Baker's Daughter, Miller's Son (Paperback) | Released: 20 Aug 2013

Lovers and adulterers, heroes and harlots, gossips and thieves, and maybe the occasional ghost (and certainly skeletons in the closets), the Miller and Baker families had their share, and Tom Miller, writing as Tom Canford, is willing to tell all. This memoir, initially written for distribution to family members, had been intended for publication, but the author did not get around to editing it before his death. His friend Jonathan May has managed that feat in part as a gift to Miller family members as well as to all readers intigued by the tale of a boy growing up and life in Southern Illinois and Las Cruces, New Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s (with family tales tall and otherwise taking it back further in time and the author's own musings bringing it well into the early 2000s). Since the author had always thought of himself primarily as a lyricist, a selection from his musical plays and his occasional lyrics appears at the end. The descriptions of life in Southern Illinois, particularly Carrier Mills, in the early part of the last century, and in Las Cruces, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, in the 1930s and later will be of interest especially to people who know those areas and their inhabitants and also to anyone curious about family life and social life of the times. Readers who have met the author through his autobiographical World War II novel Boy at Sea and through A Fever of the Mad, his memoir about working as a publicist on movies with special emphasis on his experiences on Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky and Francis Coppola's The Cotton Club will be pleased to see this earlier version of the Tom they have come to know.His late sister Norma Miller was invaluable to him in providing stories from the past and reminders and refreshers on tales he remembered. Quotations from her diaries and from letters written by various family members and friends add to the pleasure of the work.
About the Author: Tom Canford is the name which Tom Miller used for his published novels and memoirs. Miller was born in Carrier Mills, Illinois in 1922 and moved with his family to Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1929, where he lived until he joined the U. S. Coast Guard in 1942. After the war he lived in Los Angeles, attending L.A. City College where he studied journalism and playwriting. His original musical "The Darwin Theory," based on the Scopes "Monkey" Trial, was produced there to some acclaim. In the 1950s Miller moved to New York, where he continued writing lyrics and plays and worked in various capacities in film companies including American International Pictures (films he was involved with include ("Wild in the Streets" and the Vincent Price/Edgar Allen Poe movies), Embassy Pictures ("The Graduate" and "The Producers," among others), and MGM. He was hired by MGM as unit publicist (assigned to films during production) after he wrote a letter in rebuttal to "New York Times" critic Renata Adler's negative review of "2001: A Space Odyssey," the first favorable comments about the Kubrick film to appear in print. Tom Miller worked as unit publicist on "Shaft," "The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight," "The Wrath of God," "Blow Out," "Harry and Son," "The Cotton Club," "Mikey and Nicky," "A Gathering of Old Men," and several others. In 1989, retiring from publicity work, he moved to Sawyerville, Alabama where he lived until his death in 2007. His novels, published under the name Tom Canford, include the autobiographical "Boy at Sea," "The Curse of Vilma Valentine," and "Ghost Guitars." The last two drew heavily on his knowledge of the film industry and film history. "A Fever of the Mad," his memoir about this movie publicity experiences with special emphasis on Elaine May's "Mikey and Nicky" and Francis Coppola's "The Cotton Club," was published posthumously in 2013.