Jack Lemmon's son, Chris, remembers his famous father
At the height of his fame in the early sixties, Jack Lemmon warned a young magazine writer named Peter Bogdonavich, "I make for bad copy."
How right the venerable actor has proven. A few brave souls, post Bogdonavich, have tried to make Lemmon interesting on the page. Despite the man's many complications - alcoholism, egotism, loneliness - none have succeeded; all the reader has ever ended up with is a collection of sweet natured anecdotes.
Add another title to that long list of noble failures, the kitchily titled, A Twist of Lemmon, by the closest writer to the source yet, Lemmon's son Chris. Despite reason to render a Mommy Dearest - as a parent, it's clear Lemmon Sr. had his shortcomings - we are left again with a reverent and forgiving portrait, in the form of recreations of stolen father-and-son moments: the pair trying to make the cut at Pebble Beach, dad and junior teasing one another between breaks on the set, man and boy quietly bonding at the piano.
In most of these stories, Dad comes away as a kind of Hemingway manqué: a fisherman capable of being pulled under the water by an oversized Rainbow, of getting lost in the bear-infested Alaskan wilds, of embarrassing himself year after year on California's best golf courses.
It's Lemmon Jr., ironically, who we end up with the most heartfelt portrait of, as he recounts the indignities of growing up in a famous father's shadow. He shows us quite a few of his scars, from the break-up of his parents' marriage to Dad's playful but potent put downs.
As a biographer, Lemmon II is no great talent - most of the stories are the "you had to be there" variety - but then, as he reminds us, this was not an undertaking intended for publication; the book began its life began as a healing mechanism in the wake of his father's death. It achieved publication only at the insistence of old family friends (many of whom - Blake Edwards, Tony Curtis, Shirley MacLaine - put their own two cents in in a fatty afterward.)
If Jack Lemmon survived fifty years in Hollywood and the battle over his own demons, it was due to a "Teflon coating" (to quote another contributor, Cliff Robertson) that is the birthmark of those born of staunch New England stock. Chris, a generation removed and the son of another state, doesn't sound like he was subject to as thick an outer layer, and yet, if this book is anything, it is a tale of resiliency, a story of the slow coming-into-one's-own of a Hollywood kid, and the journey through love and laughter to forgiveness for a father's fame.
