Burt Lancaster: An American Life [Hardcover]

If you have any serious interest in movies, you've got to read NPR pundit Kate Buford's sharp-eyed, meticulous, intelligent account of Burt Lancaster's life and work. The most inward of actors--director Luchino Visconti called him "the most perfectly mysterious man I ever met"--Lancaster spurned most press attention. Buford proves there was more to the No. 1 box-office star of Elmer Gantry and From Here to Eternity than muscles and big capped teeth. Growing up in Mob-ruled Harlem (Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll perpetrated the famous "baby massacre" on Lancaster's block), Lancaster ran off to the circus as an acrobat, went to war, and hit stardom at 33. Sweet Smell of Success cowriter Clifford Odets said there were seven Burts, including "Inscrutable Burt" and "Monster Golem Burt." He intimidated Montgomery Clift and Norman Mailer, threatened to toss his producer out a window, slugged Margot Kidder, put a girlfriend in the hospital by hurling her in the air just like his character in Brute Force, and made Kirk Douglas cry by mocking his elevator shoes. After he seduced costar Yvonne De Carlo in her mink coat (he also bedded Deborah Kerr and Marlene Dietrich), the mother of his five children comforted herself with innumerable minks and bottles of booze. His kids were neglected; the son whose baseball team Lancaster coached wrote The Bad News Bears, capturing Burt in the gruff Matthau character.

Buford notes that the seducer Gantry and control freak J.J. Hunsecker were closest to the real Burt, while the Birdman of Alcatraz was who he wanted to be. She takes us behind the scenes, showing precisely what the actor contributed (and threatened to undermine) in his great films, including his Oscar win as producer, Marty. Buford also explains how his independent film company anticipated many later trends but blew it by overspending on script development, and assesses his brilliant deconstruction of his own legend as the lion in winter of Local Hero and Atlantic City. And she puts all gossip in perspective. Burt's jealousy as he fumed in his car outside the house where his ex Shelley Winters was bedding Marlon Brando had a film-historical importance: Brando also stole Stanley Kowalski and the Godfather roles from Burt, and he represented the Method acting style Burt strenuously opposed for the first half of his career. Because he was too smart and curious to stick with one persona, and more interested in art than money, Lancaster needs a landmark biography. He's got one now. And you must check out his full-backside nudity on the back cover! --Tim Appelo

At the height of the Hollywood blacklist, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover received a letter telling him to "check the moving picture Crimson Pirate because in it Burt Lancaster makes a speech about workers" that "sounds like a commie plug." Lancaster's decades-long political involvement with liberal causes (and his constant run-ins with the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s) are a central theme in this well-researched and engaging biography, which also details the artist's acting career, his turns as a producer and his personal life. Buford, a regular commentator on National Public Radio, has constructed a complex portrait of a man who was a noted womanizer, yet also engaged in sex with men; who was kind and generous, yet often resorted to violence in his personal relationships; who was a mainstream "megastar" (who was parodied in Mad magazine) before reinventing himself as a major figure in Italian art films; and who broke from the imprisoning studio system and revolutionized the industry by beginning an independent production company. By carefully contextualizing Lancaster's more than 50-year career--which began in the circus and included such film classics as From Here to Eternity and Elmer Gantry--within the tumultuous political and economic changes of the postwar years, Buford's finely detailed, sensitive biography ranks among the best of its genre. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Buford, a National Public Radio commentator, has written the definitive biography of the enigmatic Burt Lancaster. Though Lancaster never authorized a biography in his lifetime, Buford was able to gain the cooperation of his family, colleagues, and friends as well as make excellent use of printed and film resources. She traces Lancaster's life from its meager beginnings in East Harlem to his circus career, his role in the 1946 film noir classic The Killers, and the great success that followed for decades. Buford insightfully presents Lancaster as more than a great star; he was also a man of contradictions, sexuality, intellect, and anger. In addition, she analyzes all Lancaster's film appearances, his work as leader of a Hollywood production company, and his political activities during and after the McCarthy era. Of particular note is Buford's ability to capture the social climate in all of the diverse periods of Lancaster's life and career. Recommended for academic and public libraries; highly recommended for all film collections.
---Lisa N. Johnston, Sweet Briar Coll. Lib., VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

