Things I Did...and Things I Think I Did

by Jean Negulesco

The artist, writer, and director of such films as "Johnny Belinda" and "How to Marry a Millionaire" recalls his artist's life in the Paris of the twenties, his Hollywood years and the celebrities he encountered, and his long, productive life in the arts

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, Biography

317 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1984

Reviews

[Matthew Wilder · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cannonade of steaming horseshit is one way to describe Jean Negulesco’s memoir of life in between-the-wars Europe and in Golden Age Hollywood. Histrionic folderol is another. Joe Biden’s No Malarkey bus would burst into flame on contact with this slender opus. Another way to describe it would be: Perhaps the most sheerly and cascadingly joyful Hollywood memoir ever written.

Negulesco, a better than Sunday painter, conceives the book as a series of sketches of The Greats I Have Known. To a one they are flavorful, elicit sentimental smiles when not belly laughs, and almost every single detail seems totally made up. (Only one scene where Negulesco really goes over the line: A party at a Hollywood mogul’s house where everyone, in tiresomely time-honoree fashion, jumps in the fatcat’s swimming pool with their clothes on.) His take on Brancusi and Modigliani beating the tar out of each other rolling about in a gutter is unforgettable. His rendering of the opening night of Tristan Tzara’s THE GAS HEART, for those of us who revere that masterpiece, is pure delight. Dali, Hemingway, Isadora Duncan do cameos; and then the young painter is off to the city of dreams.

Negulesco’s sketch of John Huston has him getting into a homoerotic threeway free-for-all brawl in his bedroom with two young Hollywood hangers-on till they retire to the foyer spitting teeth. Anatole Litvak is a schmendricky forever-lovesick type while Howard Hawks is a bit of a sadistic teller of shaggy dog stories. Maybe the most plausibly limbed of Negulesco’s sketches is of Marilyn Monroe; the author seems candidly blondes by her carnal appeal. Yet the details convince.

How did Jean Negulesco become the second-, occasionally first-string talent he became? He was a gigolo, a taxi dancer as it were (just like Billy Wilder, as Negulesco cautions potential scolds)...one senses he was a first-class...let us not say social climber but a man about town. Perhaps a clue as to how he did it can be found in the sense that every single page of this blissfully phony tell-all recalls Slim Aarons’ photos of a posh, heavenly world gone long by.

[Justin Decloux · Rating 3 out of 5]

A charming, but slight, biography more interested in humorous anecdotes featuring famous people than anything else.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

A life memoir in a series of vignettes by Jean Negulesco’s of his life in between-the-wars Europe and in Golden Age Hollywood. The artist, writer, and director of such films as "Johnny Belinda" and "How to Marry a Millionaire" recalls his artist's life in the Paris of the twenties, his Hollywood years and the celebrities he encountered, and his long, productive life in the arts

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun and easygoing memoir from a man who started as a painter in Paris and transitioned to a set designer, director, and producer in the Golden Age of Hollywood. The author fires off playful rememberances of famous actors (Bogart, Bacall, Marilyn...) as well as studio execs like David O Selznick, and even European artists like Modigliani and Isadora Duncan. Some of his anecdotes are charming, some wear thin with self-congratulation. One nice feature is his own drawings of famous characters.