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Beyond His Control: Memories of a Disobedient Daughter
When Linda's mother died on March 25, 1969, an apparent suicide, nothing of Linda's staid world remained the same. Her father, the scion of a wealthy San Francisco family, already enamored with Denise Minnelli, fell under her control. Denise managed to estrange him from his family and end up the sole heir of his estate. Linda recounts here, in a frank and honest narrative, her pilgrimage of gradually learning to stand up for herself and make peace with her history.
- GenresNonfiction
180 pages, Paperback
First published March 14, 2007
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January 1, 2023
Beyond His Control had a lot of promise. Linda Hale Bucklin is the daughter of Prentis Hale II, heir of the Hale department store chain, and grew up in the midst of old San Francisco society. Her father went on to have an affair with the Hollywood society upstart Denise Minelli, one of the many wives of Vincente Minelli and one time step-mother to Liza. Her mother, Maryalice, is fully aware of the affair and is humiliated by it for a good long while before apparently deciding her best option is suicide by gun. Thus opening the door for Prentis to marry Denise, who promptly takes over and destroys the family.
There's some juicy (I guess) San Francisco society gossip, if one is close enough to that circle to care. A lot of it is credited to "former friends of Denise" who are identified only by a single initial, either for legal reasons or because they're afraid of her. But mostly this is a story of how Linda was abused by her father and ignored by her siblings while being resolutely better than all of them. After she marries she realizes that her father and older brother, Prentis "Rusty" Hale III, have been mismanaging the irrevokable trust in which her father forced her to place her inheritance from her grandparents. She takes them to court where the rest of her siblings side against her and she still wins. There are multiple lawsuits against her father and brother, and Linda prevails in them all. After her father's death the siblings all unite to sue Denise and prevail once again, thus bringing the family back together. These suits are limited in scope, however, and the children and grandchildren, having been specifically disinherited in their father's will, receive none of the property, art, or money they had been promised, or even their mother's jewelry and family heirlooms. It's a sad story but one that occurs in second marriages every day.
I read the book because at some point Rusty Hale gave up on San Francisco high society, turned his back on his shallow af siblings, and bought acreage in Sheridan Oregon where he rode horses and occasionally shared stories of his early life of social climbing extravagance and big game hunting. Then, this past summer, for reasons that will likely never be known, he shot his long-time girlfriend before turning the gun on himself. The murder-suicide was a nine-day wonder in the local paper and multiple online commenters cited this book as evidence that Denise Minelli Hale was somehow behind it. Whether she was the source of trauma so great that it finally overwhelmed him more than 20 years after his father's death, or she actually hired a hit man to silence him for good, it was her fault. They claimed that the book would explain it all.
I have to disagree. There's no explanation here that I didn't get from the San Francisco papers online. There are more details and more emotion, but all it adds to the story is ego. The view of the family Linda provides is a perfect mother victimized by her aggressively narcissistic husband. She tries to portray herself as similarly perfect with a few humanizing flaws that aren't her fault, they too are the result of her father's abusive narcissism, but she's unable to see how much of her own raging ego she exposes on every page. Story after story is told about being her father's favorite child and how she saw it hurting her older brother and tried to make him feel better, while knowing even at the time that it would only bring down more of their father's rage upon him. Yet she can't see why he isn't her best friend as an adult? She tells us about how she fixed her life with 10 years of therapy and two therapists, and yet has no insight whatsoever into the damage her siblings suffered and the role she played in it, despite describing it in detail.
She spends some time describing how, when she was a teenager, her father was constantly trying to have sex with her so she put on weight to make herself unattractive to him. It worked, but he harassed and humiliated her about her weight forever after. Then she goes on to say at several points during the book--the day her mother died, when her father married Denise, when they found out about the will, and multiple points in between--that this was when her childhood view of her perfect father was finally shattered. And every time she said that I would think Really? This is what did it? Not calling you a sexpot? Not telling you to stick your tits out more? Not the violent tongue kissing? It was this moment, right here, not all the attempted rapes? I don't know if she talked about that in therapy or not but she really didn't seem to have a handle on it as of this writing.
