Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond

From acclaimed director Michael Lindsay-Hogg (The Normal Heart, The Beatles’ Let It Be, Brideshead Revisited, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, etc.), son of glamorous Warner’s movie star Geraldine Fitzgerald: a magical dreamscape memoir of his boyhood, coming-of-age, and making his way in the worlds of theater, film, and television.Lindsay-Hogg’s father was an English baronet who lived in Ireland and was rarely seen by his son. His stepfather was the scion of the Isidor Straus fortune, co-owner of R. H. Macy’s; Straus went down with the Titanic.The author’s mother, Geraldine Fitzgerald, the redheaded Irish seductress who won instant acclaim as Bette Davis’s best friend in Dark Victory and in William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, spent time with Hollywood’s elite—Laurence Olivier, Charles Chaplin, and Orson Welles.Lindsay-Hogg writes of how he wended his way into this mysterious, and seductive world, encountering as a small boy the likes of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst, playing hide-and-seek with Olivia de Havilland, serving drinks to Humphrey Bogart, discussing life with Henry Miller.At the book’s center, an offhand comment made by his mother when he was sixteen, about rumors circulating (“Not true,” she told him) that she had a romantic relationship with Orson Welles and that he was Michael’s father. This opened up a whole new realm of his life. Interwoven throughout his narrative is the element of questioning who his father was. Was he the patron saint of American pictures, the legendary genius of the twentieth century and inconsistent person in Michael’s life . . .or was he the man who considered himself Michael’s real father?As Lindsay-Hogg struggled to make sense of it all, questions of missed chances, conversations never had, and what is true took root, dogging him, shaping his life . . . questions still, that haunt and inform this moving, funny, and illuminating memoir. Read more