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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 In a still unpublished memoir he bemoans his fate as a "stripped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.
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