The book is also filled with lengthy passages of praise for Linda in general, in every specific occasion (making a perfect shot to bring down an elephant she claims she didn't want to shoot with a gun that shouldn't have been sufficient), from the unlikeliest people (the oppositions' high powered lawyers telling her she's a perfect witness and should win her case), and even regarding the book itself (inserts from her siblings saying they've read the manuscript and all the shitty things she said about them were true and fair). It made me wonder if she carried a pocket tape recorder all her life so she could reproduce these lengthy verbatim speeches of praise. In the end it gets even weirder, as the final chapter of the 2013 edition is some additional gossip from "Denise's former friends" followed by gushing reviews of the 2007 edition.
And here's where I get down to my real problem with the book. It's not just that the sole point of this memoir is to air personal family grievances while taking shots at a "celebrity" no one outside San Francisco has even heard of, or that it feels cheap and vindictive to rehash the lawsuits after winning all of them. A good writer with an interesting story can at least make that fun in a guilty sort of way. But Linda Hale Bucklin is a terrible writer. She has no inherent talent and no learned skill. She doesn't even have an editor to put events in some kind of order and stop her from misusing simple words like "invoke".* It's possible one of the friends who read the manuscript tried to tell her not to give credit to literal angels surrounding her for her remarkable talents and abilities, but I doubt it. People as violently self-obsessed as Bucklin don't have friends who tell them things they don't want to hear. In that way she's a great deal like her stepmother.
Amid the ridiculously over the top gushing reviews is a story about actual writer Dominick Dunne calling her disorganized ego-trip "one of the great society books of this time" and saying he intends to write about it for Vanity Fair. Bucklin is thrilled, as she feels by now that her father may actually have shot her mother and wants him to investigate it as a crime. This doesn't mesh with her other belief, that a story someone wrote about a woman committing suicide while listening to her husband talk to his mistress on the phone is literally about her parents (a theory she allegedly confirmed with the author), but that's how the Hale egos roll. Everything is about them, everywhere, all the time. Dunne seems eager to write his article, telling her that her book is written with "real elegance" (bwuh?), is "not angry" (lol, okay), and that it "will be the talk of the town". Bucklin doesn't question this, despite the fact that Dunne is an old friend of Denise's and a regular at her parties. He has nothing at all to gain by pimping her badly written rage manifesto and a great deal to lose. But in the end it doesn't matter because the head people at Vanity Fair are Denise's friends and refuse to publish it. If you're wondering why Dunne couldn't publish it elsewhere if he thought it was so important, you're putting more thought into Bucklin's story than she did. The important thing is Dunne died before Bucklin updated her book to include him.
If 180 pages of last words aimed at Denise and the society that adores her (when Bucklin is clearly the superior human being, even Denise's friends and lawyers said so) isn't enough, she adds one more page. It is a truly amazing thing, the likes of which I have never seen before and hope to never see again. On social media we call this "vaguebooking", ie posting something dramatic (as on Facebook) with no details, to garner attention and/or make points in a fight without allowing the other person to state their case. I don't know what to call it when it's in a print book. Hopefully it will never happen again and we won't have to invent a word to describe it. Since this review has already gone on so long, I'm going to go ahead and quote it in full:
I'm not sure it needs saying, but she's written two books about angels.
*Although one of the multi-page reviews that she reprints in full goes her one better, rendering its opening sentence meaningless by misusing the word "of". She brags on that reviewer's praise more than once, as he's a New York journalist. His review stands out for one truly remarkable achievement--being even more badly written than its subject.
There's some juicy (I guess) San Francisco society gossip, if one is close enough to that circle to care. A lot of it is credited to "former friends of Denise" who are identified only by a single initial, either for legal reasons or because they're afraid of her. But mostly this is a story of how Linda was abused by her father and ignored by her siblings while being resolutely better than all of them. After she marries she realizes that her father and older brother, Prentis "Rusty" Hale III, have been mismanaging the irrevokable trust in which her father forced her to place her inheritance from her grandparents. She takes them to court where the rest of her siblings side against her and she still wins. There are multiple lawsuits against her father and brother, and Linda prevails in them all. After her father's death the siblings all unite to sue Denise and prevail once again, thus bringing the family back together. These suits are limited in scope, however, and the children and grandchildren, having been specifically disinherited in their father's will, receive none of the property, art, or money they had been promised, or even their mother's jewelry and family heirlooms. It's a sad story but one that occurs in second marriages every day.
