Salamon, Julie 1953–

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SALAMON, Julie 1953–

PERSONAL: Born July 10, 1953, in Seaman, OH; daughter of Alexander (a physician) and Lilly (a businesswoman; maiden name, Rapaport) Salamon; married William Abrams (a television executive), November 12, 1978; children: two. Education: Tufts University, B.A., 1975; New York University, J.D., 1978.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Office—New York Times, 229 West 43rd St., New York, NY 10036. Agent—Kathy Robbins, Robbins Office, Inc., 2 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, 866 Second Ave., New York, NY 10017.

CAREER: Journalist, author. Wall Street Journal, New York, NY, staff reporter, 1978–83, movie critic and weekly columnist, beginning 1983; New York Times, New York, NY, culture writer, 2000–. Bowery Residents Committee, board of directors (former chair), 1987–.

MEMBER: National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics Circle.

AWARDS, HONORS: Front Page Award, New York Newswomen's Club, 1985.

WRITINGS:

White Lies (novel), Hill and Co. (Boston, MA), 1987.

The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1991.

The Net of Dreams: A Family's Search for a Rightful Place (memoir), Random House (New York, NY), 1996.

The Christmas Tree (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1996.

Facing the Wind: A True Story of Tragedy and Reconciliation, Random House (New York, NY), 2001.

Rambam's Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity and Why It Is Necessary to Give, Workman Publishing (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor of articles and book reviews to periodicals, including New Yorker, New Republic, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Moviegoer.

ADAPTATIONS: Works adapted for audio include Facing the Wind: A True Story of Tragedy and Reconciliation (seven cassettes; unabridged), read by Sandra Burr, Brilliance Audio, 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Journalist Julie Salamon is also the author of a number of works of both fiction and nonfiction. Among the latter is her The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood, about Brian DePalma's making of the film based on the book by Tom Wolfe. Salamon documents a process that she says "came to symbolize the failure of every big-budget disappointment."

DePalma gave Salamon nearly unrestricted access to the set of the film that starred Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, and Melanie Griffith. Maclean's reviewer Shaffin Shariff noted that "she repaid his trust with a vivid, meticulous, but never bitchy examination of how big-budget studio movies are made. Still, Salamon's portrait is far from flattering: especially scathing are her damning descriptions of Willis's and Griffith's behavior during the production." Shariff noted that Willis challenged DePalma's direction of a scene, and Griffith, without warning, had her breasts enlarged mid-film.

Fortune reviewer Richard Schickel noted that the script was rewritten many times, "but that robbed the movie of its moral point and most of its dramatic punch. Derived of the book's outrage and outrageousness, Bonfire had nothing left to sell but its miscast stars." Wolfe had wanted Chevy Chase rather than Hanks to play the lead, Uma Thurman instead of Griffith, and John Cleese for Willis's part. Schickel wrote that "there was no reason for director Brian DePalma to have made it, and certainly no compelling reason for anyone to go see it."

With The Net of Dreams: A Family's Search for a Rightful Place, Salamon offered a tribute to her parents, Jews from Czechoslovakia who survived the camps at Auschwitz and Dachau. After the war, they settled first in New York, then in 1953 moved to Seaman, Ohio, where they were the only Jewish family in a town of 714. Salamon's father died in 1971, and her mother remarried. In 1993, Salamon, her mother, and her stepfather returned to Eastern Europe, visiting Auschwitz and Kraców, Poland, where Stephen Spielberg was filming Schindler's List. In this memoir, she provides a history of her family, including the wife and child her father lost before marrying her mother, the grandparents who died in the camps, and the survivors they met while on this trip.

Salamon's father had been a doctor in an impoverished Appalachian community. New York Times Book Review contributor Theo Richmond wrote that "the best portrait in her book is of Doc Salamon, dedicated to his patients, a complex, unworldly, moody man, who would withdraw into troubled silences, not talking for days at a time, perhaps thinking of the murdered wife and child he never discussed…. Delving into his past, peeling away the layers of his character with filial tenderness, [Salamon] conveys more pain and grief than in her descriptions of Auschwitz. Writing this book has enabled her to get to know her father as she never did during his lifetime."

First publishing the novel White Lies in 1987, Salamon's second fictional effort, The Christmas Tree, is based on a true incident. In the story, the chief gardener at Rockefeller Center, searching for the perfect tree, finds it at a convent in New Jersey. But Sister Anthony refuses to let him cut the tree that was a sapling when she entered the convent as a young orphan. The gardener and the nun stay in touch over the years, and when a blizzard threatens the tree, she agrees to let him take it, sharing its beauty with a much wider audience. In 1995, a group of nuns in New Jersey donated a huge Norway spruce for the New York celebration. Booklist reviewer Jennifer Henderson wrote that Salamon's "finely hewn fable enhances one's appreciation of this holiday tradition."

