Ginger: My Story
by Ginger Rogers
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ginger RogersEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1991-10
ISBN: 006018308X
Number of pages: 450
Publisher: Harpercollins
Book Reviews of Ginger: My Story
Book Review: "God Bless Mommy, and Granddaddy, and Mary Baker Eddy ..."
Summary: 4 Stars
What do you get when you cross Ginger Rogers with Tammy Faye Bakker? You get, evidently, Ginger Rogers--or at least what remained of Ginger in her not-so-sprightly seventies. Though much has been said and written about the cruelty of time, the gentle reader must nonetheless brace herself for a shock upon cracking Ginger's memoirs to the pages of recent photographs. There is nothing left of the buff, scrub-faced girl that graced the cover of Life Magazine in 1942 sporting boots, coveralls, and a fishing rod. Alas, Ginger in her dotage was an overweight, diabetes-ravaged, pancake makeup-smeared parody of her former self, more frightening and less recognizable than any male drag artist's impersonation could ever have been.
But what, you may well ask, is the relevance of these observations? None in particular, unless you speculate that the medical treatment Ginger shunned throughout her life might have boosted her long-term physical and mental health, leading to a more lucid, balanced, and enjoyable memoir. But such was not to be. Nay, Ginger--devout Christian Scientist that she was--relied exclusively on prayer, and credited it with curing everything from an ailing starlet's acute appendicitis to the boils on her fourth husband's derriere. Where most Hollywood memoirs are chock full of juicy gossip and innuendo, Ginger's runneth over with religious testimonials. It seems that in childhood, little Ginger, stricken with warts, first employed the bury-the-potato method to no avail. Shamefaced at her lapse in faith, Ginger then tried prayer, which--lo and behold(!)--vanquished the warts, leading to a lifetime of unwavering, prayerful devotion. So says Ginger in three scores of hindsight, at any rate.
These sorts of rose-colored recollections might justifiably strain the credulity of even similarly devout readers, and will certainly alienate young film buffs, who tend to lean toward the cynical and metrosexual. This is too bad, because La Ginger was indisputably one of the great geniuses of the Golden Era--one who could not only dance like the wind and sing tolerably but act, both dramatically and comically. She was a quadruple threat, as evidenced by her Oscar turn in *Kitty Foyle* and her uproarious comic rhythm in classics like *Swing Time*, *Stage Door*, *Tom, Dick, and Harry*, and *Monkey Business*.
On the bright sider, evidence of Ginger's cross-medium artistic ability is plentiful in *Ginger, My Story*. While her memoir doesn't come close to matching the literariness or wit of say, Tallulah Bankhead's, it conveys a sense of physical place and culture with an effectiveness unparalleled by other Hollywood bios. Whether Ginger is squatting in the dirt at her childhood home in Independence Missouri, sashaying around Astaire, or cringing at a bull fight in Rio, the reader can see, feel, and smell things as they were. This delightful sense of immersion makes *Ginger, My Story* a more than worthwhile read, despite what I would call the book's principal flaw: the author's tendency to depict the otherworld of human relationships in black-and-white, two-dimensional terms.
Four stars.
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