I read the book because at some point Rusty Hale gave up on San Francisco high society, turned his back on his shallow af siblings, and bought acreage in Sheridan Oregon where he rode horses and occasionally shared stories of his early life of social climbing extravagance and big game hunting. Then, this past summer, for reasons that will likely never be known, he shot his long-time girlfriend before turning the gun on himself. The murder-suicide was a nine-day wonder in the local paper and multiple online commenters cited this book as evidence that Denise Minelli Hale was somehow behind it. Whether she was the source of trauma so great that it finally overwhelmed him more than 20 years after his father's death, or she actually hired a hit man to silence him for good, it was her fault. They claimed that the book would explain it all.
I have to disagree. There's no explanation here that I didn't get from the San Francisco papers online. There are more details and more emotion, but all it adds to the story is ego. The view of the family Linda provides is a perfect mother victimized by her aggressively narcissistic husband. She tries to portray herself as similarly perfect with a few humanizing flaws that aren't her fault, they too are the result of her father's abusive narcissism, but she's unable to see how much of her own raging ego she exposes on every page. Story after story is told about being her father's favorite child and how she saw it hurting her older brother and tried to make him feel better, while knowing even at the time that it would only bring down more of their father's rage upon him. Yet she can't see why he isn't her best friend as an adult? She tells us about how she fixed her life with 10 years of therapy and two therapists, and yet has no insight whatsoever into the damage her siblings suffered and the role she played in it, despite describing it in detail.
She spends some time describing how, when she was a teenager, her father was constantly trying to have sex with her so she put on weight to make herself unattractive to him. It worked, but he harassed and humiliated her about her weight forever after. Then she goes on to say at several points during the book--the day her mother died, when her father married Denise, when they found out about the will, and multiple points in between--that this was when her childhood view of her perfect father was finally shattered. And every time she said that I would think Really? This is what did it? Not calling you a sexpot? Not telling you to stick your tits out more? Not the violent tongue kissing? It was this moment, right here, not all the attempted rapes? I don't know if she talked about that in therapy or not but she really didn't seem to have a handle on it as of this writing.
The book is also filled with lengthy passages of praise for Linda in general, in every specific occasion (making a perfect shot to bring down an elephant she claims she didn't want to shoot with a gun that shouldn't have been sufficient), from the unlikeliest people (the oppositions' high powered lawyers telling her she's a perfect witness and should win her case), and even regarding the book itself (inserts from her siblings saying they've read the manuscript and all the shitty things she said about them were true and fair). It made me wonder if she carried a pocket tape recorder all her life so she could reproduce these lengthy verbatim speeches of praise. In the end it gets even weirder, as the final chapter of the 2013 edition is some additional gossip from "Denise's former friends" followed by gushing reviews of the 2007 edition.
And here's where I get down to my real problem with the book. It's not just that the sole point of this memoir is to air personal family grievances while taking shots at a "celebrity" no one outside San Francisco has even heard of, or that it feels cheap and vindictive to rehash the lawsuits after winning all of them. A good writer with an interesting story can at least make that fun in a guilty sort of way. But Linda Hale Bucklin is a terrible writer. She has no inherent talent and no learned skill. She doesn't even have an editor to put events in some kind of order and stop her from misusing simple words like "invoke".* It's possible one of the friends who read the manuscript tried to tell her not to give credit to literal angels surrounding her for her remarkable talents and abilities, but I doubt it. People as violently self-obsessed as Bucklin don't have friends who tell them things they don't want to hear. In that way she's a great deal like her stepmother.
Amid the ridiculously over the top gushing reviews is a story about actual writer Dominick Dunne calling her disorganized ego-trip "one of the great society books of this time" and saying he intends to write about it for Vanity Fair. Bucklin is thrilled, as she feels by now that her father may actually have shot her mother and wants him to investigate it as a crime. This doesn't mesh with her other belief, that a story someone wrote about a woman committing suicide while listening to her husband talk to his mistress on the phone is literally about her parents (a theory she allegedly confirmed with the author), but that's how the Hale egos roll. Everything is about them, everywhere, all the time. Dunne seems eager to write his article, telling her that her book is written with "real elegance" (bwuh?), is "not angry" (lol, okay), and that it "will be the talk of the town". Bucklin doesn't question this, despite the fact that Dunne is an old friend of Denise's and a regular at her parties. He has nothing at all to gain by pimping her badly written rage manifesto and a great deal to lose. But in the end it doesn't matter because the head people at Vanity Fair are Denise's friends and refuse to publish it. If you're wondering why Dunne couldn't publish it elsewhere if he thought it was so important, you're putting more thought into Bucklin's story than she did. The important thing is Dunne died before Bucklin updated her book to include him.
