Julia: Her Life: An Intimate Biography - Hardcover

Spada, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312285655 ISBN 13: 9780312285654

Verlag: St Martin's Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

A carefully researched portrait of Julia Roberts describes her dysfunctional family, her early dating life, the impact of Pretty Woman and the paparazzi on her stardom, her volatile relationships, and the many films that have marked her career. 75,000 first printing. Illustrations.

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James Spada is a writer and photographer whose nineteen books have included bestselling biographies of Grace Kelly, Peter Lawford, Bette Davis and Barbra Streisand. Spada has also created pictorial biographies of John and Caroline Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Jackie Onassis, among others. He lives in Natick, Massachusetts.

Aus dem Klappentext

She is beloved worldwide for her effervescent smile and the way she lights up the screen in movies like "Erin Brokovich", "Mona Lisa's Smile" and, of course, "Pretty Woman." But Julia Roberts's real life has only been glimpsed in the tabloids until now. Acclaimed biographer James Spada has created a rich and exhaustively researched portrait of Julia as both an actress and as a woman. Spada went back to Julia's parents' beginnings in Georgia to unearth fascinating facts about her dysfunctional family background, her troubled childhood, and her early dating life. What he discovered may explain why Julia moved through her twenties and early thirties seemingly falling for a new co-star on every movie set. And Spada's interpretation of those romances-from the whirlwind last minute cancellation of her marriage to Kiefer Sutherland and the brooding intensity of her relationship with Jason Patric to to the sunnier and healthier long liaison with Benjamin Bratt-is juicy and fascinating reading.

Julia offers fresh details about all the star's famous movies to uncover an intensely dedicated but deeply insecure artist. After rising to superstardom at twenty-two Julia endured the onslaught of paparazzi along with her very public string of failed relationships, rumors of drug addiction, and clashes with big-name directors like Herbert Ross and Steven Spielberg. She fled Hollywood for two years, made her first "comeback" at the tender age of twenty-five, then took on a series of risky roles in movies that flopped. For the last six years, she has delighted audiences in a string of smash hits and topped the Hollywood heap as the highest paid actress in history.

Julia shows how the star has grown from a skittish girl moving through volatile relationships with charismatic co-stars to become an assured woman making her own bold-and often controversial-decisions about how to life her life.

Julia is as lively and vivacious as the star it explores. You will not be able to put it down.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Julia

Part One

THE ROBERTSES OF ATLANTA

"I come from a real touchy family. A lotta hugging, a lotta kissing, a lotta love."

--Julia Roberts

 

"Julia is in denial."

--Eric Roberts

CHAPTER ONE

"Well, if that don't beat a goose a-gobblin'!" exclaimed Jimmie Glen Roberts on Christmas Day 1933 when she heard the news that her twenty-eight-year-old son, Walter Thomas Roberts and his wife, the former Beatrice Beal, had had their first child, a boy they named Walter Grady. Walter would grow up to be the father of Julia Roberts.

The fifty-five-year-old Jimmie Glen, Née Corbitt, was herself no stranger to childbirth. Between her marriage to the strapping six-foot-tall Florala, Alabama-born farmer John Pendleton (J. P.) Roberts on December 13, 1899, and her second stillbirth in a row in 1923 (when she was forty-five), the feisty four-foot-eleven redheaded Irish-Scottish woman had borne nine children.

Baby Walter, of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh extraction on his father's side and English-Scottish extraction on his mother's, was J.P. and Jimmie Glen's fourteenth grandchild, and they would have seven more. Walter's cousin Glenda Beard recalled that the Robertses were a big but "very close-knit family, and they were a very honorable and Christian kind of family." Another cousin, Gloria Jones, recalled that "by the time my great-grandmother died, there were ninety-six of us [in and around Atlanta]."

All the Robertses, with the exception of Walter's parents and two aunts, lived within walking distance of one another in downtown Atlanta. Walter's father, whom everyone called Tom, lived with his family on Belleview Avenue in the rural West Fulton area of Atlanta. In 1933 America was in the grip of the Great Depression, and while Tom was never unemployed, there wasn't a lot of extra money to go around. "Their home was very small," Gloria recalled. "It had only three rooms. A huge kitchen--I guess what you'd call a keeping room--with a fireplace and a stove. That room was nice, but the living room and the bedroom were just tiny. The children [Walter was joined by a sister, Shirley,in 1942] slept in the kitchen." They did not have a telephone. "If you wanted to talk to somebody, you went to their house."

