Presentation Copy of Josh Logan's Memoirs with Full-Page Inscription
[Signed Presentation by Josh Logan] Logan, Joshua. Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life. First Edition. 1976. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. This copy has a lengthy inscription from Josh Logan to Mel Shavelson, then president of the WGA, on the half-title page, which refers to a fall that Logan took after speaking and performing at the 1980 WGA awards ceremony. Opposite Logan’s inscription is a secretarial inscription with the lyrics to “September Song,” “written at request of Walter Huston” that Logan performed at the WGA awards ceremony.
This memoir from the theater and film director Josh Logan is as idiosyncratic and honest as is this copy’s unique inscription. Logan covers his impressive mid-century career directing such hits as Mister Roberts, Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific on Broadway and Picnic, Bus Stop, and Sayonara for the cinema. He covers his dealings with many Broadway and Hollywood legends, including Marlene Dietrich, Henry Fonda, Margaret Sullavan, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, Mary Martin, Leland Hayward, Ethel Martin and many others. With candor, he bravely chronicles his struggles with mental illness, a subject much more stigmatizing then than it is today.
“I had begun to feel that an audience is not the disparate group of people it seems to the eye. Disparate on its way to the theatre, perhaps, but the moment it is seated and the curtain goes up it goes through a slam-bang metamorphosis. It is transformed into a single being, a tremendous, almost terrifying animal—a behemoth that wants to be conquered and at the same time defies us to conquer it.”
--Josh Logan