One Hell Of An Actor

Description for ONE HELL OF AN ACTOR by Garson Kanin:

The great John J Tumulty: who was he? Born in 1849; died in 1930. During the early part of the century he barnstormed throughout the West. San Francisco became the home of a magnificent theatre, Tumulty's Grand. Some said he was America's greatest actor, a superlative artist and exemplary man. But could he have been a liar, a parasite, a fraud, a heartless womanizer? In ONE HELL OF AN ACTOR, Tumulty's mysterious and fabulous life becomes the center of Garson Kanin's novel.

Magnetically drawn to the subject as a basis for a film or a play or a book, Kanin gradually becomes obsessed in his search for the truth. He seeks out the outstanding men and women in the actor's life, carefully recording his discoveries in his intimate working journal.

Tumulty's son---or is it really his son?--is now one of Hollywood's most celebrated directors. Tumulty's old associates---friends, enemies, descendants, leading ladies, journalists, mistresses---all contribute detail, often astonishing, frequently shocking, and maddeningly contradictory. Other material surfaces through diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, and memorabilia.

The story encompasses California theatre in its heyday, the movies in the silent days and now, the San Francisco earthquake and fire, as well as both world wars. As the journal entires continue to the present, the drama builds to its powerful climax. The portrait is complete. John J Tumulty stands revealed in all his fascinating complexity.

ONE HELL OF AN ACTOR covers a century of the American theatre and film scene as it passes through the looking glass of that magical world. In combining myth, biography, fact and invention, Garson Kanin ahs written a novel that is at once fantastic and real, moving and human, comic, glamorous, unique and compelling.