Tom Roberts loved horses and kept several on his property. After his retirement in the 1960s, he bought land across the street from his house and opened a riding academy that boasted more than a dozen horses. (It was there that his granddaughter Julia learned to ride.)

According to Gloria, Tom, his son, Walter, and his grandson Eric Roberts all look very much alike. "I saw Eric on TV the other night, and it was Walter made over. Julia can do it, too. When she acts like she's mad or upset, she can get that look that her dad and her granddad could get."

Walter's mother, Beatrice, Gloria felt, was not a particularly warm woman, "but she was sweet as she could be if you came to her house. She'd bake chocolate, she'd cook, whatever, but she didn't come to your house. She never bothered anybody. She was just a very quiet homebody. She was good with her children. They worshiped her."

Tom Roberts supported his family by working at the same job for forty-six years--first as a truck driver and then as a supervisor for the Driveway Company, Inc., a paving concern. "He supervised construction crews that did custom cement work on some of the biggest and finest homes in Atlanta," Gloria recalled. "They did driveways that looked like they were made of pine straw, but they were cement."

Glenda Beard remembered Tom Roberts as "a very hard worker. Kind of a macho-type person. He had rigid opinions about what a man should be." Gloria agreed: "I never saw Uncle Tom in anything but work shirt and jeans. He was very conservative. He believed that you went to work, you stayed with the same company, you didn't complain. And if you didn't do that, something was wrong with you."

As far as Tom Roberts was concerned, there was something wrong with his son, Walter. As the boy grew up, it became clear that he was nothing like his father; rather, he displayed the sensitivity and artistic temperament of the creative soul. Tom Roberts didn't think there was any future in that sort of thing for a young man.

"Walter had a brilliant mind and a delightful personality," Glenda recalled. "He was different--that was kind of the family name for him. Walter liked everything. He liked art, he liked music, he liked clothes. There wasn't enough that he could get into. Like most brilliant people, Walter got bored easily. I think that's why he was always into something different."

Another relative, Lucille Roberts, felt that Walter was effeminate, andrecalled that he "played with dolls as a boy and was a little bit of a 'sissy boy.'" But Glenda disagreed: "I don't think he had a feminine quality. [When he got older] he did dress differently. He liked to wear black turtlenecks. Maybe a little bit tighter clothes, a European cut on his jackets, that kind of thing. Kind of artsy."

It was clear to his family by the time he was a teenager that "artsy" described Walter Roberts exactly. "He was the first person I ever saw wear an ascot!" Gloria said. At West Fulton High School, "he was a real avant-garde type," who loved writing and theater. "I remember going to family reunions, and we'd have to act out little plays that Walter made up. He wouldn't write anything down, he'd just tell you what he wanted you to do. He was always the star, always the main character. Walter could sing and play the piano. His daddy did let him take piano lessons."

By the time Walter and Gloria were teenagers in the late 1940s, the Robertses had been settled in Atlanta for four generations. "We had uncles on the police force and a cousin in the fire department," Gloria said. "We couldn't go anywhere that someone wasn't calling my parents and saying, 'I saw so-and-so at so-and-so.'" Unlike most of their relatives, the Tom Robertses were not a particularly religious family. "I don't remember them ever going to church except a couple of times when we were at our grandparents' and we'd go with them," Gloria said.

By the time he was eighteen, Walter Roberts had grown to five foot ten. He cut an arresting figure, and not just because of his ascots and European-cut clothes. His wavy jet-black hair crowned a chiseled, high-cheekboned face set with blazing dark eyes. (Roberts family lore has it that somewhere in the past, a Cherokee entered their gene pool.) Although he hadn't been particularly athletic as a boy, his frame was lean and solid. "The girls loved Walter," Gloria recalled. "Every girl I knew in my high school who didn't have a steady boyfriend wanted to go out with him. And I got them dates with him."

In December 1951, just before his eighteenth birthday, Walter was graduated from West Fulton High School. He found himself at a crossroads. Tom wanted him to join the paving business, or at least get a similar good, steady job that would help him support a family and live the kind of rock-solid life his parents had enjoyed for twenty years. Walter longed to go to college; his mind roiled with the prospect of immersion in everything from theater to psychology to English. His father would have none of it.

"Tom thought Walter was too intellectual!" Gloria recounted incredulously. "He didn't want him to go to college, and he definitely didn'twant him to get involved in theater. That was just not what a man did." Tom refused to pay any of the costs of sending Walter to college, and father and son frequently battled over the issue. Since both had hot tempers, the fights often turned nasty. "They crossed swords often,"...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St Martin's Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312285655
• ISBN 13: 9780312285654
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar