I read "Runaway Train," Eric Roberts' memoir. It's an easy read, and, at least in the first half, has some moving memories about growing up in a very dysfunctional family, and some entertaining anecdotes about making his early (good) movies. Predictably, he doesn't hold much back and has some wild stories to tell. When he was studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts:
[quote]One of my teachers was Manu Tupou, who’d played a young Indian chief in a Richard Harris movie, A Man Called Horse, and a Hawaiian prince alongside Max von Sydow and Julie Andrews in Hawaii. We sometimes ran scenes at Manu’s apartment at 11 West Sixty-Ninth Street in Manhattan, and I stayed there occasionally. One night, the work went very late, and because I was living in Brooklyn, I crashed at his apartment. I woke up to Manu sucking my cock. I said, “Excuse me, Manu, this is not cool. I gotta go.”
When his mother remarried, Eric said everyone, including his mother, knew that her new husband (Michael Motes) was "basically gay," and shortly before the wedding when Motes and Eric are alone at his mother's house:
[quote]Michael suddenly backed me up against the front door, put his hand on my throat, and grabbed my balls. He goes, “I’m gonna marry your mother, then I’m gonna fuck you, too.” I broke away and ran to my dad’s apartment. I told him what happened, and we actually called the cops.
The second part of the book was mostly a litany of Roberts' bad behavior: drug abuse, tantrums on and off the set, and cheating on his partners. The book really needed a good final editing before publication. There are mistakes (e.g., saying he was nominated for an Academy Award for "Star 80" and an Emmy Award for "In Cold Blood" - neither is true); and there are way too many exclamation points, and too much repetition of superlative adjectives in close proximity. There are also strange contradictions in the text and very confusing gaps in the timeline (Roberts says his memory, after a serious car accident and decades of drug addiction, is not good, but the editor should have helped him more). Near the start he says he has been "mostly friendless" through most of his life (except for Eliza, his second wife, and Christopher Walken), but throughout the rest of the book there are continual references to a seemingly endless roster of friends. Similarly, he recounts constant and horrific physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his mother, Betty, until he finally tells his father and the beatings stop (when he is 11), except for one, where she hit him so hard with a pointer that his kneecap split and he needed a cast; but then he writes, "From the ages of six to twelve, I can say that I was happy."
He tries to make amends to those he has hurt (including his sisters and daughter), but Eliza tells him (after over 30 years of marriage) that he is a "borderline narcissist," and it is hard not to agree with her assessment. To be fair, considering his mother was (drunk or sober) so abusive and his father was a borderline sociopath, he did remarkably well to make it to the age of 68 with the part of his heart intact that truly loves animals and at least a few people.
