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Still Here is the first full telling of Elaine Stritch's life. Rollicking but intimate, it tracks one of Broadway's great personalities from her upbringing in Detroit during the Great Depression to her fateful move to New York City, where she studied alongside Marlon Brando, Bea Arthur, and Harry Belafonte. We accompany Elaine through her jagged rise to fame, to Hollywood and London, and across her later years, when she enjoyed a stunning renaissance, punctuated by a turn on the popular television show 30 Rock. We explore the influential-and often fraught-collaborations she developed with Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, and above all Stephen Sondheim, as well as her courageous yet flawed attempts to control a serious drinking problem. And, we see the entertainer triumphing over personal turmoil with the development of her Tony Award-winning one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, which established her as an emblem of spiky independence and Manhattan life for an entirely new generation of admirers.
In Still Here, Alexandra Jacobs conveys the full force of Stritch's sardonic wit and brassy charm while acknowledging her many dark complexities. Following years of meticulous research and interviews, this is a portrait of a powerful, vulnerable, honest, and humorous figure who continues to reverberate in the public consciousness.
In Still Here, Alexandra Jacobs conveys the full force of Stritch's sardonic wit and brassy charm while acknowledging her many dark complexities. Following years of meticulous research and interviews, this is a portrait of a powerful, vulnerable, honest, and humorous figure who continues to reverberate in the public consciousness.
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Reviews
"Sparkling details . . . clink around Jacobs's biography, Still Here, like ice in a rocks glass. Stritch, who died in 2014, was a true character, "full of piss and vinegar," as Gleason said. It would be possible to write a serviceable book about her life by simply quoting her many one-liners, or by describing her habit of wearing only tights on stage . . . [b]ut Jacobs, an editor of the Styles section of The New York Times, doesn't rely on Stritch's charm to fuel the narrative."
Rachel Syme, The New Yorker
"[A] meticulously researched biography, which uses Stritch's struggles with alcoholism as a window into her work and her life . . . as a chronicle of one impossible brilliant actor and the community around her, this biography provides a thoroughly entertaining and vividly drawn picture of show business in the 20th century."
Jason Robert Brown, The New York Times Book Review
"Fun . . . hits all the marks . . . Elaine would have loved Jacobs's bio. It's the picture she wanted to leave behind."
John Guare, Book Post