Ebert Memoir Full of Surprises

It's hard for me not to think of Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert as the chubby, bespectacled half of Siskel & Ebert, the duo of Chicago-based reviewers whose urbane, insightful and frequently scathing weekly televised discussions of the latest films -- and their thumbs-up or thumbs-down verdicts -- had a profound influence on my own movie tastes and probably yours, too.

When Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel died after cancer surgery at 53 in 1999, it ended what might have been the most beautiful partnership since Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains walked off together in search of a Free French garrison to join at the end of Casablanca. Since then, Ebert, 69, has experienced a brutal struggle of his own with cancer, one that left him disfigured and unable to speak. Nevertheless, he's not only managed to continue his career as a critic, but arguably has achieved an even broader following.

For a guy who started out hunting-and-pecking on a manual typewriter in the smoke-filled newsrooms of the Mad Men era, Ebert's adapted to the internet with astonishing skill, morphing seamlessly into a blogger on topics ranging from pop culture to politics, and a prolific generator of pithy bon mots on Twitter, The latter medium, in fact, seems almost tailor-made for Ebert, a master of Dorothy Parker-esque put-downs. (A recent sample: "Rudy Giuliani announced today he will not be running for President, bringing to a close months of indifference.")

Ebert continues to surprise us. In his new book, Life Itself, he reveals himself to be as gifted a memorist as he is a film critic. Besides his newspaper movie reviews and TV work, Ebert has written more than 20 books, including various movie encyclopedias, a collection of essays on filmmaker Martin Scorsese, a mystery novel and a how-to manual on using a rice cooker. But I never would have expected a notoriously caustic, at times haughty film critic to lower his snarky defenses enough to write an intimate, remarkably unaffected autobiography. The book is wistful and whimsical in spots and starkly honest and confessional in others.

Ebert covers a huge amount of ground in this book, from his earliest childhood memories to his encounters with Hollywood superstars such as John Wayne and Lee Marvin. As you might expect, he devotes a considerable amount of space to the recent illness that nearly killed him, though anyone who's lost a loved one to cancer may find the harrowing account of Ebert's treatments a bit too painful to read.

The best section of the book is roughly the first quarter, which vividly details Ebert's childhood and adolescence in a Midwestern working-class Catholic family in the 1940s and 1950s. He introduces us to his father, Walter, a skilled electrician with little schooling but a sharp mind, who resolutely refused to teach young Roger anything about his craft because he wanted him to work with his brain rather than his hands. Ebert recounts a particularly powerful moment in which he informs his father that he wants to go to Harvard University rather than the University of Illinois, and his father breaks into tears; unknown to Ebert, his father was dying of cancer and knew he would be unable to afford such a fancy education for his son. We also meet Ebert's mother, Annabel, who went to work as a bookkeeper to make ends meet after her husband's death and developed a drinking problem that foreshadows Ebert's own adult struggles with the bottle.

But the most fascinating character is young Ebert himself. He was the sort of earnest lad who now only seems to exist in vintage movies on the Turner channel, a naif who grew up listening to radio serials, worried about his competence as an altar boy, and spent hours in his basement, meticulously self-publishing a newspaper for stamp collectors and a science fiction fanzine. His description of Saturday afternoon matinees at the Princess Theater in Urbana, Ill., where tickets cost nine cents and a Yo-Yo contest preceded the movie bill of Lash LaRue westerns and Abbott and Costello comedies, is so vivid that you practically can taste the popcorn and jawbreakers that kids chomped on in the darkness.

As a storyteller, Ebert has a tendency to ramble and sometimes gets lost in details, but he also has a knack for bringing alive an America that long ago vanished. In some stretches, he almost reminds me of Jean Shepherd, author of A Christmas Story, or film director Barry Levinson, whose early films focused on the Baltimore of his post-World War II youth.

As Ebert explains: "We were the first generation after Elvis, and one of the last generations of innocence. We were inventing the myth of the American teenager...we knew nothing of violence and drugs. We looked forward to the future." And of course, he notes, they didn't realize how lucky they were.

Ebert's account of breaking into the newspaper business, the accidental beginnings of his career as a film critic, and his friendship with the colorful Chicago columnist Mike Royko are nearly as captivating. Another of my favorite bits is Ebert's honest, humble retelling of his struggle to give up drinking, which begins on a hot, sunny Chicago afternoon in 1979. ("I put a glass of scotch and soda down on the living room table, went to bed, and pulled the blankets over my head," he recounts. "I couldn't take it any more.")

If Ebert's memoir has a weakness, it's that he remembers the past in such incredible detail and introduces so many offbeat and colorful characters -- from the mysteriously scarred high school teacher who had survived a World War I gas attack, to one of his early landlords, who in a previous life had been an anarchist playwright in the Ukraine -- that there's almost too much to absorb. But Life Itself is so compelling that you'll want to try.