Rating: 
Summary: Even Swans Suffer
Review: Claire Bloom put her heart into this book, writing the truth about her life with the same sensitivity and refinement she brought to so many of her stage and film roles. Of course, critics hated it -- especially female critics. And you know why? Because there's nothing ugly ducklings hate worse than the idea that even swans suffer. For nasty old yentas like Daphne Merkin, it's bad enough that Claire Bloom is the most perfect, lovely English rose who ever lived. They hate her for that no matter what she happens to be like as a human being. But the fact that she can feel, and think, and love, and write -- intolerable!
This book reveals all the horror of Philip Roth's failures as a writer and a human being. The fact that his self-loathing is so often disguised as megalomania and artistic temperament is no excuse for the unbelievable suffering he caused to those around him. Reading this book makes it much easier to understand the fundamental ugliness of his later works. Plainly, Roth needs to believe that the whole world hates him as much as he hates himself. Reading the story, one senses that if anything Claire Bloom has been too kind, making excuses for a man who obviously has no pride and no shame, no sense of resonsibility and not a shred of common decency. Not even Trick E. Dixon or Big John Baal or Gil Gamesh himself could have behaved this atrociously!
At the same time, Claire Bloom herself emerges from these pages as a very fragile soul who never really recovered from a painful childhood. It's impossible not to wish she had been a little stronger -- or that the men in her life had been more worthy of her. Gore Vidal, Yul Brynner, Richard Burton, all legendary figures in one way or another, yet none of them had the special decency or the courage to recognize the heavenly, radiant, ethereal beauty that was Claire Bloom.
There will never be another like her.
Rating:
Summary: Frank, Poignant
Review: Claire Bloom's "Leaving a Doll's House" is poignant in its honesty, but a bit underwritten. The first time I reached for my highlighter pen was on page 104, where Bloom describes a distraught Vivien Leigh.
Leigh, of course, was the incomparable beauty who portrayed Scarlett O'hara in "Gone with the Wind." Leigh's marriage was unsteady; she suffered from mental illness. Leigh kept her emotions in check, but one night Bloom entered Leigh's dressing room and found her in tears. "Vivien in tears was not like anyone I knew; no red nose, sniffles...she simply sat at her table, in her beautiful scarlet [how appropriate] costume; diamond tears rolled down her cheeks, her beauty undiminished, her make-up untouched." What an image.
Page 149 includes a similarly brief, and pointedly telling, anecdote. Bloom's husband, the author Philip Roth, insists that a skunk has anti-Semitic feelings toward him. This anecdote goes a long way towards explaining Roth's new book, "The Plot Against America."
For the most part, though, the book is frank, and underwritten. For example, Bloom's father was a feckless businessman and gambler who abandoned Bloom, her mother, and her brother. Years later, when she became a successful actress, Bloom's father reappeared, backstage in her dressing room, with a new, rich wife in tow. Bloom, by her own account, was pointedly cold and humiliating to him. Three days later, he died. "I believed," Bloom writes, "that it had been my callous behavior that had killed him" (79). Bloom does not pause after this remarkable confession; only one sentence is offered as denouement, "I picked up and went on with my life."
Bloom played an essential role in a superlative film, "The Haunting." This film is unsurpassed in its genre; its psychological and sociological undercurrents raise it far above most horror films. Though made in 1963, in black and white, and since remade, it regularly makes top ten lists for "the scariest movie ever made." Bloom never mentions it here.
Too, Bloom partnered some of the biggest names among twentieth century actors: Richard Burton, Yul Brynner, Rod Steiger, Anthony Quinn, Laurence Olivier. If the reader had never seen a Burton film, I'm not sure he would get an adequate impression of Burton from this book.
Bloom's Burton has intense green eyes; she quotes a critic who says, beautifully, that his voice is so powerful "he carries his own cathedral with him" (50). But this reader never understood why Bloom risked the pain she reports feeling being his lover while he lived with, and loved, his first wife, Sybil Burton.
Bloom's brief fling with Brynner is enlivened by a late night visit to a Paris nightclub where Brynner, who mythologized his ethnic and professional roots, was adored, and sang with, the Gypsies he said raised him. The night was capped in Russian fashion, Bloom reports; drinking glasses were thrown against the wall.
Pages 195-220 contain, without comment, Bloom's diary entries from a particularly rocky time in her marriage to Roth. This is the best, rawest, most detailed writing in the book.
As others report, Philip Roth is depicted here -- believably -- as a demented and sadistic man. He is also clearly depicted as an object of genuine pathos. It must be hard to be Roth's wife; it must also be hard to be Roth. Without ever using the term, Bloom creates a vivid portrayal of Roth as a kind of idiot savant with Borderline Personality Disorder.
Reading of Roth's self-induced wounds of greed -- he demanded that Bloom pay him huge sums of money as compensation for the time he spent with her -- paranoia, and sheer unhappiness is like reading of a patient tormented by self-induced skin rashes. It's simply hard to watch, and you can't help but say a prayer for his speedy recovery.
"Leaving a Doll's House" is an easy read, and poignant in its honesty. It offers insights into Claire Bloom that will cause me to view her performances, and other women I meet, in a more expansive, and more compassionate, light.
Rating:
Summary: Honest to a fault...
Review: Claire Bloom's journey deserves a considered read. She reveals that no matter how beautiful, successful and intelligent a woman she might be, when confronted with choices from men of greater success and/or influence, Bloom was willing to pay an inordinately high price to share their worlds---even the manic-depressive world of Philip Roth, in which Bloom ends up in a psych ward just as Roth is leaving it. Rather than condeming Bloom for her weaknesses, readers should thank Bloom for the candid tour .
