WHERE WERE WE?
Take an absorbing but scatterbrained trip into Val Kilmer’s idiosyncratic head space
I’m Your Huckleberry
Val Kilmer Simon & Schuster
Val Kilmer acknowledges early in I’m Your Huckleberry, his absorbing but uneven memoir, that speaking doesn’t come easily to him nowadays. After the movie star’s 2015 throat cancer diagnosis and surgery, he writes that he sounds like “Marlon Brando after a couple of bottles of tequila.”
That doesn’t mean Kilmer, 60, is at a loss for words. When he asserts that picking up I’m Your Huckleberry is like slotting a couple of quarters into the “pinball machine of my mind,” he is not overselling the experience.
What follows is a zigzagging ride through Kilmer’s distinctive life and career, written by a spiritual storyteller with no qualms about indulging in his eccentricities. At one point, he says an angel appeared on his 24th birthday, pulled the actor’s heart from his chest and replaced it with a bigger one.
Kilmer’s tone is raw and reflective. Crucially, he shows a willingness to analyze his own image. “Just as I am a composite of all my characters, each character I’ve played is a composite of me.”
As a theatre prodigy, Kilmer was accepted to Juilliard’s drama department when he was 16, making him the youngest student admitted up to that point. Then came his Hollywood emergence as the baby-faced star of such 1980s movies as Top Secret!, Real Genius and Top Gun. The 1990s brought an eclectic mix of hit films, but the 2000s were less kind, as money woes and fading career prospects took hold.
For Hollywood fanatics, Kilmer drops plenty of names and behind-the-scenes tidbits. The most striking anecdotes come as Kilmer opens up on his connection to Brando, with whom he worked on 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau.
The screen legend was reeling from health issues and family tragedy. Kilmer was a wreck after learning that his wife, Joanne Whalley, was filing for divorce. Reports have long claimed that Kilmer and Brando clashed, but Kilmer paints a starkly different picture, one of mutual understanding and empathy. Rather than serve up juicy gossip on the famously troubled production, Kilmer ruminates on a bittersweet bond between two tortured souls.
If there’s a through line, it’s Love, which Kilmer dutifully capitalizes throughout (per his Christian Science faith). Mare
Winningham, Ellen Barkin,
Carly Simon, Cindy Crawford, Daryl Hannah, Angelina Jolie — the list of high-profile flings and infatuations goes on and on. Kilmer gives particular depth to his relationship, and enduring friendship, with Cher. In the first chapter, he reveals he moved into her Malibu guest house during his recent illness, decades after their romance burned out.
“Once Cher works her way inside your head and heart, she never leaves,” he writes.
There is a sense, though, that Kilmer is skimming over certain pivotal episodes. Passages meander errantly. After one narrative detour, Kilmer recognizes the digression with a rhetorical question: “Where were we?”
To be fair, there is something charming and disarming about a celebrity memoir that’s willing to go off the rails.