the artof thehollywoodmemoir

From the moment Mary Louise Brooks lopped off her first name and joined a touring modern-dance company, at the age of fifteen, she was determined to live a big, rambunctious life. A native of Cherryvale, Kansas, she became a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl and then a leading star of the silent-film era. Her trademark black bob, equal parts ingénue and vamp, helped turn “flapper” style into a national craze. But the silent era ended, and the roles eventually dried up. To pay the bills, Brooks took on odd jobs in New York City, including minding a counter at Saks and working as an escort to wealthy johns. By the time she published her memoirs, in her seventies, she was living in a modest one-bedroom apartment in Rochester as something of a recluse, writing sporadic pieces of film criticism. (Legend has it that she’d written an earlier draft of an autobiography but incinerated the manuscript.) “Lulu in Hollywood,” which came out in 1982, three years before Brooks’s death, is less of a grand narrative of rising and falling in Hollywood than a collection of bracing essays about show-biz pathologies: the abuses of the studio system, the industry’s tendency to cast aside aging actresses like graying dishrags, and—in a section called “Humphrey and Bogey”—the harm fame can do to male as well as female stars. Brooks is particularly sharp on the delicate psychology of actors and the ways in which they lie to themselves. Her goal, she writes, is to be “an inhumane executioner of the bogus,” and in “Lulu in Hollywood” she offers one of the most clear-eyed assessments of Tinseltown on record.

“Swanson on Swanson” is memoir-as-mythology, bravado-as-book, a feat of self-aggrandizement that, incredibly, was first conceived without its author’s consent. In 1979, when Swanson was nearly eighty years old, a screenwriter named Brian Degas sold her autobiography to Random House behind her back; only afterward did he persuade her to tell him all of her secrets. The pair collaborated in the course of a year in New York City—one imagines Swanson draped over the divans in her Fifth Avenue apartment, holding forth about her days of evening gowns and flashbulbs. The resulting five-hundred-page tome, published in 1980, feels like a groaning suitcase straining to contain Swanson’s saga: a rebellious Chicago girlhood, a gilded silent-film career, six marriages, several clandestine love affairs, and a bold second act, in 1950, when Swanson played Norma Desmond, a delusional Hollywood has-been, in Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard.” “Swanson on Swanson” is written in a tone of vainglorious, un-fact-checked hyperbole that Desmond herself might have appreciated. Swanson writes, for instance, of a screening of “Sunset Boulevard” during which several other actresses allegedly lauded her for daring to take on the part of a faded star clinging to fame. “Barbara Stanwyck fell on her knees and kissed the hem of my skirt,” Swanson crows. Her book, like her performance, brings melodrama to magnificent heights.

“It has been my experience that one cannot, in any shape or form, depend on human relations for lasting reward,” Bette Davis writes in “The Lonely Life,” her masterpiece of wry misanthropy and self-reliance, from 1962. Though she was only in her fifties, Davis already had a severe, unwavering world view when she committed her life to paper. Other big takeaways: work yourself to the bone, blame yourself if things go sideways. The acerbic, chain-smoking star of “All About Eve,” “Now, Voyager,” and, later, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” was a notoriously tough customer, both on and off set. She was monastically committed to her craft, and she could become volatile and viperous when she felt that someone had interfered with her artistry. “I do not regret one professional enemy I have made,” she writes. “Any actor who doesn’t dare to make an enemy should get out of the business.” Still, “The Lonely Life” is a study in contrast. One moment, Davis slings bitchy one-liners about believing her colleagues to be spineless weaklings; the next she’ll allow flinty flashes of vulnerability to break through. She almost turns tender when reflecting on her youth, the striving girl she was before turning diamond-hard. (To think back on her life, she writes, is to rush “past a cavalcade of Bettes, each younger, each surer of herself, each purer . . . simpler . . . a mist of blond puritanism.”) The core pleasure of “The Lonely Life” rests in seeing Davis simultaneously perform and undermine her own vision of steely self-sovereignty.

In 1968, Eartha Kitt spoke out against the Vietnam War at a luncheon with Lady Bird Johnson. When her comments hit the press, Kitt writes in “Alone with Me,” she “became persona non grata in my own country.” The book, published in 1976, is the second of Kitt’s four memoirs and perhaps her most political, as she wrote it in the wake of a Times exposé revealing that the C.I.A. had kept a dossier smearing her as a woman of “loose morals.” Born on a South Carolina cotton plantation to a part-Black, part-Cherokee mother, Kitt was sent to live with a relative in Harlem, where she joined Katherine Dunham’s dance company (a groundbreaking Black troupe that toured internationally) and, from there, became a success on the European cabaret circuit, singing coquettish ditties like “Après Moi.” In her Hollywood years, she befriended James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, whom she writes about with insight and deep sympathy. (“I don’t think she was able to differentiate between her self and the marquee.”) But, even as she revels in Parisian adventures and lunches with producers, Kitt does not hold back her rage toward those who mistreated her or tried to hold her back, whether the cruel press or the boyfriend who would not take his longtime relationship with Kitt public because of her race. My favorite part of the book might be the long, eccentric, often backhanded acknowledgements section, in which she cheekily thanks “all my lovers, who walked away when they couldn’t handle it” and, of course, the C.I.A., “who has established my reputation with men who want to believe I’m a nymphomaniac but who should leave the writing of fiction to authors who don’t write it at the taxpayers’ expense.”

