POPULAR CULTURE
Shouldn't there be Moore?
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The good part about Dudley Moore is that one can see why `Cuddly Dudley' was so endearing... '
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THE idea of biography written by one's best friend is touching and somehow makes you expect that it'll be more intimate, more revealing and more complex, but that, as one realises reading Rena Fruchter's biography of Dudley Moore, is to credit friendship's many magics with the ability to work literary alchemy!
Be-friending is separate from re-membering the friend and the friendship for the world; many have combined the two with terrific results, but not Rena Fruchter. Hers is a literal vision, a straight path interested neither in going beneath the carpets to see what's swept under, or into the cupboards to figure out why particular skeletons were never let out.
Fruchter's Dudley Moore: An Intimate Portrait takes you through the intimacies of her and her family's friendship with Moore without weighing the components of Moore's complex character and his even more complex life.
The story of Moore's friendship with Fruchter is extraordinary and touching. Their first encounter was over the phone in 1987; Fruchter, then a columnist with the New York Times and Moore, talked for 45 minutes "... about Beethoven, piano technique and performing with orchestra."
Later Moore spoke of having enjoyed the conversation, asking if he might call to discuss music one more time. At the end of the conversation, about Debussy this time, Moore asked, "I don't suppose this has to end today, does it? I know you are busy but would you mind terribly if we did this just once more... Everybody here is so busy getting tanned and blond. They don't seem to have the time to discuss Chopin at all."
This was the beginning of many many conversations, which began about music and became about everything, with Moore calling Rena on every occasion; these conversations make a substantial part of the book and one sees, through them, the platonic intimacy between the two. One also sees, and admires, the immense tenacity it took them to hold fast to their friendship, through the obvious domestic tensions it created for Fruchter and through the numerous confusions of Moore's life.
However, these conversations are often flat and literal so that you can't help feeling that Fruchter sweetened up the dialogues! She does however manage to include a number of hilarious anecdotes bringing out Moore's little quirks.
Fruchter's family comes through as warm and caring and one admires how they took this complex, troubled Hollywood star — albeit one with superb musical talent — to their heart and into their home, caring for him through the last five years of his disintegration with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, especially as then he was no longer fabulously rich and the Fruchters never allowed him to pay.
Fruchter is best when she talks of the music that Moore and she shared and when she describes the ups and downs of his friendship with her and with others. She is unable to explore Moore's emotional score, to touch the chord of his transformance from the disturbed little boy, victimised and mocked for his club foot to the confident and popular comic and musician. She seems content to repeat Moore's own recreation of the past; for instance, her portrayal of Moore's early years in London simply echoes his version of himself as the lost country boy with feelings of inferiority where as many remember him as "superior" even in the early years by dint of his awareness of his own vast comic and musical ability.
The good part about Dudley Moore is that it makes one see just why "Cuddly Dudley" was so endearing and why friends, such as Liza Minelli, rated him so highly: "He was a wonderful man. He was funny and dear and supportive and hilarious and he was one of my heroes."
Perhaps the book would have been more effective had it been shorter by about three fourths because, you have been taken, sometimes dragged, through the account of many days, many moods, many tours, many fights, many concerts, many lunches, many telephone conversations that all these overshadow the pathos of Moore's last days, the sadness of his encounter with his own, literally and metaphorically, degenerated self.
And these last years were sad, robbed completely of the fizz, the brightness of Moore's clever comic persona, of the glitter and dash of fame as musician and actor, as he struggled to find answers not only to why he had to die but also to the death that he was living with — the loss of the ability to make music. "Why did this happen to me? Why my music? I don't know how I can go on without the piano. You can put the rest into a thimble. I would give up what's left of my legs, my balance, if I could play the piano again."
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
Dudley Moore: An Intimate Portrait, Rena Fruchter, Ebury Press.
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