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All in Good Time: A Memoir (Paperback)
$13.95
Shipped to Tattered Cover in 3 to 7 days
Description
All in Good Time is a luminous memoir about growing up in the shadow of the golden age of songwriting and Sinatra, from the celebrated radio personality and novelist Jonathan Schwartz.
“Dancing in the Dark.” “That’s Entertainment.” “By Myself.” “You and the Night and the Music.” They are part of the American Songbook, and were all composed by Arthur Schwartz, the elusive father at the center of his son’s beautifully written book.
Imagine a childhood in which Judy Garland sings you lullabies, Jackie Robinson hits you fly balls, and yet you’re lonely enough to sneak into the houses of Beverly Hills neighbors and hide behind curtains to watch real families at dinner.
At the age of nine, Jonathan Schwartz began broadcasting his father’s songs on a homemade radio station, and would eventually perform those songs, and others, as a pianist-singer in the saloons of London and Paris, meeting Frank Sinatra for the first time along the way. (His portrait of Sinatra is as affectionate and accurate as any written to date.)
Schwartz’s love for a married woman caught up in the fervor of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and his other relationships with both lovers and wives, surround his eventually successful career on New York radio.
The men and women who have roles to play include Richard Rodgers, Nelson Riddle, Carly Simon, Jimmy Van Heusen, Bennett Cerf, Elizabeth Taylor, and, of course, Sinatra himself.
Schwartz writes of the start of FM radio, the inception of the LP, and the constantly changing flavors of popular music, while revealing the darker corners of his own history.
Most of all, Jonathan Schwartz embraces the legacy his father left him: a passion for music, honored with both pride and sorrow.
About the Author
JONATHAN SCHWARTZ has gathered a wide and attentive radio audience for his programs devoted to the American Songbook. His novels and short stories are frequently animated by the music he knows so well. His own three CDs, secretly released, pay respect to the highest level of popular song—Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, and his father, Arthur Schwartz. He is currently heard on WNYC-FM in New York and on XM Satellite radio nationwide. Jonathan Schwartz is married and lives in Manhattan
Praise for All in Good Time: A Memoir…
“Here is a prose blues full of many things: a much-loved father; wives and children; lovers and other strangers; solitude and fear; booze and remorse; along with the Boston Red Sox, avocados, Beethoven string quartets, dark laughter, Sinatra, lost highways, the Western desert, pianos in empty ballrooms, Paris, friends, the endless search for home, and the spooky music of time.”
—Pete Hamill
“It’s impossible to classify Jonathan Schwartz. In the way the phrase ‘disc jockey’ doesn’t begin to describe his work on the radio,
‘memoir’ doesn’t do justice to All in Good Time, which is a haunting, beautifully written, and desperately funny account of a supposedly privileged childhood and the tools a solitary child creates to survive. His voice is as wry and hypnotic on the page as it is on the air.”
—John Guare
“If you love America, you’ll love this memoir by a unique man. He reminds us of our creative traditions: of baseball, of our golden age of music, and of family. This is a very honest book.”
—Tony Bennett
“Jonathan Schwartz has taken the odd, less-than-ideal cards he was dealt—a celebrity songwriter father who was never home, a stepmother who didn’t want him around, and a yen for self-destruction almost as strong as his passion for music—and fashioned the compelling life he recounts here. How a melancholy and eccentric little boy grew up into the much-loved cultural presence he is today makes for a read that is by turns haunting and hilarious. All in Good Time is written straight from Schwartz’s large, eloquent (and unexpectedly modest) heart. ”
—Daphne Merkin
“‘Nothing ever goes away.’ Not for Jonathan Schwartz in his All in Good Time. Everything is here: Sinatra, the Red Sox, women, and music. And truth. I absolutely loved it.”
—Tim McCarver
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