even read those kinds of books? I was there I knew him/her, I served him like a brother
for the best years of my life and now he is gone I am going to take my revenge in, you
guessed it, a tell-all book.
So when you get to these books it is always the small detail, as Andrew O Hagan
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n14/andrew-ohagan/valet-of-the-dolls that breaks your heart.
Elvis Presley, who couldn’t ask somebody to pass him the salt without their one day writing a memoir about it, is fixed in our minds as a tiny-dick weirdo with double mirrors at Graceland and a penchant for deep-fried peanut butter sandwiches at midnight, thanks, mainly, to the literary efforts of the flunkies and junkies who surfed for years near the top of his payroll. Such ventures have now gathered their features into a regular form – bodyguards do it, chauffeurs do it, even educated fleas do it – but the most compelling are by the very quiet ones, the ones who must have seemed to have extraordinary reserves of faithfulness in them – running baths, pouring drinks, never interrupting – but who lived with hate behind their eyes all the while, looking forward to their own hour on the stage, no longer fireable, no longer wage-dependent, finding deeper and still deeper reserves of truth-telling brio as they plunge forward to exact the spear-carrier’s perfect revenge. Despoiling the spoiled, shutting up the shut-uppers: welcome to the world’s fiercest form
of Last Wordism.
In Mr S.: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra, George Jacobs manages to make all the vengeance sound like one of the higher duties of friendship. Thankfully, Jacobs’s instincts as a friend and a common soul turn out to be less sharp than his flick-knife, which glints a few inches in front of his can-do smile from fairly early in the book.
Jacobs, it emerges, was frozen out for dancing suggestively in a Hollywood nightclub with Mia Farrow. Fair cop, you might think. Alas, Jacobs would have you consider it a miscarriage of justice requiring the services of Atticus Finch, and though the sacking is never offered as a reason for Jacobs’s resentment, it is regularly framed as the ultimate piece of Sinatra craziness, Sinatra selfishness, Sinatra egomania, Sinatra evil.
So Jacobs gets on with the new job, making his old boss, and everyone around him, sound truly bonkers and destined for the braziers of hell. I will never listen to ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’ in quite the same way again, or watch Rosemary’s Baby in the same way either. That is George’s gift, just as it was Crawfie’s: they send workaday reality into situations where reality is a stranger, and behave like the older child at the magic show, the one who sees how the trick is done and can’t help shouting out the news, again and again, until the magician is undone and the children are depressed
There’s nothing so killing as modesty on the rampage, and this book is a lovely demonstration of the way the quiet one can get to feel good and do bad at the same time. No matter what George Jacobs thinks he’s doing, over the course of these pages he makes the 20th century’s most famous crooner look like a nutcase and a chump, and makes himself seem desperate to be noticed. He gives us the lowdown on Sinatra’s tiny vanities – the spraying of hair-colouring on his bald patch every morning, the application of make-up down the left side of his face to hide marks – and supplies the highlights of his major rages. Sinatra was a man who knew how to get pissed off.
Good old George, striking a blow for humanity. And that’s the troubling thing about the servant’s revenge: it has all the high-principled chops on its side, all the moral bunting tied around it, all the bells and whistles sounding for the Proletariat, as if a firm notion of rectitude were going to be recognised at the centre of a corrupt and uneven world. That may happen sometimes, but not often. Books written by the world’s tea-boys and bath-scrubbers are apt to exhibit the kinds of delusion they seek to unmask. That is what makes them such fun to read. George Jacobs has shown he is more subservient than he knows, and having the last word may just be a neurotic’s way of asking for something more.
for the best years of my life and now he is gone I am going to take my revenge in, you
guessed it, a tell-all book.
So when you get to these books it is always the small detail, as Andrew O Hagan
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n14/andrew-ohagan/valet-of-the-dolls that breaks your heart.
Elvis Presley, who couldn’t ask somebody to pass him the salt without their one day writing a memoir about it, is fixed in our minds as a tiny-dick weirdo with double mirrors at Graceland and a penchant for deep-fried peanut butter sandwiches at midnight, thanks, mainly, to the literary efforts of the flunkies and junkies who surfed for years near the top of his payroll. Such ventures have now gathered their features into a regular form – bodyguards do it, chauffeurs do it, even educated fleas do it – but the most compelling are by the very quiet ones, the ones who must have seemed to have extraordinary reserves of faithfulness in them – running baths, pouring drinks, never interrupting – but who lived with hate behind their eyes all the while, looking forward to their own hour on the stage, no longer fireable, no longer wage-dependent, finding deeper and still deeper reserves of truth-telling brio as they plunge forward to exact the spear-carrier’s perfect revenge. Despoiling the spoiled, shutting up the shut-uppers: welcome to the world’s fiercest form
of Last Wordism.
In Mr S.: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra, George Jacobs manages to make all the vengeance sound like one of the higher duties of friendship. Thankfully, Jacobs’s instincts as a friend and a common soul turn out to be less sharp than his flick-knife, which glints a few inches in front of his can-do smile from fairly early in the book.
Jacobs, it emerges, was frozen out for dancing suggestively in a Hollywood nightclub with Mia Farrow. Fair cop, you might think. Alas, Jacobs would have you consider it a miscarriage of justice requiring the services of Atticus Finch, and though the sacking is never offered as a reason for Jacobs’s resentment, it is regularly framed as the ultimate piece of Sinatra craziness, Sinatra selfishness, Sinatra egomania, Sinatra evil.
So Jacobs gets on with the new job, making his old boss, and everyone around him, sound truly bonkers and destined for the braziers of hell. I will never listen to ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’ in quite the same way again, or watch Rosemary’s Baby in the same way either. That is George’s gift, just as it was Crawfie’s: they send workaday reality into situations where reality is a stranger, and behave like the older child at the magic show, the one who sees how the trick is done and can’t help shouting out the news, again and again, until the magician is undone and the children are depressed
There’s nothing so killing as modesty on the rampage, and this book is a lovely demonstration of the way the quiet one can get to feel good and do bad at the same time. No matter what George Jacobs thinks he’s doing, over the course of these pages he makes the 20th century’s most famous crooner look like a nutcase and a chump, and makes himself seem desperate to be noticed. He gives us the lowdown on Sinatra’s tiny vanities – the spraying of hair-colouring on his bald patch every morning, the application of make-up down the left side of his face to hide marks – and supplies the highlights of his major rages. Sinatra was a man who knew how to get pissed off.
Good old George, striking a blow for humanity. And that’s the troubling thing about the servant’s revenge: it has all the high-principled chops on its side, all the moral bunting tied around it, all the bells and whistles sounding for the Proletariat, as if a firm notion of rectitude were going to be recognised at the centre of a corrupt and uneven world. That may happen sometimes, but not often. Books written by the world’s tea-boys and bath-scrubbers are apt to exhibit the kinds of delusion they seek to unmask. That is what makes them such fun to read. George Jacobs has shown he is more subservient than he knows, and having the last word may just be a neurotic’s way of asking for something more.
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