“I tried working here at home but nothing came,” Bacall once told a reporter, of writing “By Myself.” “So I said, ‘O.K., Bacall, you’ve horsed around enough,’ and moved myself down to Knopf.” She camped out in her publisher’s office for three years, in the nineteen-seventies, writing in longhand on yellow legal pads. What poured out of her on those pages was a love story, albeit one that had its share of rocky patches. Released in 1978, “By Myself” (as well as its short sequel, “And Then Some,” which Bacall tacked on in 2005) does detail her career, from teen-age modelling days through Hollywood dominance in films such as “The Big Sleep” and “How to Marry a Millionaire.” But her Big Subject, occupying roughly half of the book, is Humphrey Bogart, whom she married in 1945, when she was only twenty. (He was forty-five.) The two stayed together until Bogart died of cancer, in 1957, though their relationship was always tempestuous. “By Myself” is a fascinating story of romance and codependence, of how navigating the Hollywood machinery as a high-profile duo can be even more treacherous than going solo. “He was too old for me, he’d had three wives, he drank, he was an actor and he was goyim,” Bacall writes. But she loved Bogie in spite of it all. She writes with brutal honesty about Bogart’s drunken temper and with great tenderness about his years of worsening illness. There are many Bogie biographies out there, but Bacall’s staunch account is more powerful—and hard-earned—than any third-party perspective. In the end, their story was hers alone to tell.

This is a memoir of Hollywood and extreme sports, the behind-the-scenes story of an athlete-performer who found a niche for herself and broke her back—literally—filling it. A onetime national swimming champion, Esther Williams single-handedly carried the so-called swimming pictures of the late nineteen-forties and early fifties. (She titled her book after her box-office hit from 1952.) Published in 1999, the book goes into thrilling and harrowing technical detail about water-based filmmaking—Williams did all of her own stunts in a giant back-lot tank, mostly because nobody else could. Shooting one underwater scene, she ruptured an eardrum and had to wear a protective facial prosthesis for twelve hours a day. Another time, she wore a flannel bathing suit on set and nearly drowned. (From then on, she insisted on having a role in costume selection.) She devotes a long section of the book to an infamous fifty-foot dive in “The Million Dollar Mermaid,” which involved standing on a hydraulic lift while wearing heavy chain mail and a metal crown as Busby Berkeley yelled at her to jump. When she did, she realized midair that she was in for a rough landing. (“Hurtling down, I muttered a silent ‘Oh, shit,’ ” she writes.) Williams broke three vertebrae and had to wear a full-body cast for six months. It’s no wonder she admits that she eventually sought LSD treatments for her depression. By the time she hung up her “tired, saggy bathing suits in which the elastic had died” and exited her M-G-M contract, in 1955, Williams had put her body through hell—but she remains winningly buoyant in the retelling.

Rita Moreno opens her memoir with a scene from her childhood: she is newly arrived in the Bronx from the village of Juncos, in Puerto Rico, and, owing to a case of chicken pox, she’s been shuttled from her tenement to a sick ward at Misericordia Hospital. “This is me, the shivery little Puerto Rican girl—feeling lost in the world. Make like I am tough!” she writes. “This idea lasts through my whole life: I always play a part.” Moreno’s book, published in 2013, provides a revealing and often infuriating account of life as a Latina woman in mid-century Hollywood, where she was regularly typecast, over-sexualized, and even asked to paint her face darker for her Oscar-winning role as Anita in “West Side Story.” “Our gang, including me, was a uniform tobacco brown color, and that was just plain wrong and inaccurate,” she writes. (Moreno’s thoughts on that film are especially interesting, given that she recently landed in some hot water—and later apologized—for defending the homogenous casting of “In the Heights.”) But, beyond documenting Moreno’s struggle to break out of stereotypes, her memoir is just a good, old-fashioned, juicy yarn. The most compelling—and often heartbreaking—material covers her long, stormy affair with Marlon Brando. The relationship ended badly; Moreno goes into wrenching detail about a suicide attempt right before their final breakup. But she has a sense of humor about what kept drawing her back to their destructive dynamic: “Those arms, those bloody arms!” she writes.

