Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography convinced a lot of people that he was an egotistical jerk.
I didn’t get that impression, probably because I concentrated on the fascinating parts about his deprived childhood and earliest successes, and skimmed over the subsequent grand artiste stuff.
I forgot about Rogue Warrior by Richard Marcinko, a memoir of his life as a Navy Seal. Christ, what a fucking sociopathic asshole. Had a lot of fun in Viet Nam. Why? Just liked killin’ people.
I haven’t read the entire thing, but the excerpts I’ve read from Mickey Rooney’s autobiography, Life is Too Short, make him sound like a world class egomaniac (of the sort who’d wash invisible plates). Of his honeymoon with Ava Gardner (who was, by his account and by her’s, a virgin) he says that he was too drunk to consummate the relationship the first night but
The italics above are his, btw.
He goes on to talk about how he was always a wonderful lover, fantastic father, and excellent guy all around but was done wrong by Hollywood. To his credit, he admits he wasn’t a great husband (though an army of ex-wives would be a kind of hard thing to get around with any claim otherwise).
A memoir I have to admit to a sort of “toothache you have to press with your tongue once in a while” desire to read is Kirk Cameron’s Still Growing, which is about his teen idol career and then his conversion to super Fundie Christianity (which are the only two things it could be about). Has anybody read this?
Ah, how could I forget this one, which I have read cover to cover (at least twice actually):
FLASHBACKS by Dr. Timothy Leary
Dr. Leary was most definitely charming, intelligent, witty, and had some panache. The book is interesting, as much if not moreso for the vignettes of the lives of famous philosophers and artists (who used or promoted or created works that seemed inspired by psychadelic substances) as for the actual memoir. He also the most self-exonerating, egotistical, self-absorbed asshole I’ve ever read about. Knowing as little as I do about clinical psychology even I know that dropping acid along with your test subjects while conducting objective experiments is going to play hell with the methodolgy, and yet he passes off tripping with students and artists and others in his house (later in a borrowed mansion) not as acid parties but as legitimate scientific research. He glosses over pretty much every unpretty aspect of his life (such as letting his preteen kids take drugs and then abandoning them), gives accounts of his arrest and conviction that are sharply at odds with the accounts of others (including his wife Rosemary, who was there) and basically pretends that he was always too brilliant to be caught while all around him who would do him harm were idiots (whether J. Edgar Hoover, G. Gordon Liddy, Eldridge Cleaver, or others) he outsmarted. He tells a lot of half truths and “I’d like to hear the other guy’s version” stories, including how he was basically the Great White Father to the black inmates at one prison, how he carried on conversations next to Manson each night while in solitary at Folsom (even though records and former guards said the two were never anywhere within earshot of each other), how the mafiosi at another prison thought he was a mob boss, etc…
One thing he said that might be true- but he tells so many “look how clever I am” stories that you can’t really gauge- is about his incarceration. He claims that when he was convicted he was given the standard prisoner profile tests to determine how much of a flight risk he was, and that he was stunned to be given them because he either exclusively or largely designed all of them while a psychologist at Harvard. Consequently he answered all of the questions “correctly” to indicate he would be the most docile of prisoners and was sent to a minimum security prison from which he escaped with ease. (He definitely escaped from prison and eventually made it to Switzerland by way of Algiers before being arrested upon landing in Afghanistan and extradited back to the U.S.A., and that’s the most interesting part of his story in the book.) I don’t know how much the personality profiles had to do with it, but having worked with gov’t affiliated agencies I can definitely see him being given tests with his name in bold letters on the cover (Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test) without anybody catching the fact.
He claims that upon his recapture (which he tells some whoppers about) his 95 year sentence was marked paid in full after serving less than 3 years due to his own brilliance at manipulating the legal system and outwitting his captors. Others claim it was because he sang like Judy Garland on acid to reduce his sentence. In either case, he never wanted for groupies afterward, nor did he ever admit wrongdoing in anything including letting his kids experiment with drugs and sex at Millbrook when they were unsupervised motherless teens (both had major psychological issues in later life; his daughter committed suicide and his reaction in an interview was basically “so it goes… we hadn’t spoken in years due to her holier than thou religious beliefs so I’m sorry it happened but…”.)
