PETERKURTH.COM
"If
your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong." -- Robert
Louis Stevenson
"Anyway, I turn on the TV in my hotel room in
Whittier, California ... and there was BARBARA KURTH’S brother Peter on GOOD MORNING
AMERICA … this ordinary
American man, who had been suddenly plucked from obscurity by the hand of fate,
and he knew exactly what to do on television!
How to sit (not too slumpy, not too stiff),
what to do with his hands (kept them quiet, don't gesticulate or fiddle with
your ear or other body part), how to arrange his expressions (relaxed, alert,
open, affable), how to speak in sound bites (don't digress! don't get mad!
don't talk too long!). It was as though
he'd been on TV every day for years." – Katha Pollitt to Andrew Sullivan in Slate,
"Breakfast Table,"
I have
been, Katha, I have been – the trouble is they’re all
reruns. I sleep at night knowing that
somewhere in the world, at any hour, I’ll be on
television talking about ANASTASIA
and the ROMANOVS,
or about what the cable networks persist in calling the Royal Family of
"It
has the air of someone pushing his nose up against the glass," said
she. “Vanity Fair does not push its nose up against the glass.” So I sold the story to Cosmopolitan, which does, or did, when Helen Gurley
Brown still ran that magazine. Helen
Gurley Brown is my favorite editor of all time.
"Royalty!" she said on the day we met. "That’s classy! But don’t give me any Greeks or Russians or
Romanians. My girls want the Windsors
and they want Monaco, and that’s it!"
MONACO: IN THE HOUSE OF GRIMALDI (Cosmopolitan, 1993)
Wait! It didn’t end there!
THE PLEASURE
PRINCIPALITY (Observer Magazine, 2005)
Prince Albert of Monaco talks to Peter Kurth
about his mother, his mistress and his secret son
And, of course:
(I’d already written about KING MICHAEL OF ROMANIA but it was too late for tears.)
PETER KURTH
was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in
1953. He is a graduate of the University
of Vermont, where he earned departmental honors in English and Theatre. His first book, ANASTASIA: THE RIDDLE OF ANNA ANDERSON (Little, Brown 1983), was an
international bestseller and made into an NBC television miniseries. Kurth’s biography
of anti-fascist journalist Dorothy Thompson, AMERICAN CASSANDRA, also published by
Little, Brown, won the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau
Alpha Research Award as the best book about American journalism of 1990. (Hmm … that seems like a long time ago!)
In
1995-1996 Kurth was the author of TSAR: THE LOST
WORLD OF NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA
and co-author (with Eleanor Lanahan) of ZELDA: THE PRIVATE WORLD OF ZELDA FITZGERALD (Abrams). His most recent book, ISADORA: A SENSATIONAL LIFE, was published in 2001.
(That seems like a long time ago, too.)
Kurth's work has
appeared in a variety of national publications, including Vanity Fair, Condé Nast
Traveler, Forbes FYI, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Observer,
Cosmopolitan, New York Newsday and Harper's
Bazaar. He has written extensively
for SALON.COM
and is "Crank Call" columnist for
Peter Kurth lives in Vermont
(older but no wiser)
Comments to peterkurth@peterkurth.com
BOOKS BY PETER KURTH
ANASTASIA: THE RIDDLE OF ANNA ANDERSON
The
most dramatic unsolved mystery of the century.
This is the story of what happened in between.
ANNA-ANASTASIA
NOTES ON FRANZISKA SCHANZKOWSKA
Anna Anderson’s biographer takes a closer
look at the 1994
THE MYSTERY OF THE ROMANOV BONES
(Vanity Fair, January 1993)
ANASTASIA: THE RIDDLE OF ANNA ANDERSON
“Isadora Duncan is one of the greatest women
I have ever known … Sometimes I think she IS the greatest woman I have ever
known.” – Auguste Rodin
“It is quite certain that no other American
woman has so impressed the world outside of America—made such a mighty stir,
commanded such a following at home and abroad . . . left behind her such a
legend of personality and such a trail of effects." – New York Times, 1928
"Come away! her dancing says. Come out into the splendid perilous
world! Come up on the mountain-top where
the great wind blows! Learn to be young
always! Learn to be incessantly
renewed! Learn to live in the
intemperate careless land of song and rhythm and rapture! Say farewell to the world you know and join
the passionate spirits of the world’s history!
Storm through into your dreams!
Give yourself up to the frenzy that is in the heart of life, and never
look back, and never regret!" – Robert Edmond Jones (“The Gloves of
Isadora”), 1947
"We
may never know whether 'one must have seen Isadora Duncan to die happy,' as one of her
contemporaries claimed, but one way to live happily, at least for a few days,
is to read Peter Kurth's Isadora.
