An actor, a preacher and a food writer

Reach for the Top: The Turbulent Life of Laurence Harvey (Scarecrow Press, $39.95, 373 pages, illus.) is more than an entertaining and well written biography of the movie star of the 1950s and 1960s. The author, Anne Sinai, is married to the late actor’s brother and much of the book is concerned with Harvey’s relationships loving but often stormy with his parents and two brothers. The author combines personal knowledge, family lore, interviews, and media accounts to create a generally admiring but bluntly honest look at her flamboyant, often outrageous brother-in-law.

Laurence Harvey was often described as the quintessential English gentleman, although of South African origins. The truth was much more interesting. He was not Laurence Harvey, not English, not a gentleman, and not born in South Africa. He was in fact Zvi Mosheh Skikne, a Jew, born in a Lithuanian village in 1928. When he was a child, his mother, a difficult, but loving woman took him and his older brothers to South Africa where their father had previously immigrated. After serving as an Army entertainer in World War II, Harry Skikne, as he was then known, decided he would become an actor.

When he arrived in London in 1946, British producers found him too “alien” because of his South African accent and “Slavic” looks. But in a few years, by constantly working at his craft and through sheer chutzpah, he gradually made his way upward in the theater. A bisexual, he didn’t hurt his career by sleeping with rich or influential men and women or by his marriage to actress Margaret Leighton, who was already a star.

By 1959, immigrant Harry Skikne had become stage and screen actor Laurence Harvey. Brash, impeccably tailored, tall, good-looking, and with a strong masculine voice that seemed lined with velvet, he was a star, but only of the second magnitude. But then he appeared in “Room At The Top.” The British film’s central character is Joe Lampton, a ruthlessly ambitious opportunist who claws his way out ofthe working class, and uses and abuses women.

This was a role perfectly suited to Harvey’s talents and character, and he scored a well-deserved international triumph. For the rest of his life he was rarely out of work or out of the gossip columns. He died of stomach cancer in 1973 when he was only 45. As an unknown and not particularly talented young actor, Harvey had promised himself he would one day have it all, and, according to Mrs. Sinai, he very nearly did.

Note: I was never a Harvey fan, but in 1959, along with everyone else, I was stunned by his performance in “Room at The Top” (a daring, sexy movie for its time), and, in 1962, by his portrayal of the brainwashed would-be assassin in “The Manchurian Candidate.” I believe the key to his success in both roles was his uniquely cold, remote, screen persona. I do not know of any actor today who conveys, on screen, this same lack of human warmth. Michael Douglas has a chilly, distant quality, but he is warm and cuddly in comparison to Harvey.

In The Sage of Tawawa: Reverdy Cassius Ransom, 1861-1959 (Kent State University Press, $42, 344 pages, illus.), Annetta L. Gomez-Jefferson tells the story of a man whose life was shaped by the great contradiction between American ideals and the harsh realities experienced by black Americans. Reverdy Ransom, a “pastor, editor, politician, writer, civil rights leader …[and]… bishop” (of the African Methodist Episcopal Church), was seen at various times in his long career as “a radical, social gospeler, reformer, prophet and seer.” He was associated with Wilberforce University in Ohio, first as a student and then as a strong defender of the independence of the black institution. Ransom believed, in the words of the author, that the “Negro has the opportunity not only to illuminate and guide his own race, but to liberate the ‘spirit’ and strengthen the moral purpose of whites in America.”

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