Dangerous Intimacy View Preview at YouTube
Dangerous Intimacy tells the story of how, shortly after his wife's death in 1904, Mark Twain enjoyed the attentions of Isabel Lyon, his flirtatious - and calculating - secretary. Lyon desperately wanted to marry her boss, who was thirty years her senior. She manipulated the household into exiling Jean, Twain's youngest child and an epileptic, to a sanitarium. With the help of Twain's assistant, Ralph Ashcroft, who fraudulently acquired power of attorney over the author's finances, Lyon nearly succeeded in assuming complete control over Twain's household and estate. Fortunately, Twain recognized the plot in time. In his best-selling Autobiography he bemoans his fate as a "stripped and forlorn King Lear". So rife with twists and turns as to defy belief, the story comes to life via the voices of the participants and takes us into the heart of the Clemens household. In our documentary, based on the book by Karen Lystra, Jean Clemens emerges as a true heroine, one who struggled mightily to overcome her epilepsy and who was able to rejoin her father for the final, joyous months remaining in their lives. Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years shows how Twain extricated himself from the lies, prejudice and self-delusion that almost turned him into an American Lear. Thanks to Karen Lystra's research, which liberates the author's last years from a century of popular misunderstanding, we see how, late in life, this American icon discovered a deep kinship with his youngest child and experienced the interplay of love and pain that is one of the hallmarks of his work. Order Now from Amazon
Sam Clemens and daughter Jean, 1909.