Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Reviews by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
Richard E. Grant. A Pocketful of Happiness: A Memoir. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022). 324pp.
30th Edition.
Not until I read his engaging, deeply poignant, yet charmingly funny memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness, did I learn that actor Richard E. Grant, who came to screen fame in 1987’s Withnail and I, was born and raised in Swaziland. Now officially known as the Kingdom of Eswatini (which he never mentions), this tiny, landlocked nation, bordered by South Africa and Mozambique, was a colony of Great Britain from 1903 to 1968.
The 67-year-old Grant (whose nameless middle initial was chosen to differentiate him from another actor called Richard Grant), emigrated to England in 1982, but he only glancingly discusses his native country. Hopefully, he’s holding it in store for a later book; what other actor from Swaziland ever became an international star?
A Pocketful of Miracles is not your average autobiography cum memoir. Composed of month-by-month chapters providing diary entries from December 2020 through September 2021 (during the Covid lockdown), intermingled with commentary from the 1980s and 1990s, it’s above all a detailed account of the discovery and progress of cancer in his beloved wife, Joan Washington. She was one of the UK’s most honored and revered accent (and acting) coaches, whose clients were among the biggest stars in the English-speaking film world, among them Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Gabriel Byrne, and Barbra Streisand (Washington coached the actors in Yentl).
Unlike Alan Rickman’s posthumously published, diary-based book, Madly, Deeply, described here last week, Grant’s entries are written out fully, only now and then using a telegraphic style. His prose is direct, expressive, and, often, heartbreakingly moving.
Grant’s book is a wrenching account of living with and taking care of a feisty, brilliant, funny, well-read, witty, unfiltered, and independent woman, 10 years his senior. Joan, whom he met in 1983, married in 1986, and lost in 2021, was his wife for 35 years. They seemed to love each other as much at the end as at the beginning. It’s refreshing to have him insist on their monogamous relationship having been “the bedrock of our marriage.” Before she passed, though, she urged her grieving spouse to survive her absence by finding “a pocketful of happiness.”
The stability of their mutual love, even after all those years, was remarkable, and Grant’s book is as much a shimmering love letter as it is a clinical description of the emotional ups and downs of caring for a sick person, with tsunami-like mood shifts that would test the patience of a saint, a stature Grant himself might be said to have achieved. Something similar could be said of his exceptionally responsible daughter, Olivia (called Oilly even before she was born), without whose physical and emotional support he would have been a complete wreck. Also crucial was the support of numerous friends, including world-class celebrities, who paid bedside visits to Joan at the family cottage an hour out of London. Even the then Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles not only wrote warm letters but made the journey.
Anyone who’s experienced something like this (myself included) will respond to Grant’s account of pills, “miracle” drugs, drips, sleeplessness, hope, hopelessness, irritation, hospital visits, hospital beds, medical tests, multiple opinions, CT and PET scans, injections, pain, surgeries, painkillers, nurses, chemo, radiation, remission, depression, and the like. To read about Joan’s treatments, in the hospital, and at home, and realize it was all paid for by the National Health Service is enough to make one scream at the lack of equivalent health care in the USA.
In between the entries on Joan’s condition, which began with the discovery of lesions on a lung, Grant talks of his 90-year-old, chain-smoking, still-driving mother, whose tempestuous relationship with his alcoholic father ended after 10-year-old Richard, asleep in the back of a car, woke up to find his mom having sex with another man. He offers colorful anecdotes of his professional life, doing plays and films, but makes no attempt at a conventional rundown of his career. He often tells stories that somehow illuminate his current situation, or serve to highlight his relationship with Joan, including how they met and fell in love.
He recounts his early struggles to get acting work (including a spell as a London waiter) and writes of how he came to land his breakthrough role in Withnail and I. Readers seeking behind-the-scenes stories will find plenty, including Grant’s early work in provincial theater, his role in a Star Wars film, one on an episode of the “Loki” TV show, his performance in Persuasion, and, in particular, his co-starring with Melissa McCarthy in 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, for which he received an Oscar nomination. His description of attending the Academy Awards is priceless.
Regardless of his success, he remained perpetually starstruck, writing about the celebrity actors he met with childlike enthusiasm, none more so than Barbra Streisand. He confesses to a lifelong obsession with her, reprinting the letter he wrote to her as a 14-year-old Swazi boy (“Swazi” was what Joan called him), mentioning the large sculpture of the great singer-actress he commissioned for his garden, and describing his several encounters with her. Among other household names to whom he fondly attends are Jennifer Aniston, Gabriel Byrne, the Spice Girls, Tom Hanks, Elaine May, director J.J. Abrams, R2D2 (Anthony Daniels), Lady Gaga, Owen Wilson, Tom Hiddleston, and Vanessa Redgrave. There’s even a passage about interviewing Donald Trump in 2013 for a docuseries, “Hotel Secrets.” Unfortunately, though, while Grant provides a photo section (including a bunch of selfies with other stars), he omits an index, which, as I’ve often said, should be required of all such name-dropping volumes.
Despite its subject, A Pocketful of Happiness has many such pockets. While that doesn’t dismiss the unhappiness that pervades so many of its pages, the book will clearly resonate with those who’ve either cared for an ailing loved one or are doing so now. It will also give those who admire the talent of the winsome Richard E. Grant a reason to admire him on an entirely other level.
Coming up: Katie Gee Salisbury. Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
