Grant Hayter-Menzies
Biographer
Shadow Woman: The Extraordinary Career of Pauline Benton
ISBN 9780773542013
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Kansas-born Pauline Benton (1898-1974) was encouraged by her father, one of America's earliest feminist male educators, to reach for the stars. Instead, she reached for shadows. In 1920s Beijing, she discovered shadow theatre (piyingxi), a performance art where translucent painted puppets are manipulated by highly trained masters to cast coloured shadows against an illuminated screen. Finding that this thousand-year-old forerunner of motion pictures was declining in China, Benton believed she could save the tradition by taking it to America.
The Empress and Mrs. Conger:
The Uncommon Friendship of Two Women and Two Worlds
ISBN 9789888083008
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The story of two women from worlds that could not seem farther apart—imperial China and the American Midwest—who found common ground before and after one of the greatest clashes between East and West, the fifty-five-day siege of the Beijing foreign legations known as the Boxer Uprising. Using diaries, letters and untapped sources, The Empress and Mrs. Conger traces the parallel lives of the Empress Dowager Cixi and American diplomat’s wife Sarah Pike Conger, which converged to alter their perspectives of each other and each other's worlds.
Mrs. Ziegfeld: The Public and Private Lives of Billie Burke
ISBN: 978-0-7864-3800-6
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Broadway actress Billie Burke was one of the most sought after young stage beauties of her time, stealing the hearts of Enrico Caruso, Mark Twain, and, most importantly, famed Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld, who became her husband. Following Ziegfeld’s death, the threats of financial ruin and encroaching age forced Burke to recreate herself as a Hollywood character actress. This biography benefits from the cooperation of the daughter and grandchildren of Burke and Ziegfeld, as well as from anecdotes provided by actors who performed with Burke on the stage and screen. In addition to studying the character and significance of Burke’s greatest screen role in Glinda the Good Witch of the North, this richly illustrated book also provides a complete history of Burke’s stage, screen, and radio work.
Imperial Masquerade:
The Legend of Princess Der Ling
ISBN: 9789622098817
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Daughter of a Manchu aristocrat, granddaughter of a Boston merchant, educated like a boy in the Confucian classics, a baptized Catholic blessed by the hand of Pope Leo XIII, a woman who donned chic Western fashions in China and her ceremonial court robes in the United States, and wife of an American soldier of fortune, Princess Der Ling was a fascinating human battleground of warring identities, a victim of the hallucinogenic effects of too much publicity, much of it prompted by Der Ling herself, and a figure whose life provides a glimpse into one Eurasian woman's experience of living not just between two cultures – that of China and the West – but among many different worlds: social, religious, moral, political.
Charlotte Greenwood: The Life and Career of the Comic Star of Vaudeville, Radio and Film
ISBN: 9780786429950
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Charlotte Greenwood never intended to become a comedienne, but she was unfashionably tall at 5′ 10″ and her early aspirations to become a great dramatic actress eventually led her to the field of comedy. Greenwood, whose early life had taught her nothing if not how to be optimistic, stifled her disappointment and used her considerable skill to become one of the greatest comedic actresses of the early twentieth century.
Based on Greenwood’s unpublished memoirs, this biography presents a personal, detailed look at her colorful life. Beginning with her early years in Philadelphia, Boston and Norfolk, it relates her struggles with ill health, her social difficulties caused by her then unusual height and her realization of her ambition to become an actress. The main focus of the work is her career, which spanned more than 50 years and ranged from vaudeville to the dramatic stage and, finally, to films (during the World War II years she starred in Twentieth Century Fox musicals with Cesar Romero, Betty Grable, Edward Everett Horton, Jack Haley, Don Ameche, and Carmen Miranda). Her roles in a variety of works including The Passing Show of 1912, So Long Letty (both stage and film), and I Remember Mama are also discussed. Special emphasis is placed on her career-defining (and best-known) role as Aunt Eller Murphy in the 1955 film adaptation of Oklahoma! Charlotte Greenwood’s performance history, a list of her known recordings, and a filmography for her husband Martin Broones are also included, along with a collection of rare photographs and memorabilia.
The North Door: Echoes of Slavery in a New England Family
ISBN: 0997894172
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More Americans are discovering their ancestral connections to slavery --as victims, as perpetrators, as beneficiaries. Biographer Grant Hayter-Menzies has contributed a unique memoir depending not on genes or genealogy primarily, but upon a rich family history full of faces, personalities, and fascinating stories. He follows the threads of lore, remembrance and hard fact to encounters today with descendants of the slave holders and the slaves of his family's past. The result is a powerful testament to the resilience of Americans of all backgrounds confronting slavery's dishonorable and humiliating imprint. Hayter-Menzies describes slavery in the North as a parallel and variation of southern slavery. But he is able to examine the history through the lens of his beloved grandmother, who grew up in the shadow of post-slavery culture, and embodied both a deep humanity and an unconscious conformity to traditional white attitudes. In this memoir of his journey through the past and the present, through his own memories and impressions of early childhood to his mature understanding of the complex legacies of slavery across American culture, Hayter-Menzies makes a remarkable departure from his past work, and achieves a memorable contribution to a literature of growing importance.