If 180 pages of last words aimed at Denise and the society that adores her (when Bucklin is clearly the superior human being, even Denise's friends and lawyers said so) isn't enough, she adds one more page. It is a truly amazing thing, the likes of which I have never seen before and hope to never see again. On social media we call this "vaguebooking", ie posting something dramatic (as on Facebook) with no details, to garner attention and/or make points in a fight without allowing the other person to state their case. I don't know what to call it when it's in a print book. Hopefully it will never happen again and we won't have to invent a word to describe it. Since this review has already gone on so long, I'm going to go ahead and quote it in full:
POSTSCRIPT: For the last six months, I've been struggling with yet another power-hungry and willful person, who is in violation of two signed agreements. From past experiences with my father, I know she will fight to the bitter end rather than be accountable for her actions. I've done all I can do. She has to live with herself. I have decided to move forward, grateful for my family, my friends and all the other wonders in my life.
I'm not sure it needs saying, but she's written two books about angels.
*Although one of the multi-page reviews that she reprints in full goes her one better, rendering its opening sentence meaningless by misusing the word "of". She brags on that reviewer's praise more than once, as he's a New York journalist. His review stands out for one truly remarkable achievement--being even more badly written than its subject.
May 14, 2013
This was a rather shocking memoir in that the author's mother and two members of the staff all committed suicide in the family home. Ms. Bucklin's father was a controlling tyrant. This book highlights Ms. Bucklin's life in the San Francisco society spotlight. Not all was as it seemed from the outside. Years of therapy helped Ms. Bucklin find her voice and the strength to finally stand up to her father.
I found it heartbreaking how Prentis Hale controlled his family and turned his other three children against Ms. Bucklin. However, there is a happy ending. This is not a Hollywood fairy tale, so the ending isn't as wonderful as it could or should have been, but it is happy nonetheless.
I found it heartbreaking how Prentis Hale controlled his family and turned his other three children against Ms. Bucklin. However, there is a happy ending. This is not a Hollywood fairy tale, so the ending isn't as wonderful as it could or should have been, but it is happy nonetheless.
May 1, 2018
On March 25, 1969 Linda Hale Bucklin learned her was dead, her right temple blown out by a bullet from her father's pistol. Was it suicide or homicide? Her father, heir to the Broadway/Hale Department Store fortune, claims innocence. When her father marries his mistress, Denise Minnelli, stepmother to Liza Minnelli, the family unravels. Linda recounts her life and her father's final decision: to leave the entire family fortune to Minnelli. An interesting novel that leaves you to your own decision - did he or didn't he murder his wife.
May 14, 2020
Melodramatic
Because I grew up in northern California during this period of time, I am familiar with names and places. So that helped to keep this interesting. Prentis Hale obviously had a lot of demons, there is no denying that. I just feel that there is a lot of " poor me" and a lot of repetition.
Because I grew up in northern California during this period of time, I am familiar with names and places. So that helped to keep this interesting. Prentis Hale obviously had a lot of demons, there is no denying that. I just feel that there is a lot of " poor me" and a lot of repetition.
May 4, 2023
Ms. Hale is very out of touch unfortunately. She certainly suffered, but the lengthy accounts of her legal battles over massive amounts of money from her father's estate were...very unrelatable. I think I would prefer to read Denise's memoir, should she write one 😂😭
May 31, 2014
Interesting memoir of a prominent family i was not aware of except for the Minelli connection - sometimes slow and repititive and perhaps more difficult to identify as it is a lifestyle I am not a part of.
July 6, 2015
I did not think this book was very well written. It didn't paint a very vivid picture of the family, in my opinion. It fell flat and I didn't sympathize with her although based on the events described I should have.
April 26, 2013
Quick read. It was interesting to read about someone with a different social status than me and all the problems in her life.
June 26, 2013
Ok book nothing special
July 21, 2016
Would give it 2.5 stars.
July 4, 2013
story about a daughter standing up to a controlling father.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews