Coast to Coast: A Family Romance

by Nora Johnson

Book Overview

Nora Johnson was a young child when her parents' marriage collapsed. Her father, Nunnally Johnson, the writer, producer, or director of many acclaimed movies, such as The Grapes of Wrath and The Dirty Dozen, remained in California, where he would continue to be a major Hollywood presence for more than three decades. Nora's mother, Marion, a beautiful but unsettled woman, took her to New York to start a new life -- one surrounded by her mother's lovers and eccentric literary friends instead of movie stars and studio heads. Coast to Coast is Nora's account of a childhood spent shuttling between Manhattan and Hollywood. What emerges is a marvelous portrait of American life in the 1940s and 1950s -- from the movie lots of California to the cocktail parties of the Upper East Side -- and also a touching story of a shrewd, observant girl who would grow up far too fast. Nora shares the colorful details of a childhood spent in privilege, but also captures the painful loneliness of changing schools, four-day train trips from one coast to the other, and never being quite sure of where she belonged. She also brings to life her droll, charming, talented father -- a Thurberesque character in Hollywood -- and her beautiful and erratic mother, a woman who fled the Los Angeles movie colony life but was unable to forget the husband who took her there. Coast to Coast is a wonderfully written portrait of a fascinating era and a child who came of age in it, who had everything she wanted -- except a place to call home.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416568093
• ISBN13: 9781416568094
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A Surprise Find For Another Fan Of Henry Orient

My eleven year old daughter and I read The World Of Henry Orient, another work of this author, as part of our tradition of reading books together over summer vacation. We so enjoyed that book that I quickly ordered another of Ms. Johnson's books - this one just for my own reading. Coast To Coast is just as much fun for adults as Henry O was for myself and my daughter. I now have a third book of Nora's on order and it will not be the last. Highly Recommended!

Impressionistic Memoir

It seems as though Nora Johnson already wrote this book before, though now she's telling the story in a new way with a new focus on experimentation, as though Virginia Woolf were writing THE LAST TYCOON. The accent is on her younger years, and what is what like growing up in Hollywood and New York, the child of a broken home and the daughter of an accomplished, even famous screenwriter. Quick, impressionistic sketches of a time long gone by intermingle with the author's private reflections on the events she lived through, and some of them she helped create. Fans of the lyricist Johnny Mercer are not going to like the way he comes across in this book, as a poisonous Buddha who apparently hates women and is drunkenly, insanely cruel to a young girl at a "sophisticated" party. Talk about a mean drunk! At the same party the girl is rescued by none other than Humphrey Bogart, who betrays the sensitivity and the thoughtfulness we always "knew" lurked behind his touch guy image. To me, the greatest disappointment was Johnson's chapter on poet Sylvia Plath, with whom she attended Smith College back in the day. It's not that Johnson doesn't give a new angle on Plath, for she does (she, Nora, must have been one of those privileged, spoiled rich co-eds whom Sylvia envied, feared and adored), it's only that Plath still manages to elude description properly. Of all the great Hollywood and Broadway legends whom young Nora knew, isn't it odd that the most provocative and charismatic turns out to be none other than our Sylvia?

Engaging and personal

If this is a genre, I don't have any experience with it. Part confession, an insightful portrait of her times and engaging picture of very human personalities, whatever it is I found this memoir to be charming as it was frank, and poignant. The brushes with late fifties Hollywood royalty bring the era alive. The author brings us into her encounters with friends of her beloved father Nunnally (famed screenwriter of the day) with an immediacy that I could touch. Her wry rending of the struggles of an adolescent and young woman of her life including (tactfully) frank discussion of coming to grips with sex bring the story alive and make me look forward to the sequel. I want to know how she and the characters she introduces us fair in the many worlds she travels.