There have been several books about Lancaster, one of the last bigger-than-life movie stars, since his 1994 death. Buford laudably concentrates on her subject's doings, which are the stuff of movies in their own right. Lancaster was born in Manhattan's East Harlem, a little less poor than most of the neighbors by virtue of his Irish family's ownership of the building where they lived. He attended a good high school but opted for work instead of college, partly because of the Depression and partly because of the restlessness he later incorporated into his screen portrayals. He chose to work as a small-time circus acrobat and barely eked out a living in the '30s. World War II found him in an army service unit, eventually helping entertain the troops. His good looks in uniform prompted a Broadway scout to recruit him for a war play. The play brought him Hollywood attention. No sooner did he hit the left coast than he met Harold Hecht, with whom he immediately began planning one of the industry's first independent production companies, Hecht-Lancaster (later Hecht-Hill-Lancaster). The rest is movie history, which Buford slogs through by recounting production stories about Lancaster's many high-profile flickers. She ignores what the finished films are like, relying on the odd critic's pronouncement or award citation to suggest a film's quality. Consequently, the book seems full of padding and overstatement as well as short on what it needs to make Lancaster interesting to nonstarstruck readers. Those who are starstruck, however, should enjoy, enjoy. Ray Olson

A serious biography of the Adonis who wanted to be considered a thinker . National Public Radio commentator and screenwriter Buford gained the cooperation of Lancaster family and friends to reconstruct his life in great detail, from a genealogy dating back to the Norman invasion to his star-making debut in The Killers to his burial without a ``bullshit'' funeral. Particularly interesting is Buford's interweaving of Lancaster's performances with their impact on the American public. Lancaster's Swede in The Killers embodied the fearsome ``black undercurrent'' of the immediate postwar years; his Sergeant Warden in From Here to Eternity was the ``virile, brave, and focused . . . apotheosis of postwar American manhood.'' Lancaster's achievements as an independent co-producer (Marty, Apache, Vera Cruz, etc.) and their impact on the industry are well-chronicled, as are the anti-Communist roadblocks thrown at the New York liberal (including loyalty requirements and restricted passports) during the McCarthy years. There's lots more here on the films, including how he fought with John Cassavetes on A Child Is Waiting and was considered for the role of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire; yet unlike some biographies, this does not lead readers to the video store to view filmographies. One reason is that Lancasters filmswhether because they were message-driven (Elmer Gantry, Judgment at Nuremburg, Sweet Smell of Success) or genre-powered (The Crimson Pirate, Rope of Sand) or colored by his prickly personadon't inspire devotion. The other is Buford's consuming interest in presenting a full view of Lancaster. To her credit, she makes readers think of him as a man, but given his overwhelming energy and relentless inner striving, there's an incomplete feeling to the book. As an analysis of an early Hollywood actor-producer, this is enlightening. But for dish on the man supposedly chased by women ``with mattresses on their backs,'' try former lover Shelley Winters's autobiography. (24 pages photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"Kate Buford's Burt Lancaster is a beautifully written, precisely observed, and shrewdly insightful account of a life that turns out to be daunting in its achievements, haunting in its contradictions. Lancaster was never more fascinating on the screen than he is in these pages."
-- Steven Bach, author of Final Cut

Startlingly handsome, witty, fanatically loyal, charming, scary, and intensely sexual, Burt Lancaster was the quintessential bête du cinéma, one of Hollywood's great stars. He was, as well, an intensely private man, and he authorized no biographies in his lifetime. Kate Buford is the first writer to win the cooperation of Lancaster's widow, close friends, and colleagues, and her book is a revelation.