And yet- it’s compelling reading. Go figure. :eek:
Nope - he’s just as bad, if not worse. Never trust a man who writes about himself in the third person.
What’s worse is that most people take his accounts of battles/people/wars as fact, when they’re pretty much the Roman equivalent of Fox News. :rolleyes:
Dude, it’s Timothy Leary. OF COURSE, it’s compelling!
And as a bookend to Leary (who went on a speaking tour with this guy), how can we forget WILL by G. Gordon Liddy?
Someone else who comes across as an asshole, somewhat confessionally, in his memoir- Nathaniel Branden in JUDGMENT NIGHT (I haven’t read his revision MY YEARS WITH AYN RAND, who ties him as No. 1 A-hold in JN).
You mean MSNBC, right? :rolleyes:
Thanks **Ellen **- I knew I got the story wrong, but didn’t have time to figure out how. It’s that the first speaker attempts to come across as wise with “the rich are different from you and me” trying to frame some special something, and the second speaker cuts him off at the legs with a dry, dismissive “yeah - they have more money.”
Now, now. you’re both right.
Sammy Davis Jr.
I love the guy as a performer, yes I understand the barriers he broke down, etc… I completely get that a youngster traveling with his family that placing the atmosphere is important.
But every freaking page of the thing has some version of the phrase “because we were black and so they hated us” in it. I do NOT need to have it hammered into my head that you were better dancers and singers than anyone in the world, but held back because you’re black.
I get it. Now stop and tell a good story.
You think I’m exaggerating, pick it up.
Richard Marcinko navy seal and author of “Rouge Warrior.”
I know we need bad ass military men in combat but to brag about killing and wanting to kill is too much for me. When in Vietnam he relates a story of a captured VC prisoner. The VC was hung upside down while a U.S. officer was cutting his ears off. Marcinko makes the following remarks about this, while he was not against wiring up a man’s genitals to a field telephone, he had no problem that, skinning a man alive was going too far, so what does Marcinko do, he shoots the prisoner. Hey war is war right.
He also cheats on his wife, volunteers for tours in Vietnam while he has small children to get trigger time. I know, I know he is a true Warrior but it does come off as enjoying combat way too much.
Michael Crawford’s memoir mentions his genitalia about every fifth page. I kid you not. I know more about Crawford’s penis than I know about either of my two ex-husbands.
Crawford’s autobio doesn’t make him an asshole, but he comes across as a dick.
I heard the “rich are different from the poor” story in high school. After a quarter in which we had read both Hemmingway and Fitzgerald, we had the following question on an essay test:
“Hemmingway and Fitzgerald meet up at a party. One says ‘the rich are very different from the poor.’ The other says ‘Yes, they have more money.’ Which one said what, and why?”
We were supposed to be able to figure it out from the books we had read. I remember being totally stumped, but luckily he was a pretty easy grader and as long as your answer was coherent you would do fine.
Matt Hughes, UFC fighter and douchebag extraordinaire.
Here is a summary of his autobiography (scroll down a bit). Having read it (ugh), I can tell you the summary is pretty accurate.
If I wanted to be a Navy SEAL in drag, I’d be angry too.
Yes, I am sorry it should be Rogue. I guess that explains it. 
Surely Burt Ward belongs in this list somewhere.
John Adams comes across as quite the jealous asshole in many of his letters to his “beloved” Abigail. His letters to Jefferson were actually written to “posterity.”
His personal shit list included Jefferson, Washington, many in the Continental Congresses, all of the first Congress and was headed, in a 62 pt. font, by Benjamin Frankin.
Luckily his genius superceded his assholery, IMHO.
If it’s any consolation, most actual SOF personell I’ve had the chance to talk to believe his book is about 70-80% fantasy. That still makes him an asshole, of course, just for different reasons.
Well, he was obnoxious and disliked, remember? 