Q: The autobiography of quincy jones (Doubleday), 412 pages, $40 cloth. Rating: NNN
The focus of The Autobiography Of Quincy Jones is on the celebrity lifestyle rather than the music, with plenty of intriguing name-dropping high in the “holy shit” quotient. From his youth in Seattle hanging with Ray Charles to being seduced out of his pants by Dinah Washington, skirt-chasing in Harlem with Marlon Brando, brunching with Picasso, passing up an invitation to an ill-fated house party hosted by Sharon Tate and rising to greet the new millennium from the Lincoln bedroom, Jones connects the dots in a rich and eventful narrative for which historic recordings with Michael Jackson are but intriguing sidebars. He’s a decent storyteller, and while he never really dishes the sordid details, there’s a load of entertaining material like, “Around 6:30 am, I heard a knock at the door. I opened it. Frank (Sinatra) was standing there in army fatigues. He looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘How do you like your eggs, Q?'” Until some unauthorized biographer digs up the real dirt, this will do nicely.
Write Books at susanc@nowtoronto.com