Here is Lancaster the man, from his teenage years, bolting the Depression-era immigrant neighborhood of East Harlem where he grew up for the life of a circus acrobat -- then the electric New York theater of the 1930s, then the dying days of vaudeville. We see his production company -- Hecht-Hill-Lancaster -- become the biggest independent of the 1950s, a bridge between the studio era and modern filmmaking. With the power he derived from it we see him gain a remarkable degree of control, which he used to become the auteur of his own career. His navigation through the anti-Communist witch-hunts made him an example of a star who tweaked the noses of HUAC and survived. His greatest roles -- in Sweet Smell of Success, Elmer Gantry, Birdman of Alcatraz, The Swimmer, Atlantic City -- kept to the progressive edge that had originated in the tolerant, diverse, reforming principles of his childhood. And in the extraordinary complete roster of his films -- From Here to Eternity, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Leopard, 1900, and Field of Dreams, among many others -- he proved to be both a master of commercial movies that pleased a worldwide audience and an actor who pushed himself beyond stardom into cinematic art. Kate Buford has written a dynamic biography of a passionate and committed star, the first full-scale study of one of the last great unexamined Hollywood lives.

"Outstanding. Burt Lancaster: An American Life sets a standard against which other Hollywood biographies can be measured."
-- Neal Gabler, author of Life the Movie

"Lancaster is captured in all his complexity in Burt Lancaster. The book tells an extraordinary story of a kid from East Harlem who became a movie star in his first minutes onscreen. Written by Kate Buford, this biography is perceptive, engrossing and worth of its subject.... A valuable document."
-- San Francisco Chronicle

"Burt Lancaster is much more than the usual movie star biography. It illuminates the mystery behind the man who captivated so many of us with his physical grace and power. Kate Buford takes us through Lancaster's evolution as a man and artist during a turbulent era and insightfully conveys his constant struggle to improve and grow. A fascinating, honest, terrific read. A must for all Burt fans!"
--John Turturro

"[A] well-researched and engaging biography. . . . By carefully contextualizing Lancaster's more than 50-year career (which began in the circus and included such film classics as From Here to Eternity and Elmer Gantry) within the tumultuous political and economic changes of the postwar years, Buford's finely detailed, sensitive biography ranks among the best of its genre."
-- Publishers Weekly

"Burt Lancaster: An American Life is a wonderful look into the complicated life and influences that made this extraordinary man and the times in which we live -- by understanding his beginnings and choices, we better understand ourselves. It reminded me that politics and art have always been intertwined and that celebrities who think independently and truly believe in the First Amendment can make a difference."
-- Susan Sarandon

"Kate Buford has done something remarkable with Burt Lancaster. She makes his childhood and circus days seem romantic and enviable. She shows him as a Hollywood giant, not always easy or nice to know. And then she brings him home as a great actor, sadder, wiser, but essential. The arc is all there -- just like Burt flying through the air -- but the book is as good as it is because she never denies the abiding mystery of the man."
-- David Thomson, author of Biographical Dictionary of Film

"Kate Buford's Burt Lancaster is so beautifully written and reasoned that it transcends 'celebrity bio' on every page. It is a precisely observed and shrewdly insightful account of a life that turns out to be daunting in its achievements, haunting in its contradictions. Burt Lancaster was never more fascinating on the screen than he is in these pages. Buford's portrait of him is witty, compassionate, a helluva read, and -- I suspect -- definitive."
-- Steven Bach, author of Final Cut

Kate Buford has been a commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition since 1994 and has written for the New York Times and Architectural Digest. She is the author of several articles on the movies for Film Comment, including the first retrospective analysis of Burt Lancaster's career -- the project that launched this biography. She has two children, Lucy and Will, and lives in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York.

Chapter One: New York City Boy

The story of Burt Lancaster begins with the idea of America, with the belief that you can journey to another place and become another person. His ancestors crossed to England from France in the Norman invasion of 1066 and took the name de Lancastre. Most likely concocted from the Roman word castra (legionary camp) and the river Lune whose name may come from the Gaelic slan (healthy, salubrious), Lancaster came to mean simply one who comes from Lancaster, the county town of Lancashire. Blond hair and blue eyes would persist over a millennium as a characteristic of Norman or Teutonic origin, showing up in odd places like Sicily. The coats of arms of several Lancaster families feature golden lions but at least one has a leopard, rampant.