Exhaustively researched, intelligently rendered, it becomes, in its
lovingly judicious and ultimately explosive unfurling, the definitive portrait
of this — in the words of one
of the few men not her lover —
'figure of mourning and flame.'" — J. D. Landis, author
of Longing
"The
most famous woman of the first quarter of the 20th century may have been Mary Pickford, but the most influential, and the most notorious,
was Isadora Duncan. She was the
progenitor and soul of a new art form, modern dance. She was the prototype of the uninhibited
young American whose freshness and originality charmed jaded old Europe. And for decades she startled respectable
society — even as she helped transform it — with her flouting of conventions, both onstage and off. You would have to go back to George Sand or
Byron to find a comparably galvanizing figure. … And now there is Peter Kurth,
sardonic yet appreciative, neither adoring nor denigrating. … He has stylishly
synthesized the literature to give us the fullest and most coherent account of
the life to date. … Excellent." — Robert Gottlieb, The New York Times
Book Review
"Peter
Kurth has written the best biography we have of an astonishing and often
underrated woman. He writes so well that
only the weight of paper will occasionally remind you of his subject’s
amplitude. … Working from an assembly of sources vast enough to make you dizzy,
he succeeds in making you love, hate and honor America’s greatest dancer,
sometimes all at once. Earlier
biographies have tended to focus on her, just as Isadora herself did. Kurth does better by giving vivid portraits
of the lovers, friends and pupils whose voices make up a diverse chorus. … Shrewdly, he gives space not only to
Isadora’s wonderfully feckless chum, Mary Desti, the
creator of the scarf that throttled her, but to
SALON.COM BOOKS DANCING IN THE
DARK
SALON.COM PEOPLE |
PETER KURTH
AMERICAN CASSANDRA:
THE LIFE OF DOROTHY THOMPSON
"Peter Kurth's
opening description of perhaps the most influential woman journalist of the
century is too good to pass up. 'The Reverend Peter Thompson's elder daughter,
according to family legend, ran away from home for the first time at the age of
three, taking with her some docile, dimly remembered childhood playmate and her
father's buggy umbrella and heading straight down the line of the Erie Railroad
into the open world.' But there you have Dorothy Thompson in a nutshell:
precocious, independent, commanding, fearless, legendary. … Kurth weaves the
public and the private Thompson together with considerable deftness. The task
is made somewhat easier by the fact that much of his subject's private life was
lived in public. Her romance with Sinclair Lewis (who proposed to her on their
first meeting despite the inconvenience of being already married) was the stuff
of which a John Reed need not have been ashamed. Indeed, the movie "Woman
of the Year," with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, was an explicit
satire on her exploits and notoriety. The fact that she is so little remembered
today is itself a satire on celebrity, because in the interwar years she was
one of the best known women in
"Those who remember Dorothy Thompson
(1893-1961) know she was once married to Sinclair Lewis, and was a journalist
of high influence and repute in her own time.
As Peter Kurth's sensationally good biography
reveals, Thompson was much more: an opinion-maker, international celebrity and
very real power behind several thrones - pushing and nagging the great, the
near-great and the inept to ensure the survival of those humanitarian ideals
for which she tirelessly campaigned and more than once risked her life. Kurth's vividly
detailed and dramatic portrayal of her life fully compensates for the memoirs
she planned but never lived to write. He
shows her at her best and worst and, without insisting, leaves us persuaded
that here was a one-of-a-kind incarnation of energy, honesty and commitment; a
woman we must not forget." --
MUSEUM OF
TELEVISION AND RADIO: DOROTHY THOMPSON
Dorothy
Thompson was one of the most influential
journalists in American history. In the mid-1930s, having already forged a
precedent-shattering career in print as a reporter, foreign bureau chief, and
nationally syndicated columnist, Thompson went on the radio with her passionate
and politically charged commentary. From 1936 to 1945, as the world first
balanced on the edge of war then plunged full-bore into armed conflict,
Thompson’s eloquent and well-informed views were regularly broadcast to
millions… The volume of mail sent to Thompson’s office after one of her radio
addresses was so immense it required delivery in special sacks. In 1939 she
made the cover of Time magazine at an NBC mike. The article said that, after
Eleanor Roosevelt, Thompson was “undoubtedly the most influential” woman in the
"As
far as I can see, I really was put out of
“Security for all, aggression for none – that
is the fundamental thesis of the United Nations. But to make this thesis real one sovereign
right – the right to wage aggressive war – must be banned by all nations, and
an international power must exist to see that the ban is observed. …It does not
require a `world government’ beyond one single world law: a law against aggression and preparation for
aggression.”
TSAR: THE LOST WORLD OF
NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA
Photographs
by Peter Christopher
With
an introduction by Edvard Radzinsky
“We were
twelve days in that awful Ekaterinburg.
You have no idea what a living nightmare is until you see that
town.” --
Isadora Duncan, 1924
"A page-turner packaged as a coffee-table
book." -- Entertainment Weekly
THE MYSTERY OF THE ROMANOV BONES
(Vanity Fair, January 1993)
Japanese scientists have their doubts …
And so does
Dr Knight argues that the Home Office
results were too good to be true and doubts the researchers could have obtained
such long stretches of DNA from old bones, particularly those that had spent
more than 70 years in a shallow, wet earthen grave.
TSAR: THE LOST
WORLD OF NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA
ALSO BY
PETER KURTH
Articles, book reviews, columns and rants
After a nightmare flight from
Pondering the perils of publishing
The Author of `Darkness at
BOOK REVIEW: DUCHESS DEAREST by Christopher Wilson
A dodgy new book claims that Wallis Simpson
was genetically a man and romanced a much younger gay playboy -- "Dancing
With the Devil" shouldn't be critiqued so much as held at a distance with
tongs.
AMERICAN RHAPSODY by Joe Ezsterhas
Let's face it,
MORE, NOW, AGAIN by
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Sorry,
GEORGETTE MOSBACHER: THE FEMININE FORCE
Georgette Mosbacher
has earned every one of those power lunches, every one of those houses and
gowns, those cars, those jewels, those shiny incisors and that big red
hair.
LISTENING TO PROZAC
by Dr. Peter Kramer
The harder we're urged these days to follow
our bliss and run with the wolves the more determined are the experts, in their
oily little hearts, that we stay on the straight and narrow.
IN THE NAME OF THE
SISTER: THE STEPHEN FAGAN CASE
“You'll remember that Barbara Kurth is the
mother whose daughters were kidnapped by her ex-husband, Stephen Fagan, who
changed his name and lived in shadowy splendor in Palm Beach, Florida, raising
"the girls" as they are always called, having told them their mother
died in a car crash. … So, of course, since she is the mother, Barbara Kurth
has been attacked in the media, solely on the basis of allegations by Stephen
Fagan, who says she was an alcoholic who neglected the children, leaving him no
choice. … He doesn't explain why he kept
up the deception for two decades, long after his ex-wife had clearly overcome
her problems, if she ever had any, and had gotten a Ph.D. (she is now a
professor of cell biology, married -- but no kids). His whole family was in on it, too … It's
hard to imagine the cruelty involved here.” -- Katha Pollitt
“In order to strip Stephen Fagan bare of the
image contrived by his hired flacks, we need to look at his case coldly and see
it for what it is: His crime was heinous, unspeakably cruel; and morally, if
not legally, he renewed it and repeated it on every one of the approximately
7,300 days he kept his girls and their mother in the dark.”
Notes on the Plague Years
REFLECTIONS ON PROTEASE THERAPY
National Public Radio, “Morning Edition,”
October 1996
There’s nothing like rising from the grave
to get people’s attention.
AN OPEN LETTER TO
SANDY THURMAN
I'm not sure how I'm supposed to address an
AIDS Czarina -- "Your Tokenhood?"
"Your Nothingness?" "Your Ineffectuality?" (Salon.com,
1997)
One of the stranger side effects of the
super-toxic chemicals I take to stay alive is that my hair has started growing
again. I mean new hair. On my head.
Remember, when they say “one man,
one woman,” they mean one at a time.
On the subject of Vermont’s civil union law,
I can see all points of view, even the stupid, hateful, ugly, Christian ones.
I never expected to live this long, never
mind in such good health. I also never
expected that citrus – a little Florida Sunshine, as that old fag-baiter Anita
Bryant used to say – might be the answer for us all.
All the news that gives us fits
Talking about the weather is the very best
thing to avoid talking about something else -- Dick Cheney, for example.
It was Clausewitz,
we’re always told, who said that “War is a continuation of politics by other means,”
but he was wrong: War is a continuation
of ownership by any means.
Let’s face it, from the point of view of
media scandal, the kind the public gobbles up, this summer’s been Double
Dullsville.
We need someone who’ll rule us by fiat, with
an iron fist – or, in Angelina’s case, iron lips.
A doctor called in to attend to the tribe’s immediate
needs told the Times matter-of-factly, “The Nukak
don’t know what they’ve gotten themselves into.”
George, you’ll have to forgive me for not
addressing you as “Mr. President.” I’d
like to honor your office, at least, but in your case I’m not allowed.
The Lord doesn’t mind a little stealing,
really, because He puts it way, way down on the list of things thou shalt not do.
Right now, Mel Gibson could say that the
world is balanced on the back of a giant turtle and half the population would
flip-flop itself into believing it.
THE BREAST THAT ATE PITTSBURGH
It’s hard to know if the sight of Janet
Jackson’s dexter mammary posed an “imminent” threat
to public morality, or if it was merely “urgent,” “immediate,” “serious,”
“mortal” and “mounting.”
You just
keep your eyes on Harry Potter!
Barbara Bush is said to regret that she has
sometimes been “too outspoken” in public life – outspoken by whom?
I suppose everyone knows by now -- don't
they? -- that the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a card-carrying
socialist.
Take
“civility” -- please!
No
wonder you look worried!
Selected complaining, 1997-2006
For
a complete “Crank Call” archive, 2001-2007, click here
Comments to peterkurth@peterkurth.com