cover image Art Carney: A Biography

Art Carney: A Biography

Michael Starr. Fromm International, $24.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-88064-173-9

The life of TV, stage and film actor Art Carney (b. 1918) is treated compassionately in this genial, briskly paced bio by Starr (Peter Sellers, 1991), a deputy TV editor of the New York Post. The youngest son of an Irish family in Mount Vernon, New York, Carney in the 1940s parlayed a talent for clowning and doing celebrity impersonations into a radio career. Severely wounded during WWII (he walks with a limp to this day), Carney returned to work in TV to become ""a seminal figure in popularizing the new medium,"" playing sewer worker Ed Norton to Jackie Gleason's bus-driving Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners. Starr's account of Carney and Gleason's working relationship is a main thread of the book, which depicts two enormously talented men who never quite made friends off camera, but who created magic together on screen. Carney comes across as one of the nicest men in show business; none of his many co-workers interviewed by Starr--including Lily Tomlin, Neil Simon and director Robert Benton--has an unkind word for him. Starr writes of Carney's insecurity as an artist and of his lifelong battle with alcohol. The author's affection for his subject is manifest throughout, and he seems to take pleasure in describing Carney's comeback (one of several) as an actor in such films as Harry and Tonto (for which he won the 1974 Best Actor Oscar) and The Late Show. If the book has a weakness, it is in Starr's hinting at Carney's ""demons"" without ever quite telling us what they are. But overall this is a warm portrait of a complicated man who is also a gifted actor. The book includes a list of Carney's film, TV and theater performances. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)