His immediate ancestors left England for Ireland, easily accessible across the Irish Sea. Later, eager publicists would claim that he was a descendant of John of Gaunt and his father would tell a tale of lost House of Lancaster fortunes confiscated by Oliver Cromwell, but Lancaster dismissed such stories. Not much would survive of his Irishness except two instinctive responses: a reverence for the single human singing voice and a belief that the declamatory persuasion of live drama, theater, could change the world.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Lancasters and the Roberts family, his mother's Belfast people -- working-class Northern Irish Protestants -- were poor and trapped by the island's limitations. His paternal grandfather James emigrated to New York in the mid-1860s, more than a decade after the Great Famine, part of the human migration to America that provided labor for the vast technological changes that swept the country after the Civil War. James had two key advantages as an Irish Protestant: he was educated enough to read and he was a skilled worker, a cooper, having served a five-to-six-year apprenticeship before landing in America. He settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, at 40 Essex Street. In the twisting streets and dark brick buildings lived harness makers, peddlers, grocers, bakers, carpenters, and barbers, Germans from Hesse-Darmstadt and Bavaria, Russians, Austrians, and thousands of Irish -- one of the most horrific concentrations of tenement-jammed humanity in the world.

By 1880 the next great wave of immigration filled New York's Tenth Ward around Essex Street with Eastern European Jews fleeing pogroms and starvation. James married Susannah Murray, another Irish immigrant five years his senior, and they had five children, including James Henry (Jim), Burt's father, born December 6, 1876. James Sr. moved the family uptown to 619 First Avenue between East Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Streets. Perched on the edge of the island next to the East River, just south of today's Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the Lancasters settled amid a new mix of midtown working-class neighbors -- butchers, machinists, florists, and varnishers.

Up the East Coast in the busy seaport town of Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1880, four-year-old Elizabeth "Lizzie" Roberts, Lancaster's mother, was living at 194 Main Street and developing the dominating traits of the firstborn. In addition to her father, James, 35, and her mother, Jennie Smith Roberts, 28, plus baby brother, George, the house was filled with members of the extended Roberts family. Her parents had emigrated from Belfast around 1875; Lizzie was born in Norwalk on May 13, 1876. James was a shoemaker and the family lived surrounded by neighbors -- carriage makers and hat trimmers -- whose skills catered to a refined clientele.

The family proudly claimed to be related to Frederick Sleigh Roberts, the British field marshal who was later named the 1st Earl Roberts of Kandahar, Pretoria, and Waterford. The last person to hold the title of commander in chief of the British Army, Earl Roberts was from 1857 until his death in 1914 an outstanding combat leader in famous imperial battles from India to Afghanistan and, at the end of the century, South Africa. The elderly mustachioed man staring out of the John Singer Sargent portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London has the look of Burt Lancaster: the strong, well-shaped head, the straight chiseled nose, and what Laurence Olivier would describe as Lancaster's "steely-steady" eyes.

The Roberts family left Norwalk for Manhattan shortly after 1880, probably sailing the usual route down through the notorious whirlpools of Hell Gate on the East River. They were part of a land rush to the southeast section of the neighborhood of Harlem, an area that would become one of the most densely populated and volatile in New York City. For the first half of the nineteenth century, the flat plain, later to be called East Harlem, was a bucolic area of farms sloping down to the Harlem River on its northeastern border and loosely bounded by Ninety-sixth and 125th Streets, with the mansions and museums facing Central Park on the west. By the 1860s, the "Harlem Flats" was the site of breweries spewing malt and brew odors into the air, slaughter houses, coal yards, junkyards, and saw mills clustered along the river frontage. Isolated clusters of small four-story brownstones, built to house the workers, popped up like mushrooms in the middle of the fields that filled in the empty grid of future cross-streets. Irish shanty towns lined the water.