Salamon's Facing the Wind: A True Story of Tragedy and Reconciliation grew from her interest in a support group of mothers with blind children held at the Industrial Home for the Blind (IHB) in Brooklyn, where their children attended school. Twenty years earlier, Mary Rowe, a former member of the group, along with her children, was murdered by her lawyer husband, Bob. The couple had two natural sons and an adopted daughter. Because Mary had been exposed to rubella (German measles) early in her second pregnancy, Christopher was born blind and severely handicapped. Bob seemed to be a caring father, working with his son, attempting, along with friends and volunteers, to provide him with normal experiences, like feeling the wind on his face, from the title. But when Christopher was twelve, his first son, Bobby fourteen, and their daughter, Jennifer eight, Bob Rowe killed them with a baseball bat, then called his wife home. Upon her arrival, he killed her in the same manner.

Salamon began to delve into the facts of the case. "There was no telling where this story would take her," noted James B. Stewart in the New York Times Book Review. "For the murders are by no means the end of the narrative. Its first half takes us from the Rowe's courtship and marriage, the births of their children, and the trials of coping with Christopher to the murders. We meet and get to know the mothers and share their shock, disbelief, and anger. Then Rowe is found not guilty by reason of insanity and he begins another life."

Rowe was released from the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, New York, just two years after the murders. He met Colleen, a shy, religious woman who adored him. Soon after they married, she gave birth to a daughter, and Salamon injects the suspense that must come in light of the violence he rained on his dead children. Colleen met the women in the mothers' support group, some of whom vented their anger on her, as well as on the man who killed their friend. Andrew O'Hehir wrote for Salon.com that "raising a child who requires constant attention is a grueling task, and several of the IHB mothers had faced money problems, crumbling marriages, or bouts of mental illness. In private, Salamon explains, they might confess to each other their moments of homicidal fantasy, when they imagined freeing themselves from their responsibilities. So they understood the darkness into which Bob Rowe had descended all too well, and they couldn't forgive him for going there."

Stewart noted that "Salamon secured access to the most intimate thoughts and writings of nearly all the participants, enabling her to amass a wealth of detail. And she makes the most of it, proving Tom Wolfe's assertion that narrative nonfiction can be every bit as important as fiction in exploring the most important issues of our lives and times." Stewart called Facing the Wind "a rare combination of superb reporting and narrative skill."

Rambam's Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity and Why It Is Necessary to Give is a study of the Ladder of Charity, an eight-step program of giving devised by Rambam, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides, a twelfth-century scholar and physician to the Egyptian sultan. Salamon, who has worked on behalf of the homeless of New York's Bowery district, cites the facts about Americans' own giving. She notes that the United States, percentage-wise, is the most stingy when it comes to providing aid to the poor of other countries. Her own father had often treated his patients in Appalachia at no cost. Salamon notes that high on the ladder is the act of giving to the needy one does not know. At the bottom of the ladder is giving reluctantly after being asked. Salamon was moved to write Rambam's Ladder following the events of September 11, 2001, and studies her own and others' responses to the needs 9/11 generated.

Gail Buckley wrote in the New York Times that Salamon's "utopian views compelled her to prove the truth of Stephen Jay Gould's 'Great Asymmetry' response to 9/11: 'Every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness.'" Buckley concluded by calling Rambam's Ladder "small in size but very humbling."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Salamon, Julie, The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1991.

Salamon, Julie, The Net of Dreams: A Family's Search for a Rightful Place, Random House (New York, NY), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 1996, Jennifer Henderson, review of The Christmas Tree, p. 30; March 1, 2001, Marlene Chamberlain, review of Facing the Wind: A True Story of Tragedy and Reconciliation, p. 1213.

Fortune, December 16, 1991, Richard Schickel, review of The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood, p. 141.

Library Journal, February 15, 2001, Karen Sandlin Silverman, review of Facing the Wind, p. 185.

Maclean's, January 20, 1992, Shaffin Shariff, review of The Devil's Candy, p. 51.

New York Times, March 23, 2001, Teresa Carpenter, review of Facing the Wind, p. E40; December 3, 2003, Gail Buckley, review of Rambam's Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity and Why It Is Necessary to Give, p. E8.

New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1996, Theo Richmond, review of The Net of Dreams: A Family's Search for a Rightful Place, p. 10; April 1, 2001, James B. Stewart, review of Facing the Wind, p. 10; January 18, 2004, Paula Friedman, review of Rambam's Ladder, p. 20.

Publishers Weekly, February 5, 2001, review of Facing the Wind, p. 75; August 4, 2003, review of Rambam's Ladder, p. 64.

Time, November 25, 1991, Richard Corliss, review of The Devil's Candy, p. 93.