Born to a family of Anglican clergymen, Samuel Butler attended Cambridge, worked with the poor in London, then cut loose for New Zealand. There, he became a sheep rancher, and in the manner of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, fell into an intense relationship with Charles Paine Pauli. They were so close that when Butler returned to England in 1864, Pauli went with him, and for the next thirty years, as Butler wrote his books, most notably Erehwon and The Way of All Flesh, he supported Pauli financially. Through three decades of playing poor, Pauli was in fact ferreting away a fortune, because he was simultaneously accepting money from several men. His duplicity was revealed only after his death. In 1899, Butler wrote Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered, arguing that the poems are about a sexual relationship between an older writer and the beautiful young man who betrayed him.
Cornell Woolrich's life story offers so many cautionary tales that his biography is called First You Dream, Then You Die. A hard-nosed crime writer ranking with Chandler and Hammett, his prolific stories and novels became the movies Rear Window, Phantom Lady, The Bride Wore Black, and Mississippi Mermaid, as well as more than twenty other films. That and his book sales explain why he had nearly one million dollars in the bank when he died at sixty-four in 1968, but why did he live for thirty-five years, with or near his mother, in a seedy residential hotel in Harlem? Although Woolrich was already in his fifties when she died, rather than exploring his freedom, he moved in with his aunt in a worse hotel. He had torrid gay affairs, which he described in his diary, discovered by his wife of three months. She learned, among other things, that he wore a sailor's uniform to go looking for late night adventures. Their marriage, never consummated, was annulled. In his final years, he moved into a luxury hotel, alone, yet he continued to treat himself badly. After wearing shoes that were too tight and seeing his foot become infected, he ignored it until finally doctors had to amputate his leg. A chronic smoker and alcoholic, he died weighing eighty-nine pounds.
A. Scott Berg grew up in Los Angeles, his brother is uber agent Jeff Berg longtime CEO of ICM, and his partner is Kevin McCormick, executive producer of Saturday Night Fever and Dying Young, so, sure, why wouldn't he be the screenwriter of the groundbreaking 1980s gay drama Making Love? Well, because he's literary nerd A. Scott Berg, named for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who geekily attended Princeton because Fitzgerald had gone there, and wrote his senior thesis about Fitzgerald's editor Maxwell Perkins, which he turned into a full length biography that won a National Book Award. His third book, Lindbergh, won a Pulitzer. His fourth, a memoir of his long friendship with Katharine Hepburn, held until her death and published eleven days later, was more problematic. Called exploitive by everyone from Robert Gottlieb in the New York Times to official Hepburn friend Liz Smith in her gossip column, Kate Remembered is a soft-focus glance that perpetuates the myths Hepburn wanted to endure; he degays her. (For a deeper look, including her relationships with women, read William J. Mann's excellent Kate.) Berg's next biography, which he hopes to complete in 2009, is about Woodrow Wilson.
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