The Washington Post - 07.08.2019

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WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7 , 2019. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/STYLE EZ RE C

BY AVI SELK AND LISA BONOS

Over the weekend, about 30 Kennedys

gathered a round a firepit in Hyannis Port,

Mass., telling stories about Saoirse Ken-

nedy Hill, their 22-year-old cousin who

died Thursday. Saoirse’s uncle, Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., shared a blurry snapshot on

Instagram: Several of the adults rest their

feet against the edge of the firepit, just

inches from the flames. Children pile o nto

laps, sharing a red and white star-span-

gled blanket. Surrounded by darkness,

the f ire i lluminating t heir faces, the family

members are indistinguishable from a

distance. Along with the somber image,

RFK Jr. posted pictures of happier times:

Saoirse, smiling and goofy, with her cous-

ins at the beach, on the family sailboat,

jumping off buoys, interlocking arms and

sharing a n ice cream cone.

“The gaping hole that she leaves in our

family is a wound too large to ever heal,”

he wrote.

The family has lots of gaping holes left

by young lives cut short — most famously

two assassinations, and a plane crash that

killed John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn

Bessette Kennedy 20 years ago last

month. With Saoirse’s death, which two

SEE KENNEDY ON C3

THE RELIABLE SOURCE

Gun violence leads late-

night TV hosts to turn

somber. And Sean Hannity

to suggest more guns. C2

ART

Metro reverses itself on

banning ads for the

Phillips’s exhibition on

displaced people. C3

BOOK WORLD

Elizabeth Macneal’s “Doll

Factory” is a guilty

pleasure wrapped around

a history lesson. C4

CAROLYN HAX

Hiding a health scare from

people who care about

you isn’t good for your

emotional health. C10

The Kennedy

legacy: Torch

and darkness

The tenacity of hope

Toni Morrison exposed America’s ugliest truths in some of its most beautiful prose

BY ANN HORNADAY

It’s somehow appropriate that the last

and only time I spoke with D.A. Penne-

baker, we barely got around to discussing

movies.

Pennebaker, who died last week at the

age of 94, became famous as one of his

era’s most influential documentary film-

makers, best known for such music-cen-

tered films as “Dont Look Back” (featur-

ing Bob Dylan at his most entertainingly

enigmatic) and “Monterey Pop,” a s well as

the presidential campaign chronicles

“Primary” and “The War Room.”

When I called Pennebaker in 2013, it

wasn’t just to talk docs, but to share his

memories of New York in the early 1960s

for an oral history I was compiling.

During those years, Pennebaker was

working at a unit Robert Drew had set up

at Life magazine to take documentary

film from dull illustrated lectures into

something more dramatic and immedi-

ate. Working with such colleagues as

Richard Leacock and Albert and David

Maysles, Pennebaker would help invent

what would become known as direct

SEE PENNEBAKER ON C5

APPRECIATION

A force behind

the modern

documentary

BY HANK STUEVER

As midlife crises go, you could do a lot

worse than Fox’s “BH90210,” a clever

and intentionally cheesy reunion of the

original cast of the 1990s high school

drama “Beverly Hills, 90210.” They’ve

engineered it in a way that lessens the

burden of full commitment — theirs or

ours.

Managing to be both light and cyni-

cal, “BH90210” (a six-episode minise-

ries, premiering Wednesday) brings

back Jennie Garth, To ri Spelling, Shan-

nen Doherty, Gabrielle Carteris, Brian

Austin Green, Jason Priestley and Ian

Ziering (everyone but Luke Perry, who

died five months ago) to play exaggerat-

ed versions of themselves — which is to

say, actors who happened to hit it big on

an enjoyably mediocre TV series three

decades ago and have had to cope with

that fact ever since.

The show opens on the slightly

pathetic scene of a “90210” f an conven-

tion in L as Vegas, where six of the actors

have been lured to appear on a panel

Q&A, each quietly dealing with a fresh

SEE TV REVIEW ON C9

TV REVIEW

A Beverly Hills

reunion with a

dose of reality

BY RON CHARLES

“124 was spiteful.” ¶ With that enigmatic opening line of “Beloved,” T oni Morrison, who d ied Monday a t the age of

88, placed her i ndelible s tamp on American l iterature. ¶ That a black woman should write the greatest novel of the

20th century is a glorious rebuke to our long history that denigrated women and African Americans. From the

furnace of her genius emerged a book that melded America’s past into a work of enduring art — gothic, magical,

magisterial. And the passage of more than three decades has done nothing to diminish the power of that

masterpiece. It remains, like the world’s most famous monuments, both familiar and astonishing, as capable of

inspiring awe as it did when it first appeared in 1987. ¶ Most authors are silenced by death. But a few —

Shakespeare, Austen, Twain — grow more amplified by each new generation. We had the blessing of reading

Morrison as she was writing. Others will have the blessing of rediscovering her. ¶ The granddaughter of a slave,

Morrison wrote the novel that definitively dismantled a century of Southern romanticism. Arguments about

states’ rights or fantasies of antebellum gentility were scythed by her storytelling. With “Beloved,” s he dared to

expose not just the injustice of slavery, but the full spectrum of its obscenity. She uncovered the ghastly metal

devices wrapped around black necks and crammed into black mouths. She explored the sickening abuses of

“science” t o justify racial hierarchies. She blasted the m yth of the benevolent plantation.

APPRECIATION

TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS

SEE MORRISON ON C2