BOOK OF THE DAY: Colin Murphyreviews Starstruck: Fame, Failure, My Family and MeBy Cosmo Landesman Macmillan 356pp, £14.99
ABOUT THREE weeks into my career as a reporter, Vincent Browne asked me to do a story on developments at the Sunday Tribune. Some days later, I handed him a carefully crafted 1,200-word article. He read the first paragraph, scanned the rest of the page, ignored the second page and stared into the distance, looking tired. "You write," he said, "like one of those feature writers in the British Sunday papers. Your article exudes authority, but I know you know nothing about your subject. It's just a pose . . . It's worthless."
Cosmo Landesman is a feature writer and film critic for the Sunday Timeswho writes with deft authority. Or so I thought, until I read his 350-odd page memoir.
Overwritten by about 300 pages, Starstruckis Landesman's account of the lives of his parents; of his media career and mild notoriety (chiefly due to having been left by his wife, Julie Burchill, for a female intern at their then successful literary magazine, the Modern Review); and of the nature of "celebrity".
Landesman's parents were beats, bohemians, hippies, macrobiotic freaks and swingers, first in New York and St Louis, and then London.
Jay Landesman took his name from the hero of the The Great Gatsby, and spent his life in a paradoxical search for both mainstream fame (as a producer, club owner, writer and more) and a counter-cultural version of the good life. His wife, Fran, was a briefly successful songwriter and performance poet. They achieved their greatest celebrity for going public about their open marriage, leading to appearances in feature articles and TV documentaries - to the embarrassment of their son.
Their eccentricity makes for good copy, but their peculiarity defeats their son's attempt to draw insights from their lives into the generic phenomenon of modern-day celebrity.
Cosmo Landesman's own career also makes for some good anecdotes. As a young mother and emergent media superstar, Julie Burchill would write in the evenings. She would open a bottle of champagne and do a line of coke. Then she would sit down to type, with one finger. As she picked up speed, she would cry out to her husband, "Baby, put a line out for me", while remaining "hunched over the keyboard". She would be drunk and completely coked by the time she finished, and her copy would be perfect. (What a pro.) "Just bash the f***er out!" was her maxim, shouted at her husband whenever he struggled with deadlines.
As indicated in the subtitle, "fame" and "failure" are the themes used to knit together the book's diverse elements of parental biography, confessional memoir and sociological study. But if these are knitted together, it is in loose loops of second-hand wool. Landesman's lengthy digressions on the evolution of modern celebrity have the panache of a Wikipedia entry and the erudition of Hello!He has nothing of particular insight to say about what "celebrity" means, other than to confess - with humour, admittedly - that he craves it even while he loathes it.
Between comic confessions and anecdotes from the careers of himself and his parents, Landesman could conceivably have written a decent article on fame and failure. Starstruckis a book that has been bashed out: mired by contradictions, repetition and typos, it reads like it was written in one quick draft. Perhaps he took Burchill's advice too much to heart.
Colin Murphy is a journalist. His essay on the decline of the Irish language is in the current issue of the Dublin Review