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But I Have Promises to Keep: My Life Before, With, and After Robert Taylor
As the hours leading up to her life-threatening surgery dissolve, Ursula Thiess remembers the dramatic events of her storied life. An actress in war-ravaged Germany, the author recalls saving her one-day-old baby from a fire-bombed hospital. Fate brings her to Los Angeles, where she meets and marries Hollywood superstar Robert Taylor. Film roles and magazine covers follow, and Ms. Thiess revisits wonderful encounters with Clark Gable, Grace Kelly, and Robert Mitchum. A true Hollywood story, "...but I have promises to keep." Benefits from the perspective of a woman who dared to reach out and grab her future.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 30, 2017
In spite of some moving passages about her marriage to Robert Taylor and his death from lung cancer in the late sixties’, overall I was underwhelmed by Ursula Thiess’s thin reminisces of life with one Hollywood’s most recognizable leading men of the classic era. Leaving aside the fact that the text is riddled with typos, the memoir leapfrogs here and there with no narrative thread, feeling more like “assorted memories of Ursula Thiess” than a structured autobiography.
The portions of the book describing Robert Taylor’s personal life (his habits, his home, his affability, his lack of vanity) were fascinating but written in an almost stand-offish way... I wasn’t looking for salacious headlines or made up scenarios, but I did find myself almost starved for candid details of the fifteen year marriage that preceded his diagnosis with cancer. The illness chapter is very heartfelt and interesting but stands in stark contrast to the lack of specificity surrounding large portions of the fifties’ and sixties’. Most of the book could be summed up with “I traveled here to visit Bob, he was so glad to see me/the children. We stayed in a charming hotel. We saw a [tepidly interesting detail about the location shoot]. It was lovely.” I understand not everyone keeps clearly detailed diaries of their goings on forty years ago, but a more formal approach or a ghostwriter might have breathed life into an otherwise somewhat tedious and labored collection of (very limited) recollections. I got the impression throughout that Thiess was a charming woman who loved her husband very much but wasn’t a huge fan of talking about herself or her private life. And boy, she does not, throughout the whole of this book. I got this from my library’s Interlibrary Loan or I would have been very disappointed to have shelled out the $22 a paperback of this title is currently running on Amazon.
PS Barbara Stanwyck’s name appears something like three times in the whole book, for you Stanwyckophiles out there— better to wait for the second volume of Victoria Wilson’s excellent two part biography if it’s her you’re after.
The portions of the book describing Robert Taylor’s personal life (his habits, his home, his affability, his lack of vanity) were fascinating but written in an almost stand-offish way... I wasn’t looking for salacious headlines or made up scenarios, but I did find myself almost starved for candid details of the fifteen year marriage that preceded his diagnosis with cancer. The illness chapter is very heartfelt and interesting but stands in stark contrast to the lack of specificity surrounding large portions of the fifties’ and sixties’. Most of the book could be summed up with “I traveled here to visit Bob, he was so glad to see me/the children. We stayed in a charming hotel. We saw a [tepidly interesting detail about the location shoot]. It was lovely.” I understand not everyone keeps clearly detailed diaries of their goings on forty years ago, but a more formal approach or a ghostwriter might have breathed life into an otherwise somewhat tedious and labored collection of (very limited) recollections. I got the impression throughout that Thiess was a charming woman who loved her husband very much but wasn’t a huge fan of talking about herself or her private life. And boy, she does not, throughout the whole of this book. I got this from my library’s Interlibrary Loan or I would have been very disappointed to have shelled out the $22 a paperback of this title is currently running on Amazon.
PS Barbara Stanwyck’s name appears something like three times in the whole book, for you Stanwyckophiles out there— better to wait for the second volume of Victoria Wilson’s excellent two part biography if it’s her you’re after.
April 3, 2022
The author grew u in the Nazi era but you would barely guess this.She lived through the Hamburg firestorm but was unaware of any labour or concentration camps.
After the war she became a model and was spotted by Howard Hughes and signed to an RKO contract.
She didn't make many films as she met and married Robert Taylor.
The 15 years of married life were unremarkable apart from the death of one of her sons.
We then go through Taylor's terminal illness followed by her own operation for a brain tumor.
Quite frankly the last 40 pages aren't worth reading.
Her film career was short and unremarkable and the rest of her life is not worth reading about.
After the war she became a model and was spotted by Howard Hughes and signed to an RKO contract.
She didn't make many films as she met and married Robert Taylor.
The 15 years of married life were unremarkable apart from the death of one of her sons.
We then go through Taylor's terminal illness followed by her own operation for a brain tumor.
Quite frankly the last 40 pages aren't worth reading.
Her film career was short and unremarkable and the rest of her life is not worth reading about.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews