Southern Bookman

Al Pacino in excerpt from memoir "Sonny Boy" looks back on South Bronx childhood

Al Pacino's three closest childhood friends succumbed to heroin.

Acting, and his mother's love, saved Pacino from a similar fate, as he vividly recalls in his forthcoming memoir "Sonny Boy." 

In an excerpt titled "Early Scenes" in the current issue of The New Yorker, Pacino looks back on his childhood roaming the South Bronx with his wild friends.

Abandoned by his father, Pacino and his mother lived with his Sicilian grandparents in a small apartment in a multi-cultural neighborhood near the Bronx River. His mother's father, a plasterer, really did come from the small Sicilian village of Corleone.

Pacino's emotionally fragile mother took her "Sonny Boy" to the movies from an early age and did her best to protect him from the worst excesses of the streets. Through the years, Pacino rarely saw his father, although he remembers him fondly.

At age 16, Pacino discovered the theater, viewing a small company's production of Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" at the Bronx's Elsmere Theater. 

The self-taught actor rode the subways reading the Russian writer's plays. Later, after classes at New York's High School for the Performing Arts and lessons at an actor's studio, he recited Shakespeare soliloquies while walking the city streets. He and his roommate, Martin Sheen, worked menial jobs at small theaters seeking to break into acting.

His mother's accidental drug death left Pacino numb with grief. In his warm recollections of her, he never mentions her name.

Despite the devastating loss, Pacino refuses an offer to return home and live with his grandparents. "Early Scenes" ends with his decision to begin the next act.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Griffin Dunne recounts Hollywood life of triumph, tragedy in "The Friday Afternoon Club"

Griffin Dunne's "The Friday Afternoon Club" upholds his family's glittering literary heritage.

The nephew of famed writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne and son of acclaimed author and crime reporter Dominick Dunne, Griffin Dunne looks back on a life of privilege, heartbreak and tragedy.

In the tradition of other revealing Hollywood memoirs, the 69-year-old actor, director and producer examines the intense pressures and fear of failure at the heart of film glamour.

Dominick Dunne enjoyed a blossoming career as a film producer, hosting sumptuous Hollywood parties with his wife, Ellen Griffin Dunne, that attracted a dazzling array of film stars. Griffin rccalls Sean Connery saving him from drowning, Elizabeth Montgomery serving as his babysitter, and his mother's close friendship with Natalie Wood.

It all crashed when Dominick Dunne at a dinner party told a cruel joke about the high-powered agent Sue Mengers. Suddenly, no one returned Dominick's calls, and he was finished as a film tycoon.

The book's tragic center is the murder of Griffin Dunne's beautiful and vivacious sister Dominique, a rising film star. The book's title derives from the name his late sister gave to a group of young actors with whom she frequently met.

The 22-year-old star of the movie "Poltergeist" was strangled by her boyfriend, John Sweeney, on Halloween in 1982. In a trial presided over by an incompetent judge who issued several prejudicial rulings in favor of Sweeney's attorney, the killer was found guilty of manslaughter instead of murder, eventually serving three years in prison.

Griffin Dunne recalls the family's outrage over the trial and the defense attorney's malicious tactics. But the family's anger resulted in Dominick's emergence as a writer for Vanity Fair. Tina Brown, the magazine's new editor, met Dominick at a New York dinner party, and when he mentioned the trial, asked him to write about it. 

Dominick's success from reporting on the trial upset his son, who grew up admiring his uncle more than his father. Griffin poignantly describes his reconciliation with his father before his death in 2009 from cancer at age 83. As Griffin details, Dominick was tormented by his homosexuality, which he struggled to resist until late in life.

At times not an admirable character, Griffin fearlessly recounts scandalous behavior and career missteps. Yet he never loses the reader's sympathy.

One of the book's most captivating vignettes is his youthful friendship with Carrie Fisher before she gained fame portraying Princess Leia in "Star Wars."

Dunne amusingly recalls how Fisher didn't expect the movie to be a hit and was shocked by her sudden rise to stardom. They remained friends, and he endearingly recalls his final goodbye to her before her death.

With inside glimpses of the New York and Los Angeles film and theater worlds, and a full cast of memorable characters, "The Friday Afternoon Club" affirms the enduring power of family love.

 

 

Rosanna Warren looks back on sunny Breton summers with her parents, Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark

Poet, biographer and literary critic Rosanna Warren in an article in the current Harper's magazine recalls two idyllic childhood summers in France's Brittany region.

Warren and her brother Gabriel lived in local homes with their famous parents, the poet, novelist and critic Robert Penn Warren and the writer Eleanor Clark.

"My Mother's Oysters: Recollections of Breton Summers" gives an intimate glimpse of her family's life, portraying her illustrious father and mother as warm and loving parents.

The family came to the village of Locmariaquer in the summer of 1961 so that Clark could do research on the rustic village's oyster-based economy. The next year, the family lived in the Basque region in the south of France before returning to Brittany.

Rosanna celebrated her eighth birthday and Gabriel his sixth during their first year's sojourn. She remembers receiving a birthday gift of a small plastic carriage drawn by eight miniature horses.

Brittany, unlike other parts of France, was settled by Celtic tribes who migrated from Britain in ancient times and lived among the region's original inhabitants. The region was separate from France until 1532.

Rosanna Warren, interviewed by Southern Bookman in 2009, remembers going to school in Locmariaquer with oyster workers' children. She and Gabriel were taught by nuns who conducted their lessons in French, although she and her brother didn't speak the language.

The trips weren't always blissful: Rosanna broke an arm in a beach accident, and the entire family caught the mumps. When they left France in 1962, they found themselves thrust into the French-Algerian war. Clark tensely drove the family to the airport through Paris streets lined with machine gun-bearing soldiers.

In the article, Rosanna Warren examines Brittany's rich history and special geography. She recalls ancient churches with martyr's bones, and viewing in astonishment the ancient stone monuments known as dolmens and menhirs.

Clark's immersion with the rustic oyster workers resulted in her 1964 book "The Oysters of Locmariaquer," which won the National Book Award.

Rosanna Warren, now 71, says at the end that the region's people, history and oceanic geography remain real to her. Her fondest memory is of her parents, who allowed her to explore childhood wonder.

 

 

D-Day anniversary brings childhood memories of watching "The Longest Day" in theater

D-Day's 80th anniversary recalls a vivid childhood memory.

My mother dropped my sister and me off at a theater in downtown Baton Rouge to watch "The Longest Day," a Hollywood extravaganza depicting the Allied invasion, based on Cornelius Ryan's pioneering book.

The film, released in 1962, featured a "galaxy of stars," ranging from John Wayne, Robert Ryan, Richard Burton, Henry Fonda, Peter Lawford and Robert Mitchum to Red Buttons, Eddie Albert, George Segal, Paul Anka and Fabian. Many just made cameo appearances.

I still remember sitting in the dark theater, eating my popcorn, transfixed by the luminous action on the screen.

In those days, parents thought nothing of letting their children go alone to the movie theater, the mall, the barbershop or the golf course.

The theater where my sister and I saw "The Longest Day" is long gone now, a victim of suburban multi-screen theaters.

Hollywood's dramatization of D-Day captured the mammoth scope of the invasion, and the heroism of individual soldiers.

It was one of the first movies I watched in a theater, opening an exciting world.

 

Washington Post critic Michael Dirda's "An Open Book" a Proustian memoir

Michael Dirda when growing up often had his nose in a book, upsetting his steel-mill worker father, Michael Dirda Sr.

Dirda's blue-collar upbringing in industrial Lorain, Ohio, gave him little preparation for a literary career, as recounted in his engaging 2003 memoir "An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland."

In its wealth of details and memorable characters, Dirda's book recalls "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust, one of the many writers he mentions along the way. He also loved as a child paperback adventure stories, fantasy and science fiction and comic books, along with 1950s-era TV westerns.

The Washington Post's acclaimed book critic, who won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize, recalls a childhood marred by his father's anger and sense of failure and bolstered by his mother's stoic devotion to her son and his three younger sisters.

Dirda recalls his painful relationship with his father with a mixture of regret, compassion and sad humor.

Exacerbating his irritation at Dirda's bookishness, his father erupted in anger at his son when he enlisted his help on ambitious home construction projects that often went awry. A benevolent uncle, his mother's brother, often was enlisted to salvage the disastrous work.

Along with his abusive behavior, Dirda's father displays moments of rough love for his son, including frequent trips to the public library and dispensing folksy advice.

Dirda's Slovakian mother, Christine Burkl Dirda, is portrayed as an exuberant personality who showers her children with affection along with strict discipline. She holds on to her positive spirit, countering her husband's dark moods.

The introverted, nearsighted and unathletic Dirda feels isolated from Lorain, an ethnically diverse industrial city on Lake Erie near Cleveland.

Yet he also expresses affection for Lorain's parks, colorful characters and interesting stores and shopping centers, sharing his mother's pleasure at finding bargains. Dirda also fondly remembers visits to his family's many relatives of eastern European descent.

In contrast to more privileged intellectuals, Dirda eventually worked in hazardous jobs at his father's plant and as a construction worker installing aluminum siding.

Despite his love for reading, Dirda struggles academically until the end of high school. Eventually, he enjoys teen adventures with a close circle of friends and begins to excel in the classroom under the guidance of inspiring teachers.

Accepted to Oberlin College, a progressive liberal arts school near his home, Dirda slowly discovers his literary calling.

After initially struggling with Oberlin's demanding academic regimen, he at his father's life-changing encouragement studies harder and excels. He also finds his first serious girlfriend, a young woman from Nashville, Tenn.

Vietnam protests stir the campus, although Dirda mainly stays on sidelines He's more devoted to literature and classical music.

Dirda finds the model for his literary career when he meets the writer and translator Robert Phelps on his first visit to New York City before an expansive trip to Europe in the revolutionary summer of 1968.

Phelps, the father of one of Dirda's roommates, gives Dirda a decisive glimpse of the bookish life, inviting him to his crammed Greenwich Village study, where Dirda enjoys martinis and sees his first page proofs.

The book closes with Dirda's Oberlin-sponsored trip to idyllic Aix en Provence and Paris, still smoldering from the revolutionary turmoil of May, 1968.

Dirda also enjoys a passionate romantic encounter with a young women he meets at the opera. They take a hitch-hiking trip to Florence, then say farewell forever.

Exciting moments in Aix and Paris glow in his memory, yet Lorain and his childhood shine brighter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memories of a Presbyterian boyhood

When my father picked us up after Sunday school at First Presbyterian, he sometimes drove us to the levee, where he enjoyed watching the Mississippi.

We always encountered an old black man who wore a white robe and cotton-cloth cap. The preacher carried a cross of two crooked tree branches tied with a white cloth. He said he performed baptisms in the river, although I never saw him carry out one.

My father would give the black preacher a dollar and send him away. For a few moments, my father, saying nothing, looked at the dark brown Mississippi flowing toward the gulf. Tugboats pushed bigger cargo ships up the river, its banks in my memory lined with trees in flower. After a few moments, Daddy would turn and say “let’s go,” and we’d head home, where Mama cooked Sunday dinner.

My mother’s father and mother came to visit us every Sunday afternoon, my grandfather still wearing a tie and starched white shirt and my grandmother the nice dress she’d worn to church. They were Presbyterians, as was my mother. My father had been raised Catholic, but had to leave the church because of his marriage outside the faith.

My sisters and I were raised Presbyterian, going to Sunday school from early childhood. After “confirmation,” a significant childhood occasion, we studied the “shorter Catechism,” which detailed John Wesley’s Predestination doctrine. Some would be saved, others condemned.

After Sunday school, we sometimes went to church with our mother, especially on communion Sundays, when ushers passed out round silver trays with specially cut holes that held the small glasses of grape juice. The holes ringed the outer circumfrence of the trays, tiny suns in a symbolic cosmos.

The sanctuary’s dark wooden walls and abstract stained glass windows contrasted with the flowery dresses of the women and girls. The husbands, their hair combed back with hair tonic, wore business suits, their shoes buffed to a brilliant shine. A full choir in red robes with gray sashes sang the soaring Protestant hymns, the congregation joining in.

Before and after church, people congregated on the plaza at the foot of the concrete steps that rose to the sanctuary’s heavy wooden doors. The couples chatted with each other, their children running back and forth, the girls in black patent leather shoes with straps and the boys in nice pants and shirts, hair slicked back like their fathers’,

Daddy was never comfortable with the forced bonhomie of Protestant Christian Fellowship. He didn’t care for the sermons of our minister, Dr. Melton, especially when they appeared lifted from Reader’s Digest.

Over the years, my mentally unstable father attended church a few times, usually seated with me in the gallery, where we whispered about football. He came to church on the Sunday after John F. Kennedy’s assasination, his eyes red with sadness although we had gone to Tiger Stadium for the LSU-Tulane game the day before.

Vacation Bible School gave me my favorite church memories. On hot and humid weekday mornings, my mother would drive us to the church on North Boulevard in downtown Baton Rouge and drop us off. We’d hurry to a clasroom behind the sanctuary, where mothers younger than ours taught us the stories and heroes of the Old and New Testaments, especially the teachings of Jesus, pictured as pink-cheeked and golden haired in a cheap poster hanging on the wall. The women wore shorts, their tan and shapely legs stirring passions I didn’t understand.

Sunday school continued through high school. Classes moved from the sanctuary basement to the “rec center,” equipped with classrooms and a basketball court where Sunday night “youth fellowship” commenced. My Uncle Mac, my mother’s older brother, taught a class on the Reformation, which although tilted toward the Protestant side gave a good foundation in early modern European history.

A youth minister named George Klett stirred my religious faith in my impressionable early teen years.

Mr. Klett was a young man with dark, slicked back hair, who wore thick black glasses. The old minister, Dr. Melton, rarely allowed Mr. Klett to give a Sunday seromon, and he was a dull speaker with a monotonous Southern drawl. His duty was to develop our youth program, a mission he carried out diligently.

One Easter, he organized a love feast to commemorate Christ’s Last Supper. We gathered in a room in the rec center. Perhaps each person brought a dish, or the church staff prepared the meal. In subdued light, we teens and Mr. Klett recalled Jesus’ final meal with his disciples.

To prepare for the banquet. Mr. Klett led an Easter contemplation group, which met on Wednesday nights for several weeks. After one session on Peter’s denial of Jesus and the savior’s passion, I and a young woman with long brown hair and sky-blue eyes engaged in an intense conversation on the rec center steps, a streetlight illuminating the sidewalk. Despite our sharing of deep feelings, the relationship advanced no further.

In a year or two, Mr. Klett left for another church, or perhaps he suffered a crisis of faith, or was embroiled in a scandal. I’d pretty much lost my religious belief by then and instead of going to Sunday school walked down to the newsstand at the end of North Boulevard to look at issues of the Sporting News and the Village Voice.

The burden of those years was church youth retreats. Boys and girls gathered for entire weekends for the church's campaign to keep us from drugs, sex and rock and roll. The speakers aspired to hipness, to speak in our teenage language. I spent those sessions in a fog of confusion. 

Once I roomed with a boy from church whose mother was eternally pregnant, leading to overheard snatches of gossip whenever she appeared in her maternity dress. The family
bore eight children. This family member, a boy of 16 or so, assaulted me for hours with filthy stories. A chaste lad, I felt my neck, ears and face burn as he kept the filth coming. That was in Gulfport, Miss., where later I played a high school football game, one of the few in which I satisfied the coaches.

In one daylong restreat, we rode a bus, or different cars, to a church in Clinton, La., a small city north of Baton Rouge that hadn’t developed much from its ante-bellum plantation days. We met in a small library with a vending machine that dispensed free soft drinks. The preacher who spoke to us chain-smoked cigarettes. A nervous man, he wore a black shirt and white collar in the day’s heat and somnolence.

After the talks, we saw Kirk Douglas play Vincent Van Gogh in “Lust for Life.” I wasn’t sure and remain unenlightened about what Vincent’s cutting off his ear had to do with the Christian message. On the way home, the ladies gossiped about the preacher, finding his smoking unseemly for a man of the cloth.

Although I attemded LSU, its campus just a few miles from First Presbyterian, I stopped
going to church. After my father devoted Sunday mornings to fishing, and bought a camp
on the Atchafalaya Swamp, my mother felt compelled to join him, leaving the church she’d loved since childhood.

As I was swept away by the cults of rock and roll and radical politics, religion’s roots proved shallow after all of those years of indoctrination.

Now that I am an old man, my memories of First Presbyterian show how deeply they were
implanted. In quiet moments, I hear Mr. Klett’s voice intoning “well done, my good and faithful servant.”

Andre Dubus III displays narrative brilliance in the essay collection "Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin"

Andre Dubus III's essays in his new collection "Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin" read like deeply imagined short stories.

Dubus explores his rough childhood raised by a single mother after his parents' divorce, his efforts to overcome his violent past, his relationships with women and the joys and challenges of fatherhood.

Reflecting upon his early attempts at writing and his growth into a man of peace and compassion, Dubus impressively displays fictional techniques. His captivating first-person narrative voice reveals him as a sensitive, perceptive observer. His encounters with a series of finely portrayed characters unfold in story-like plots.

Revisiting the territory of his excellent memoir "Townie," Dubus looks back on his childhood, when his financially strapped single mother frequently moved Dubus and his brothers and sisters from apartment to apartment, each cheaper than the last, in a losing battle to find affordable rents.

Bullied as a child when he entered new schools, Dubus as a teen began working out and learning how to fight, eventually beating up those who had tormented him. He laments that most of those with whom he fought are now dead.

Recognizing the self-destructiveness of his violent behavior, and developing tolerance for others as he goes to his desk each morning to learn to write, he understands that true masculinity is defined by caring for others.

A frequent presence is his father, the noted short story writer Andre Dubus II, who spent his last years in a wheelchair after a horrible accident. Attempting to help a motorist whose vehicle had broken down on an interstate highway, the elder Dubus was struck by a car, crushing both of his legs, one of which was amputated below the knee.

Dubus III pictures his father as optimistic and joyful despite his agonizing disability. In a memorable piece, Dubus describes the meeting of his father and the terminally ill Raymond Carver at an American Society of Arts and Letters awards ceremony. Having never previously met, but admiring each other's work, the two master short story writers immediately reach a deep friendship.

Although he grew up in small Massachusetts towns in industrial decline, Dubus has deep Louisiana roots. Both his mother and father grew up in a small Louisiana community, moving to New England after eloping.

Dubus III in traveling with his mother back to Louisiana finds a sense of home among her family. He casts his Massachusetts upbringing as one of exile, although he knows it formed him.

The acclaimed author of novels like "House of Sand and Fog"and "Such Kindness," Dubus in "Ghost Dogs" shows that he's a deep spiritual thinker as well as one of America's finest writers.

 

Christmas brings memories of past, hope for future.

Another year, another Christmas tree.

The old ornaments are like old friends. Taking them from the red box in which they reside throughout the year, I recall carrying out the same ritual at the same time in years past.

Tree decorated, lights glowing on the hedge outside, I listen to Willie Nelson's "Pretty Paper," Alabama's "Christmas in Dixie," Elvis Presley's "Blue Christmas" and Mel Torme's "The Christmas Song."

When we walk to lunch at the shopping center, a family trio - piano, trumpet and tenor sax - plays holiday hits outside the bird store, which is collecting winter coats for those in need.

The father on electric piano plays the chords beautifully on Vince Guaraldi's "Christmas Time Is Here," as his son on trumpet and daughter on sax find the song's jazz soul.

In my mind, I see the kids skating in the drifting snow at the start of "Charlie Brown's Christmas."

When the first signs of Christmas erupt in October, I feel like old Mr. Scrooge.

Yet the season always carries me away.

I purchase Christmas cards and cookies, and stuffed toys for the new babies in the family.

Looking at the tree, I remember old friends and family members, and the passing of the seasons.

Each year comes and goes. And lovely is the rose.

Watching through the window, I see a cardinal land on a tree branch.

As Dickens observed, the past, present and future come together at Christmas.

 

 

 

Award-winning reporter Anne Hull recalls Florida childhood in "Through the Groves"

Anne Hull as a 6-year-old rode with her father as he recklessly drove through central Florida's then boundless rows of orange trees.

The smell of blossoms was "like God had knocked over a bottle of Ladies of Gardenia," Hull remembers in her luminous memoir "Through the Groves."

Hull, who won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a Washington Post team uncovering abuses at the Walter Reed veterans' hospital in Washington, D.C., recalls a free-range Tom Boy childhood in a lost paradise, teeming with snakes, alligators, orange trees and rakish kin and Florida eccentrics.

The too-brief book tells in spare, shimmering language a heart-breaking story of the pain family members inflict on their loved ones, along with aching interludes of joy.

A cast of outlandish relatives and acquaintances recall Flannery O'Connor's grotesques, with citrus-flavored raucous comedy and extravagant dreams.

Accompanying her story-telling, flamboyant father on his rounds overseeing orange fields covering 4,000 acres in central Florida's "The Ridge," the child experiences intense moments of natural beauty. The Florida sunlight when they emerge from the groves' darkness gives a vision of grace.

Hull's mother had the idea of her child sharing her husband's workdays. She thought her daughter's presence would alleviate his desire for drinking in neon-lit bars popping up along the rural roadways.

With a pistol and rattlesnake-bite kit in the glove compartment, he takes the little girl  on wild rides through the orange groves, the trees full of the succulent fruit. They encounter black workers and foremen, ravaged by exposure to pesticides. She describes her father's benevolent treatment of the crews toiling in the brutal heat.

John Hull's family had been "orange people" for generations. Along with his theatrical personality, he's an old-school Southern gentleman and aspiring writer. He might have been a lawyer, newspaper editor or legislator. Unable to escape his family heritage, he increasingly succumbs to alcohol, eventually abandoning Hull and her mother and younger brother.

In another dazzling portrait, her mother, Vicki Hull, exudes feminine beauty and resolve. Brought to Florida as an adolescent after a childhood in Brooklyn, she struggles to support her family after her husband's abandonment. She's a determined career woman who loves fashion, writing and Broadway show tunes.

Hull in the second part of the book tells of her family's move to St. Petersburg, where they live with her maternal grandmother, whom Hull calls "Demie."

Like a big sister who never quite grew up, Demie shares with the adolescent Hull a love for pop music and sugary treats. While Hull's mother develops a career as an educator, Demie takes her granddaughter to adventures such as a Jackson 5 concert.

The book progresses with Hull's failure as a college student and brief, unhappy employment as a traveling salesperson for Revlon shampoo. She also gives awkward accounts of her emerging gay sexuality.

Her journalistic career begins when she lands a job as an assistant for legendary St. Petersburg Times sports columnist Hubert Mizell, whom Hull doesn't name. From there, Hull begins writing music album reviews, and feature stories, eventually receiving a Nieman Fellowship, which her mother proudly hails. Left for later books is her career with The Washington Post.

The book ends with the deaths of her father and mother. Sadly, Hull's attempts to reconcile with her father misfire. Yet he remains a guiding light, with a final evocation of those childhood days in the orange groves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Distinguished actor Wendell Pierce inspired by his father's patriotism

Wendell Pierce delivers an inspiring Fourth of July message in the "House Call" feature in Friday's Wall Street Journal.

The New Orleans native and admired actor tells of growing up in a then-segregated Southern city, his war hero father's refusal to give in to bitterness over racism and his stellar career in film, television and theater.

Compiled by writer Marc Myers, the entertaining House Call feature in WSJ's Friday "Mansion" section looks at the childhoods of show-business stars.

The celebrities give first-person recollections of the homes in which they grew up, their families and how they received their big breaks to achieve fame.

Pierce, who recently received acclaim for his portrayal of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman in London and Broadway productions of "Death of a Salesman," recalls that his 98-year-old father, Amos, was for years denied medals for his heroism during the World War II Battle of Saipan, "known as the Pacific D-Day."

"At home, Dad never once let bitterness overwhelm him, nor did he stop loving his country," Pierce said.

The actor known for HBO performances as detective Bunk Moreland in "The Wire" and the New Orleans jazz musician Antoine Batiste in "Treme," grew up in Ponchartrain Park, a suburban-style New Orleans neighborhood developed after World War II for middle-class blacks. A ditch separated the community from the all-white Gentilly Woods.

His father used the GI Bill to purchase a house and attend Southern University, where he took classes for a commercial photography career.

After graduating from high school in New Orleans, Wendell Pierce was accepted at New York City's Juilliard School in 1981. His successful career also includes roles in the TV series "Suits" and the films "Ray," "Malcolm X" and "Waiting to Exhale." He's now starring in Prime Video's "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan."'

After Hurricane Katrina, Pierce helped rebuild his childhood neighborhood. He also gave the devastated city hope with a production of "Waiting for Godot," as recounted in his memoir "Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, a Play and the City That Would Not Be Broken." The staunchly liberal Pierce co-wrote the book with the conservative writer Rod Dreher, a fellow Catholic.

Pierce discovered in 2009 that his father, now 98, was entitled to six medals for his heroism at Saipan. The Army presented the medals to his father later that year at the World War II Museum in New Orleans. Pierce's brother, Ron, an Army officer, pinned on the medals.

Instead of bitterness, his father at the ceremony recalled the battle. "What I remember most are the many who died there."

Pierce was in tears when his father saluted and said "God bless America."