Filthy Rich

Filthy Rich by James Patterson and John Connolly with Tim Malloy, 287 pages

In June of 2008, Jeffrey Epstein plead guilty to a single charge of soliciting a minor for prostitution, and was sentenced to spend 18 months in jail, of which he served 13.  It is doubtful whether such a minor case would have garnered any attention beyond an article in the local newspaper, except that Jeffrey Epstein was a billionaire who counted among his friends both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.  And Epstein had not been accused of having sex with a single teenage prostitute, but paying dozens of underage girls hundreds of dollars each for "massages" and similar sums for recruiting new girls into the network.  The generous plea deal, negotiated by a legal team that included Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr, is a stark reminder of the extent to which great wealth and political connections can shield an individual from the full legal consequences of even the most appalling crimes.

Overall, Filthy Rich is about what you'd expect from the Patterson firm.  There is no real insight into Epstein - the authors all but admit that he remains a cipher to them.  Nor can the book get too close to his victims, who are, after all, minor victims of sex crimes.  Despite a considerable amount of innuendo, there are no grand revelations about sex parties in which underage girls mingled with American politicians and British royals.  The story of the actual investigation which resulted in Epstein's exposure, however, is somewhat compelling, and the narrative never drags or becomes dull.

Katharine Drexel

Katharine Drexel: The Riches-to-Rags Story of an American Catholic Saint by Cheryl CD Hughes, 259 pages

St Katharine Drexel was the second of three children - all daughters - of Francis Drexel, scion of the Drexel banking empire.  With the death of their parents, the sisters - known collectively as the "All Three" - inherited a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars in today's money.  In keeping with the practice of their devout parents, the Drexels contributed to a wide variety of charitable and philanthropic enterprises, but Katharine went one step further than the others, abandoning wealth and comfort for a life of poverty and hardship as the foundress of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, a religious order dedicated to staffing schools for Native American and African-American children.  By the time of her death in 1955 at the age of 97, there were over five hundred SBS sisters staffing 49 elementary schools, 12 high schools, and Xavier University in New Orleans, as well as 37 missions.

In this biography, Cheryl Hughes does not detail the minutiae of the saint's struggles to found and grow her order, only briefly passing over St Katharine's struggling with floodwaters in Arizona and catching typhus in Harlem.  The focus of this book is exactly where it should be - on Katharine's inner life and motivation.  Hughes finds the center of Katharine's life and work in her devotion to the Eucharist, the sacrament of total divine surrender that inspired her own total pouring out of self for others and thus transformed her into a source of inspiration for generations to come.

Lady Blue Eyes; My Life With Frank

Lady Blue Eyes: My Life With Frank by Barbara Sinatra  400 pages

Frank Sinatra. I don’t have to type anything else. I came of age when hard rock was blasting from every kids radio, but I have always preferred songs that told a story, crooners, and of course, a great saloon song. When someone asks me about the music of the last 50 years, I always say, “I quit listening when Sinatra quit recording.” What a voice for a man whose ear drum was perforated at birth!

I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. S. two of the times he performed in St. Louis…once in the 1980s and the other in the mid-1990s. By the latter, his voice wasn’t as strong as it used to be and he would forget some of the lyrics. But his charisma exuded from the moment he walked on stage was overwhelming. It’s was worth every penny I paid for those tickets.

When I stumbled upon his widow’s memoir of her life with the legendary singer, I couldn’t pass up a chance to read about his life. The all-nighters, the parties, the loyalty, the charm, the compassion, the women, the generosity, are tales fit for the tabloids. I learned he liked to paint in his later years, loved to read (I knew we had something in common), and do crossword puzzles (and he did them in ink).

Barbara Ann Blakely, from Bosworth, Missouri, first heard Sinatra at a drive-in when she was fifteen years old. She had no way of knowing that she would someday become the love of her life. At least that’s her story. But I have to wonder.

True, she was his longest-lasting marriage, 22 years. In Lady Blue Eyes: My Life With Frank, Barbara comes off as a gold digger. As much as I enjoyed reading about their personal lives, there was always that feeling I had that she didn’t love him as much as she loved his money and his fame; not near as much he seemed, in this telling, to love her.

I liked the conversational, breezy style Barbara uses (with the help of co-author Wendy Holden). The stories were intriguing but never went into gory detail, except perhaps in the details of Mr. S’s good friend Jilly Rizzo’s death. That gave me nightmares. At the very heart of Barbara’s remembering, in my eyes, is Mr. S’s loneliness. An only child, he seemed to have felt that his entire life. He felt as deeply as his songs made others feel. That’s the best way to describe it.

His descent into old age was glossed over. There were two mentions of him sitting in wheelchairs and mentions of his health issues. They were disconcerting, and I wanted to know more about how old age was wearing him down.

The most touching scene in the book is Mr. S’s death at age 82. As Barbara begs him to fight him to fight, he whispers, “I can’t.”  Probably the only time in his life that he said that.

I wondered how other readers felt Barbara came off, so I perused that reviews on Amazon. There I noticed many attacks on Barbara. While she didn’t come off so well, I don’t feel a need to hate her. It’s okay to hate characters, but the ones I read were really tough on her. I tried to judge the book by its ability to hold my attention, to keep turning the page, and to allow me to take a small peek at one of the entertainers I most admire. And Lady Blue Eyes does just that, which is why I give it 5 out of 5 stars.