Autobiography reviews: The Times, 2006
LIFE IS JUST WHAT YOU MAKE IT by Donny Osmond - Orion, £17.99, 378pp
THE HURDY GURDY MAN by Donovan Leitch - Century, £17.99, 328pp
Rock and pop stars are designed to be ephemeral. Their role is to provide a snapshot of the times, a quick-hit nostalgia fix. The dilemma is what they do when celebrity fades, for they are a long time alive.
In crude terms, Donny Osmond is 1973 and Donovan, 1965. Their names alone are enough. They take us back. Osmond is teen hysteria, three-day weeks, all-American wholesomeness crash banging into black and white, power-cut Britain. Donovan is the beatnik minstrel, head full of Kerouac and Rimbaud, one of the bright sparks from which the Sixties was struck. They were 15 and 19 respectively at the apogee of their fame, mere boy-men. No wonder they both went slightly mad.
Osmond's is marginally the stranger life. At the age of six he is the scrubbed
up cutie dancing on pianos on national television while avuncular Andy Williams
looks on. Grimly fast-tracked to premature middle age, he is touring Sweden
at eight, noting wearily that, 'performing was my job now, my responsibility,
to myself and my family.'
One morning it takes him fully 30 minutes to remember which town he is in
and he acknowledges that he was 18 before his first genuine smile was trusted
to a camera lens. The Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibovitz coaxed it
from him with the delicious entreaty: be yourself.
Post-Osmonds mania, he breaks down at the family condominium in Hawaii, curled up in the foetal position on the floor, lost to tears. ''I just want to be me, not all this showbiz stuff,'' he tells his brother, Jay. He manages this - via therapy, religion and numerous family summits - by curbing his desire to please everyone above himself, often at the expense of his own dignity.
Donovan was brought up in roughhouse Glasgow, moving to Hertfordshire at 10, a place 'chirping with birds and bursting with blossom'. He was a pioneer for hippiedom in his Breton cap, soaking in Cornwall's summer vistas, sleeping under the stars, advocating free love and universal tolerance. An easy manner and an ear for a frothy tune brought him to the counter-culture top table, providing him with great wealth and acclaim, and frequent pow-wows with The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg and, inevitably, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He still wasn't happy. 'Who am I in all this creativity?' he asked, frequently.
The I was pining for Linda Lawrence, ex-paramour of Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones and father of his baby son, Julian. Eventually, after much karmic misalignment and his various dalliances with 'pale-skinned beauties' they came together in 1970, just at the point when Donovan realised he was having a 'sort of nervous breakdown.' He was adrift in a world of private jets, fast cars and a fad for buying up remote Scottish islands; in his own words, 'resenting extravagance and loving every minute.'
At the age of 24, he dropped out of pop's frontline to settle down with Linda. He closes his autobiography here, indicating perhaps that he had found a completeness all the gadding over previous years had failed to supply: there was nothing more to say. His subsequent post-fame spiritual uplift might have been a little too bracing judging by the names given to their children - Astrella Celeste and Oriole Nebula.
Osmond also found truth and subsistence in the most basic of unions. He met local girl Debbie Glenn in 1975. They were married three years later and are still together today, having had five sons. 'To Debbie I was really just Donny the person,' he writes. This is the routine journey of the troubled famous - coming back to what they know, what they already had and is in reach of all of us. The enigma is why they fail to realise this in the beginning and become bound tight to their ego and craving for a public affection.
Though Osmond and Donovan profess their respect and admiration for their fathers, it is clear that the father-son dynamic has shaped their lives, driving them occasionally to unpleasant places within themselves. George Osmond, Donny's father, lost his father when he was a baby. As a boy he slept on an unheated porch, living on bread and milk. He left home when he was a young teenager, determined to create a better, more-focused family life than the one he had known. Osmond writes with almost comical understatement: 'Dad was a person who would always be uncomfortable with disorder and driven to let the world see only the best in himself and his family.'
Donovan's father was a dreamer. He would implore his son to travel, reading him the stirring poetry of Robert Service ('the Scottish Woody Guthrie'), Shelley, Blake and Wordsworth. He loved photography and would take pictures of his son constantly. 'Daddy had transferred his own dream of the road to me,' says Donovan.
Of course, much of our greatest art and music has, at its source, kick-backs
to fathers, whether they be pushy or errant, too weak or too strong. At least
Donovan and Osmond made it through and found reconciliation. Too many rock
stars have continued their odyssey from fame to addiction and then a sorry
death in search of a perceived greater and more public love.