Rating:
Summary: Boom's Candor Deserves Credit
Review: Claire Bloom's journey deserves a considered read. She reveals that no matter how beautiful, successful and intelligent a woman she might be, when confronted with choices from men of greater success and/or influence, Bloom was willing to pay an inordinately high price to share their worlds---even the manic-depressive world of Philip Roth, in which Bloom ends up in a psych ward just as Roth is leaving it. Rather than condeming Bloom for her weaknesses, readers should thank Bloom for the candid tour .
Rating: 
Summary: Philip Roth gave me a lousy divorce settlement...
Review: Hmm. I agree with the other reviewers who say that there is no depth or reflection here. It is quite a catalogue of woes, and there is a sincerity and honesty in the telling. But.... As a piece of writing, it is not at all distinguished, and there is not much nourishment as in something left to reflect on, observations worth mulling over, whether in agreement or disagreement. It is, sadly, like some of the worst celebrity autobiogs on the shelves. Which is a pity, because I think with better editorial direction this could have been a far better book.
Rating: 
Summary: Ho hum
Review: Hmm. I agree with the other reviewers who say that there is no depth or reflection here. It is quite a catalogue of woes, and there is a sincerity and honesty in the telling. But.... As a piece of writing, it is not at all distinguished, and there is not much nourishment as in something left to reflect on, observations worth mulling over, whether in agreement or disagreement. It is, sadly, like some of the worst celebrity autobiogs on the shelves. Which is a pity, because I think with better editorial direction this could have been a far better book.
Rating:
Summary: Honest to a fault...
Review: I approached this Celebrity Memoir cautiously, for I had just finished Aretha Franklin's "From These Roots" which was about as dishonest as a memoir can get. I was amazed to find this one to be the complete opposite - and yet, just like Aretha's, also not terribly deep. I adore Claire Bloom the actress, the same as I do Aretha the singer. But as writers they leave a lot to be desired. Nevertheless, I gave this book four stars for the sad but honest look she was willing to give us of her disastrous relationships. Still - can any creative, intellectual woman out there honestly say that if Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier and Phillip Roth had desired them they would not have gone, willingly, to their doom? Not me! you protest. Well, not me, either, but that's easy for us to say. Who hasn't had a wounded relationship with her father? Especially us driven, creative types. I just want to hug Claire Bloom - she's such a charming person. And I'd like to slug Phillip Roth except that he's given me a few fabulous moments in literature and theater ("The Ghost Writer" is my favorite work of his) that make me fond of him despite his being a mysoginist. It's kind of like Woody Allen - I hate him for what he did to Mia, but I wouldn't miss a movie...Love to you, Claire, if you read these reviews. I hope I see more of you on screen, past and future.
Rating:
Summary: Philip Roth gave me a lousy divorce settlement...
Review: I picked up this autobiography not out of any particular interest in Claire Bloom the actress (I'll say Claire Bloom the writer resembles Claire Bloom the actress : competent, well-spoken, attractive but so narcissistic it is difficult to empathize with her), but rather intrigued by her relationship with Philip Roth, an author I admire but find maddeningly misogynistic. Bloom the writer is no more convincing than Bloom the actress at depicting a depth of feeling. She tells us she loved Roth, Richard Burton, her mother and her daughter. Yet mother and daughter both get short shrift (when Roth didn't want the daughter around, the daughter was out on her ear). First and second husbands get little attention (not famous enough ? there is something of the groupie about Ms. Bloom). She names her autobiography after « A Doll's House » but is this ironic ? She portrays herself as the original doormat-wife and mistress and then asks her audience to sympathize with her inability to get her husbands to respect her. She moans about unfaithful husbands but delights in telling her readers how she cuckolded Richard Burton's wife. Pot, meet kettle. The book's main source of interest is its description of Philip Roth's mental breakdown. This is fascinating for Roth readers - however humiliating it must have been for Roth the man to endure (and now to have exhibited in public by his ex-wife).
Rating:
Summary: rather depressing
Review: I'd have to agree with the previous reviewer in that while this book is a good read, it's quite depressing that Ms. Bloom managed to stay with someone like Roth for so long when all the warning signs were there from early in the relationship. I also found it disappointing that several of her films are ignored in the book, like Charly, which I thought was a teriffic film.
Rating:
Summary: For Roth junkies only; a guilty pleasure
Review: Ok, I admit and I am embarrassed--I ate this book up like a pint of Haagen-Daz. And afterwards, I felt about the same as I do when I look at the empty ice cream container: a little shamed, vaguely nauseous, highly satisfied. I am a huge Philip Roth fan, a collector of his signed first editions, etc., so you have to take this reveiw with a grain of salt. Ms. Bloom, or whoever ghosted it, is much better writer than I had anticipated and the pages flew by (just one more spoonful...). Charlie Chaplin, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Gore Vidal, Rod Steiger--it was interesting to read what felt like highly redacted versions of who these men were in Ms. Bloom's life. She does seem to reserve a certainy clarity and honesty for her depiction of Roth, for better or worse, than she seems willing to give to these other men. I, frankly, believe most if not all of what she wrote about Roth, and it is tantalizing to watch the threads of her fact with him reverberate in his fiction. (Sylphid, the harp-playing harpy in "I Married A Communist" is very openly Bloom's daughter with Rod Steiger). So if you are a Roth fan and are interested in a painful dissection of his fiction, you should probably put this on your shelf...though don't expect HIM to appreciate it.
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