Leaving a Doll's House: A Memoir Review

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Leaving a Doll's House: A Memoir ReviewClaire Bloom's "Leaving a Doll's House" is poignant in its honesty, but a bit underwritten. The first time I reached for my highlighter pen was on page 104, where Bloom describes a distraught Vivien Leigh.
Leigh, of course, was the incomparable beauty who portrayed Scarlett O'hara in "Gone with the Wind." Leigh's marriage was unsteady; she suffered from mental illness. Leigh kept her emotions in check, but one night Bloom entered Leigh's dressing room and found her in tears. "Vivien in tears was not like anyone I knew; no red nose, sniffles...she simply sat at her table, in her beautiful scarlet [how appropriate] costume; diamond tears rolled down her cheeks, her beauty undiminished, her make-up untouched." What an image.
Page 149 includes a similarly brief, and pointedly telling, anecdote. Bloom's husband, the author Philip Roth, insists that a skunk has anti-Semitic feelings toward him. This anecdote goes a long way towards explaining Roth's new book, "The Plot Against America."
For the most part, though, the book is frank, and underwritten. For example, Bloom's father was a feckless businessman and gambler who abandoned Bloom, her mother, and her brother. Years later, when she became a successful actress, Bloom's father reappeared, backstage in her dressing room, with a new, rich wife in tow. Bloom, by her own account, was pointedly cold and humiliating to him. Three days later, he died. "I believed," Bloom writes, "that it had been my callous behavior that had killed him" (79). Bloom does not pause after this remarkable confession; only one sentence is offered as denouement, "I picked up and went on with my life."
Bloom played an essential role in a superlative film, "The Haunting." This film is unsurpassed in its genre; its psychological and sociological undercurrents raise it far above most horror films. Though made in 1963, in black and white, and since remade, it regularly makes top ten lists for "the scariest movie ever made." Bloom never mentions it here.
Too, Bloom partnered some of the biggest names among twentieth century actors: Richard Burton, Yul Brynner, Rod Steiger, Anthony Quinn, Laurence Olivier. If the reader had never seen a Burton film, I'm not sure he would get an adequate impression of Burton from this book.
Bloom's Burton has intense green eyes; she quotes a critic who says, beautifully, that his voice is so powerful "he carries his own cathedral with him" (50). But this reader never understood why Bloom risked the pain she reports feeling being his lover while he lived with, and loved, his first wife, Sybil Burton.
Bloom's brief fling with Brynner is enlivened by a late night visit to a Paris nightclub where Brynner, who mythologized his ethnic and professional roots, was adored, and sang with, the Gypsies he said raised him. The night was capped in Russian fashion, Bloom reports; drinking glasses were thrown against the wall.

Pages 195-220 contain, without comment, Bloom's diary entries from a particularly rocky time in her marriage to Roth. This is the best, rawest, most detailed writing in the book.
As others report, Philip Roth is depicted here -- believably -- as a demented and sadistic man. He is also clearly depicted as an object of genuine pathos. It must be hard to be Roth's wife; it must also be hard to be Roth. Without ever using the term, Bloom creates a vivid portrayal of Roth as a kind of idiot savant with Borderline Personality Disorder.
Reading of Roth's self-induced wounds of greed -- he demanded that Bloom pay him huge sums of money as compensation for the time he spent with her -- paranoia, and sheer unhappiness is like reading of a patient tormented by self-induced skin rashes. It's simply hard to watch, and you can't help but say a prayer for his speedy recovery.
"Leaving a Doll's House" is an easy read, and poignant in its honesty. It offers insights into Claire Bloom that will cause me to view her performances, and other women I meet, in a more expansive, and more compassionate, light.
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