April's Affections and Intrigues: Love and Mystery Bloom
Gerald Clarke
A native Californian, Gerald Clarke spent most of his
childhood in Los Angeles,
his teens in Ohio. He graduated from Yale, where he majored
in English
and American literature, then spent a postgraduate year at
Heidelberg
and Oxford--but mostly just traveled in Europe. That happy
time was
followed by a year at Harvard Law School.
"I
discovered I
didn't have the temperament to be a lawyer," he says, "but
if I learned
only one thing at Harvard, my time was not wasted. And what
was that? I
learned never to assume, never to jump to conclusions. Just
because two
people pass each other on the street--to give one homely
example--doesn't
mean they saw each other. One may have been looking up; the
other may
have been looking down. And just because two attractive
people are
alone in a room, it doesn't necessarily mean they were
making love.
When I read any kind of nonfiction, I expect the writer to
offer
proof--real evidence--for the statements he is making. And
when I write,
I hold myself to the same standard."
After law
school, Clarke tried journalism, going first to the New
Haven Journal-Courier, then to the Baltimore
Sun, and finally to Time
magazine. Starting out as a political writer, he eventually
moved on to
show business, interviewing and writing profiles of
everyone from Mae
West, Elizabeth Taylor and Claudette Colbert to Rex
Harrison, Laurence
Olivier and John Gielgud.
It was during that period
that he wrote a piece that was later to have considerable
importance for Get Happy--a cover story on Judy
Garland's older daughter ("The New Miss Show Biz: Liza
Minnelli," Time,
Feb. 28, 1972.) "Liza and I talked for hours--mostly about
her mother,
who had died only two-and-a-half years earlier--and I even
flew to San
Juan to see her act. It was, I might add, terrific. I liked
Liza
enormously."
Clarke also wrote for other magazines--
Esquire,
most prominently--and in the early 1970s he began a series
on writers:
Gore Vidal, Allen Ginsberg, P.G. Wodehouse, Vladimir
Nabokov and Truman
Capote. A full-length biography grew out of the last
interview, and in
1988, four years after his death, Capote was
published to almost universal acclaim. It immediately
jumped on to the New York Times
best-seller list, where it remained for thirteen weeks--an
unprecedented
figure for a literary biography--and was translated into
eleven other
languages.
Research for Get Happy,
his biography of Judy Garland, began in 1989, leading to
thousands of
miles of travel, in both the United States and Europe,
hundreds of
interviews and endless hours in various archives. For a
year and a half
Clarke commuted between his home in New York and Los
Angeles, where he
kept an apartment in Westwood, not far from where he had
grown up. "So
much had been written about Judy that I thought my job
would be easier
than it was," he says, somewhat ruefully. "In fact, it was
harder,
because so much was untrue, incomplete or misleading. I had
to start
from scratch. In Get Happy I try to tell the real
story of Judy Garland. I think--I hope--I've succeeded."
Clarke now lives on
the eastern end of Long Island, where he has six acres
overlooking a
pond. "It's as quiet a spot as you can find so close to the
biggest
city in America," he says, "and I never tire of watching my
elegant
neighbors--the swans that glide, ever so serenely, across
that lovely
body of water at the bottom of my lawn."