Prior to reading this memoir - published a scant 3 years before his death at age 89 - the most I knew about Burgess Meredith was from seeing him in the role of the Penguin in the Batman TV series during my school days back in the 1970s; the role he reprised in the TV movie Tail Gunner Joe as the lawyer Joe Welch, who during the televised Army-McCarthy Hearings in 1954, helped bring down the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy whose reckless anti-Communist crusade ruined the careers and lives of many innocent people; and an episode from the TV series The Twilight Zone in which he was a henpecked bookworm who finds himself the survivor of an apocalyptic catastrophe, contemplating suicide until he chances upon the ruins of a library. I saw him solely as a actor who managed to have a long career in both film and television. One of those character actors many of us recognize, but when pressed, couldn't say their names.

Not so. There was much more to Burgess Meredith than meets the eye. He comes across in the memoir as very honest about himself and his life experiences. He came from a troubled home in OH. His father, a doctor, was an alcoholic who abused Meredith's mother (whom he adored) who abandoned the family and went on to live in Canada. As a boy, Meredith (who was found to have talent as a singer) would earn admission to 2 prestigious schools and later attend Amherst before going on to study acting with Eva Le Gallienne through her repertory company in New York (one of Meredith's classmates was John Garfield), which served as a springboard for Meredith finding stage work on Broadway (where he honed his talent and earned a few rave reviews from theater critics) and Hollywood.

I was also fascinated to learn about the many notable personages (in film, theater, and through his hobbies) with whom Meredith came into a contact. Examples: Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Stewart, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Elia Kazan, Ingrid Bergman, the composer Kurt Weill, the playwright Maxwell Anderson, Franchot Tone, Hedy Lamarr, John Huston, James Thurber, John Steinbeck, Alexander Calder (the conceptual artist), Paulette Goddard (who would become one of Meredith's 4 wives), Zero Mostel, Carroll O'Connor, Andy Warhol, Jeff Bridges, and the war correspondent Ernie Pyle (whom Meredith met during his World War II service as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Force; Pyle was later killed in the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945).

What's more: besides acting, Meredith was also a director (stage and screen), a licensed pilot, an owner of horses whom he raised and raced, and a deeply contemplative man about life and the world as he came to know it. I very much enjoyed getting this rounder view of Burgess Meredith. His life was diverse and fascinating. He was a man of deep passions who once went broke, and, at various stages of his life, underwent psychiatric counselling. And through it all, he never lost his zest for LIFE.


Frankly, I'm at a loss as to why other reviewers of this memoir decry Meredith's name-dropping. Geez! Surely, the reason why most of us read memoirs from famous people is out of an overweening curiosity (many of us have) to find out how many other notables figured prominently in the lives of the memoirists!