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Life Itself! is most intriguing in its depiction of Dundy's relationship with Tynan, though the details of his sado-masochistic "Oxford practices" have been well documented elsewhere, in his second wife Kathleen Tynan's The Life of Kenneth Tynan. Life with Ken, a Barbie in her flurry of frocks and socialising, saw Dundy circulate with a gilded cast of associates, rarely dull and never unknown: Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Cyril Connolly, Marilyn Monroe, Henry Green and Gore Vidal make frequent appearances, as she commiserates with the wives of Peters Brook and Ustinov how hard it is for actresses with illustrious partners to find work. Once the heart stops bleeding, what redeems passages of flapper frippery are when the screwball wit kicks in, or she pauses to allow her writing the space it cries out for, and justifies when allowed. When she finally left Tynan, after a brutal attack and serial psychological sadism, she produced mediocre plays, reasonable journalism, fuelled by the pills and booze which nearly ended her life. Rescued by electro-therapy and a discovered love of Elvis (of whom she wrote a respected biography, Elvis and Gladys), one hopes she is allowed to live out her days in California with peaceful reflections and calmer syntax. --David Vincent
Even so this book was a pleasure to read, she's a gutsy lady who's changed direction from actress to novelist to playwright to biographer and has had her share of problems but still seems to getting a lot from her life, I recommend it - though anyone who picks it up hoping for lots of salacious details about Key Tynan's fondness for flagellation is going to be pretty disappointed because though it's mentioned as it has to be since it was a major factor in the break-up of their marriage she doesn't dwell on it.
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