Review: My Friend, Yvette Vickers: In Her Own Words, as Told to John O'Dowd

My Friend, Yvette Vickers: In Her Own Words, as Told to John O'Dowd by Yvette Vickers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t believe I had ever heard of Yvette Vickers before running across this audiobook. What drew me to listen was the promise of hearing the story of a starlet, with bit parts in Hollywood classics and leading parts in the kinds of horror movies I used to watch Saturdays at midnight on local TV. (In my area, the Quad Cities, her “Attack” movies would have been shown on Chuck Acri’s Creature Feature). And the book blurb promised her story “in her own voice”. How literal that ended up being.

The entire book, except for a few short introductory sections of a few minutes each at most, was recordings of Yvette talking. The first half of the audiobook consists of a set of recordings Yvette made to capture her biography, with the hopes of later turning her recorded notes into a book. Much of this first section is told with a light jazz band in the background. She apparently recorded this at a bar or with music playing at home. She includes many stories of her early life and her early career, including her belief that she was blackballed from good roles in Hollywood by Joanne Woodward after “partying” with Paul Newman while filming “Hud”. The second half of the book were, of all things, two hours of telephone messages Yvette left with her collaborator/interviewer – the “author” of this book. Here, Yvette told some additional stories of her life, about, for instance, the death of a beloved dog, and issues selling real estate, and reports of doctors appointments. Yvette was a friend to the author, and these messages showed her as a normal person, showing interest in him while also sharing details of her life.

Unexpectedly (to me), Yvette came across as a smart cookie, with an outgoing personality typical of a real estate seller. This made it easy to listen to the recordings. What ended up being odd was that the two things she was most known for – her horror movies and her bizarre death, were not part of this book. Obviously she couldn’t have narrated the details of her own death, but you don’t know from the blurbs if her recordings were all you would get. The author certainly could have written more on this. The author explains away the lack of horror movie detail by saying that Yvette had already had some magazine articles written that detailed those episodes in her life and she didn’t bother repeating them in her recordings here. These missing pieces were very noticeable, but what you are left with was really like being a fly on the wall as an older actress talked to a friend/potential biographer. The voyeur in me found this a lot like listening in to some old friends talking at a table near you in a coffee shop. I found it of some interest, but was glad it wasn’t longer.


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