Matthau writes about herself that her book feels anemic. Matthau interjects, For Gods sake, Walter, why dont you chop off her legs and read the rings? Matthau, though her barbs here are never as biting as the one Capote specifically attributed to her in the section of Answered Prayers called La Cote Basque: When a Swedish starlet with a beautiful face, ample bosom and unusually heavy legs takes her flirting too far and Mr. She especially dislikes anyone who comes on to Mr. Her insights into other people can be keen and incisive, especially when she doesnt like them and doesnt feel compelled to compliment them. Matthau was a good audience, and she has a master hand with an anecdote. Didnt I ever find anyone interesting who was not famous? Actually, no, I didnt. Matthau writes: It seems strange that everyone Im writing about was very famous. Then she gave up on writers and married Walter Matthau. Kenneth Tynan was also a beau, but she never had sex with him, either. She was madly in love with James Agee, but wouldnt have sex with him because he had a bad heart. Truman Capote was a lifelong friend who used her and her white-blond hair as a basis for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys. She married William Saroyan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, twice, despite a quotient of mental cruelty that could fill hours of Donahue. There she made fast friends with a debutante set that included Gloria Vanderbilt and Oona ONeill, and developed a taste for writers. It begins with a bleak childhood spent in foster homes until the age of 8, when she was rescued, Cinderella-style, by her mothers second marriage (to a co-founder of the Bendix Corporation) and relocated to an 18-room apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her memoir, Among the Porcupines, reads like the story outline for a sweeps-period mini-series. So says Carol Matthau, wife of the actor Walter Matthau, who has spent her life among the rich and famous. WILLIAM SAROYAN was lousy in bed except on his wedding night, when he skipped sex and read Gullivers Travels instead. Carol passed away on July 20, 2003, at the age of seventy-eight.The New York Times Review by Alex Witchel July 19, 1992 She published her memoirs, “Among the Porcupines” in 1993. She was the muse and confidante to some of the twentieth century’s most renowned writers (William Saroyan, James Agee, Kenneth Tynan, and Truman Capote), friend of writers, artists and actors (Charlie Chaplin, Maureen Stapleton, Carson McCullers, Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall, Richard Avedon, Isak Dinesen), the witness to high-society fetes of the forties, the guest at and host of glitzy Hollywood dinner parties throughout the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties, and frequent attendee at the Oscars and the White House. Throughout her life, Carol was a celebrated original in both New York and Hollywood. Their son Charlie Matthau, a director, was born a few years later. That same year, Carol published a well-received novel, “The Secret in the Daisy”.Ĭarol and Walter Matthau were married in August of 1959. It was on this production she met stage actor Walter Matthau. In 1955, she had a small part and was the understudy to Jayne Mansfield in the Broadway show “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?”. Carol’s personality, not occupation, was the inspiration for Capote’s character Holly Golightly, the heroine of his 1958 novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”.Ĭarol twice married and divorced Pulitzer-Prize winning writer William Saroyan, with whom she had two children, Aram Saroyan, a writer, and Lucy Saroyan, who became an actress. She was also pals with young Truman Capote, whom she met when both were thirteen. It was around this time she met her life-long friends Oona O’Neill (daughter of Eugene O’Neill) and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. Young Carol attended the Dalton School during high-school. She was eventually placed in foster care until the age of eight when her mother married Charles Marcus, the head of the Bendix Aviation Corp., whose name she took. Later, her mother Rosheen Marcus identified him as British actor Leslie Howard, from “Gone with the Wind”. A Celebrated Original "The Original Holly Golightly" – The New York TimesĬarol Grace (Septem– July 20, 2003) was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the sixteen-year-old daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, and an unknown father.
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