The rapacious northward growth of the city that followed the construction of the Second and Third Avenue elevated railway lines in 1878 and 1880 further engulfed the area with Irish and German immigrants. Speculators threw up row upon row of unregulated tenements with as many as four hundred people crammed into structures designed to house fifty. The New York Central railroad track ran aboveground up Park Avenue from Ninety-seventh Street, the dark stone viaduct further slicing up the neighborhood.

By the turn of the century four out of five New Yorkers were immigrants or the children of immigrants, with East Harlem absorbing each wave of newcomers. Rag peddlers trolled through the neighborhood's trash-filled yards and dead animals floated in flooded cellars. By 1904 there were over one hundred saloons in a forty-block area. From this rattling rhythm of immigrant change, poverty, and backbreaking labor was bred Lancaster's energy and taste for work. The tone of the slum was set: working-class immigrant, the lowest rentals. Years later he would remember crossing the de facto border of Ninety-sixth Street, sauntering down Fifth and Park Avenues to look at the rich people.


In 1900 James Roberts -- a widower now, with two more children, Minnie and Stephen -- rented an apartment at 2068 Second Avenue, near the corner of 106th Street in the shadow of the El. Lizzie, twenty-four, took on the responsibilities of mother of the family. Four years later, James bought what his grandson would call a "very poor little house," a narrow four-story brownstone down the street at 209 East 106th Street between Second and Third Avenues, built around 1880 on the north side of the street. The house had been divided into three rental floors, with a moving business on the ground floor. As one of the periodic broad streets that broke up the narrow Manhattan grid, 106th, even with the superstructures of the two Els marking both ends of the block, was less confined and claustrophobic than other nearby streets. The light was stronger and brighter all day long. A very young Walter Winchell and his parents briefly lived up the street between Fifth and Madison Avenues.

The Roberts family took over the second-floor apartment, a classic coldwater railroad flat with windows only in the front and back. Lancaster would describe it as "long, dreary, one room after the other" with a toilet out in the hall and a coal stove in the kitchen providing the only heat in winter. The big bay window protruding from the front facade was a perfect vantage point from which to view the busy street. The family derived additional income from the tenants, $16 a month per family by the 1920s. A landowner in the slums, no matter how shabby the house, was somebody.

Shortly after settling into the new house, Lizzie met a handsome, talented young man who looks in photographs like the lean and cunning James Joyce. Jim Lancaster had moved uptown and become fairly well known in the area for using his Irish tenor voice to win prizes on amateur nights at the local theaters with a song-and-dance routine called "The Broadway Swell and the Bowery Bum." According to various accounts, he played an old guitar, the ukelele, the accordion, and the harmonica. To Lizzie's take-charge assumption of authority, he was gentle. Both were remembered by their children as being in their youthful primes two of the best-looking people on the East Side, Lizzie attracting wolf whistles well into middle-age. Neither would ever have much inclination for daydreaming about life's impractical possibilities. They were married on August 8, 1908, and Jim moved in with his new wife's family. Over thirty at the time of her marriage, Lizzie lost no time in having three children over the next four years: Jennie Dorothea (Jane), James Robert (Jim) Jr., and William Henry (Willie).

In 1913 -- a year that would be remembered for several firsts, including the founding by Jesse Lasky of a motion picture company later called Paramount Pictures, and the opening of the tallest "skyscraper" of the new Manhattan skyline, the sixty-story Woolworth Building -- Jim took a job as a postal clerk at the brand-new McKim, Mead and White-designed General Post Office. Not only was he working in a salaried white-collar position in an edifice which took up two full blocks between West Thirty-first and Thirty-third Streets, he got to wear a uniform. He may as well have been working on Wall Street.

On November 2, Lizzie, age thirty-seven, gave birth at home to her third son, Burton Stephen. A crowd of friends and neighbors gathered outside in the street cheered at the news shouted do...