Bertram Fields spent his entire professional career as an attorney. After he left the military, he started a practice in Los Angeles and garnered a stellar reputation, representing major stars, including Tom Cruise, Warren Beatty, Wayne Rogers, Dustin Hoffman, Madonna, and Michael Jackson.
A professional memoir instead of a chronologically linear autobiography, Summing Up furnishes a collection of anecdotal vignettes focusing on Fields' extraordinary experience as a lawyer, and many consist of only a few pages of impressionistic remembrances. His insider’s look into the world of the famous is sometimes artfully revealing. For example, Fields was already one of Jackson’s lawyers when the singer was accused of sexually abusing a child; he resigned due to what he saw as Elizabeth Taylor’s interference. Other tales are much lighter in tone; for instance, Gore Vidal turned to Fields when a movie studio refused to credit his work on the screenplay for the film The Sicilian. Fields won his case, but then Vidal, after seeing the movie, exclaimed, “Keep my name off that piece of shit!” The author also fired Donald Trump as a client, he says, because he was disgusted by a deceitful strategy that the real estate mogul employed.
The author’s world seems to be full of famous people; he began writing books, he says, after Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, encouraged him after reading one of his legal briefs. Still, the repeated references to celebrities never feel like gratuitous name-dropping. Fields’ prose style is wry, lighthearted, and crisply straightforward, and the memoir is impressively humble given the author’s many accomplishments. His book should appeal broadly to lawyers and non-lawyers alike.
Fully illustrated in color.
