. “Status,” he said, “and added that he’d marry me if I wrote a book.” She didn’t write a book, and he didn’t marry her, but she says she gave him one of the phrases for which he remains best known. The phrase is “starved to near-perfection,” and the man was Tom Wolfe.
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Think of anyone who had cachet in the worlds of movies, literature or fashion, starting in 1970 or so, and chances are good that they pop up in this book, even if all Buck ever did was consider the person’s proposition and turn it down. Go to the Greek Island of Hydra with Leonard Cohen after meeting him only casually? She thought his skin might be wrinkly, so made apparently weak excuses. He sent her flowers with a note that read, “Never lie to a great poet, or even a minor one.”
Despite their globe-trotting and anything but parallel careers, Buck and Huston seemed to maintain a competition, mostly at Buck’s instigation. She acknowledges being envious of Huston’s acclaimed acting career and movie star boyfriend (Jack Nicholson).
Buck, who did a lot of interviews with stars, went to the set of “1900” and wound up falling hard for Donald Sutherland.
But however well Buck knew free-range celebrities, she wasn’t truly intimate with the way the fashion world worked until she became part of it. The book describes her naïve shock at seeing erstwhile friends in the business start behaving like advertisers; trying to be politically and culturally neutral in her wardrobe choices (not easy at all); and deciding what kinds of values Vogue ought to endorse. Less interesting: thoughts about whether or not her apartment was haunted, notes on office politics and even this quick, witty summary of a runway show: “Lights, music, girls, no plot.”
It would take a more heavily illustrated book to weigh the pros and cons of Buck’s most daring moves, like using quantum physics as the theme for an entire issue of Vogue. Did her editorial choices have anything to do with her removal? Or was it simply, as she says, some confusion about the vials of seawater she carried everywhere, which catty co-workers mistook for syringes?
All of this pales in comparison with the catastrophe that derailed her freelance career: accepting an assignment from Anna Wintour’s American Vogue in 2011 to go to Syria and interview Asma al-Assad, the wife of the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad. “It was a terrible idea, but I didn’t call Anna to ask her what she was thinking,” Buck writes. Soon after the article ran, Assad’s forces began attacking civilians, and Buck became a pariah in the magazine world.
There are many things in “The Price of Illusion” that don’t sound candidly complete. But Buck has been a fabulous Zelig in the world of memoirs. She has witnessed or experienced a book’s worth of tellable tales, tall or otherwise. She’s certainly entitled to a version of her own.
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