Susanna Moore’s memoir starts in Hawaii, untethered by her mother’s death, and ends in a starry Hollywood. Like many fairy tales, it is infused with tragedy.
Miss Aluminium, named after a modelling gig she got at a trade show, is a compelling account of Moore’s life as she moves from being a model to bit roles in films, to reading scripts for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. This is the working life before she became an author, most famously of the erotic thriller In the Cut, which became a cult classic.
Both personally and culturally, life is changing. Brought up in the traditional morality of the 1950s and early ’60s, she navigates a new era of free love. Lacking the steely ambition of a Becky Sharp, she can seem at times weightless, steered by patronage and buffeted by a society in flux: Hollywood is in transition between the old James Stewart era and the new one exemplified by Nicholson.
Throughout the memoir, Moore returns to the subject of her childhood, piecing together stories about her mother, who had bouts of depression, as well as about her father’s neglect and stepmother’s cruelty. In one anecdote, Moore’s father visits his wife in hospital, solemnly promising to stop an affair. “My mother was happy for the first time in a long while and when he left, she went to the window to watch him walk across the parking lot of the hospital . . . and there, sitting in [his] car, was the girl.” As a bereaved child, she writes, no one made any connection between her mother’s sudden death and her “wild behaviour” at school.
For both Moore and her mother before her, clothes were transformational. They became “objects of fetishistic importance to my mother”, Moore writes. “The well-made suits and evening dresses . . . with some sleight of hand transformed my mother from a shanty Irish girl into a beautifully dressed and well-behaved debutante.” So too for Moore, who slips “into an elegant disguise” when she is bequeathed clothes designed by Balenciaga and Dior.
Moore’s beauty is a ticket away. Yet the journey to Hollywood is painful. She is assaulted by Oleg Cassini, a seemingly sophisticated fashion designer, and mentally removes herself from the event, imagining herself to be “crouched in a corner of the ceiling, my bare feet balanced on the molding as I watched from above”. Later, she is badly beaten by her first husband.
There is a coolness in the way she describes traumatic events. Such understatement also lends itself to wicked humour, notably the delicious account of Moore’s time with Audrey Hepburn, who enigmatically confides: “There is something that I have been meaning to tell you. It will make all the difference in your life, I promise you.” Only for the actor to be called away, leaving Moore on tenterhooks for days. At last, Hepburn reveals the great advice: “You must always wear shoes the same colour as your hose . . . It has been my secret for years.”
It is the relationships with older women that prove life-changing for Moore: first, with her warm, loving maternal grandmother, then with a socialite who gives her the elegant clothes. In Los Angeles she falls in with Connie Wald, widow of film producer Jerry Wald, who invites Moore to her starry dinner parties alongside actors Natalie Wood, James Stewart and Deborah Kerr. Along the way, writer Joan Didion and her husband John Dunne become good friends.
In another author’s hands, a Hollywood memoir would be pure titillation. What makes this stand out is its depiction of a specific place in time and the elegant restraint of its prose.
Moore falls in love with production designer Dick Sylbert, who becomes chief of production at Paramount Studios. Just as their passion dwindles, she suggests they marry.
“For some time, it had seemed to me that people decide to marry or to have a child or to buy a house at the moment that their relationship is coming to an end, in part as an attempt to save it, and because they do not know what else to do. I was no exception.” It is a cerebral twist on romance and a fitting end to an excellent book. The author’s happy-ever-after is of making peace with herself and having faith that things “would be all right”.
Miss Aluminium by Susanna Moore, Weidenfeld & Nicolson £9.99, 288 pages
Emma Jacobs is the FT’s work and careers columnist
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