In 1981, Shelley Winters—born Shirley Schrift, in St. Louis, in 1920—went on “The Merv Griffin Show” to celebrate the paperback release of “Shelley: Also Known as Shirley.” The book, which is chunky and cherry red, had been released a year before and risen to the top of best-seller lists. Thumbing through a copy before introducing Winters, Griffin mused, “That’s the thickest paperback I have ever seen in my life.” He then added, “But she did name everybody in town.” Winters then waltzes onto the set wearing flip-flops and carrying a cane, explaining to Griffin in a mischievous tone that she tripped over a phone wire trying to choose a dress to wear and broke her foot. It is daffy antics like this that make Winters—and her book—so instantly lovable. With her gravelly voice and blustery attitude toward glamour, Winters is a celebrity you want to root for, whether she is willfully opting out of ab crunches during her friend Debbie Reynolds’s exercise video or, in her book, telling tales out of school about her love life, including a secret years-long affair with the married Burt Lancaster. Winters’s writing is equal parts punchy and profound (and even—gasp!—profane). More important, she is funny. Of a royal acquaintance who accidentally burned a cigarette hole into her favorite mink coat, she writes, “That damned millionaire prince never paid me for repairing it.” She describes doing press as “nonsensical Blonde Bombshell repartee.” Her book, like so many of her boisterous public appearances, feels like a generous belly laugh at Hollywood’s expense.

Celebrity memoirs tend to follow a pleasingly predictable format: I was born, I was ambitious, then I became famous. “Myself Among Others,” from 1971, goes another way entirely. Ruth Gordon—who got her start as a silent-film bit player while a teen, enjoyed a long career as a Broadway actress, and had a late-in-life cinematic surge in “Rosemary’s Baby” (for which she won her first Oscar, at seventy-three) and “Harold and Maude”—doesn’t set out to tell a chronological, or even logical, tale. Ostensibly a series of vignettes about the colorful characters Gordon encountered in Los Angeles and New York—Noël Coward, Cole Porter, Mia Farrow, Don Rickles, Frank Sinatra—the book drops names without context, zooms between time periods, and often sounds less like memoir than like surrealist tone poetry. Throughout, Gordon badgers readers with rhetorical questions (“Where are the snows of yesteryear?” “How are you going to feel when you drop dead?” “Do you know anyone who lights up real candles on their Christmas tree?”) and bizarre ruminations (“Whitebait and oyster crab, stainless steel, celery tonic, spoon bread, hangnails, massage, licorice, funerals, these are a few of my unfavorite things”). Yet if you truly give yourself over to the book’s chaotic rhythms, “Myself Among Others” is a delightful reading experience, a slice of authentic absurdity from a mind warped by the better part of a century in show biz. Most Hollywood memoirs are the work of ghostwriters. You can be sure that Gordon came up with every word of this strange book on her own.

“If you needed a woman of color to handle a gun, do a wheelie on a chopper, or fall off a cliff into a rice paddy, I was the one to call,” Pam Grier writes in “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts,” published in 2010. A sense of readiness permeates Grier’s memoir. She was raring to go and game to do her own stunts; it was Hollywood, run by white men, that was not ready to accept her prodigious talents. Grier was a military brat, born in North Carolina, who moved around often as a child. (She recounts her peripatetic youth in the first of her book’s three “acts.”) She writes openly about an early sexual assault and her fraught relationship with her later status as a blaxploitation siren, though she heralds films such as “Coffy” and “Foxy Brown” for showcasing her strength and expanding the possibilities for Black women onscreen. “To me, what really stood out in the genre was women of color depicting heroes rather than acting like nannies or maids,” she writes in the book’s second section, which covers her heady seventies era. Later, Grier survived cervical cancer and experienced a professional resurgence, working with Quentin Tarantino on “Jackie Brown” (“I sometimes wondered about his ability to understand what a woman needed,” she writes, of the director) and starring on “The L Word.” But she also retreated from the public eye, to a ranch in rural Colorado. “Foxy” unfolds like a plucky hero’s journey, so it’s no surprise that it is in development as a bio-pic. As to who could fill her shoes, Pam Grier told The New Yorker in 2020, “I don’t know who could play me—who can sing and play drums and do martial arts?”

It’s amazing that nobody has ever made a movie out of Julia Phillips’s story: a girl from Brooklyn marries a wealthy banker and moves to Hollywood in the nineteen-seventies to produce films, becomes the first female producer to win an Oscar (for “The Sting,” in 1974), runs into trouble with cocaine, flames out of the industry with spectacular aplomb, writes a searing tell-all about every sleazy man she ever had to sit across from at the Polo Lounge, and turns into Public Enemy No. 1 on Hollywood Boulevard. Of course, it also makes sense that nobody has been brave enough to adapt “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again”—when her book was released, in 1991, it was the toast of the publishing world but the scourge of Los Angeles. Phillips (who died in 2002) quickly found herself banned from popular restaurants, threatened with lawsuits, and dropped from guest lists. Still, she remained uncowed. “These are all people who wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, ‘Are they going to find out I’m a fraud today?’ ” Phillips told one reporter shortly after her book came out. “That’s about ninety percent of the town, which is why they’ve been so fearful and so nasty.” “You’ll Never Eat Lunch” is the only memoir on this list by a non-actor, and it shows: it’s hard to imagine any performers (who have further to fall in the public eye, and therefore more to lose) going scorched-earth quite like Phillips does here. From the first scene, which finds Phillips woozily high on a cocktail of diet pills, Valium, and cocaine on the day of the 1974 Oscars, her account is full throttle, vulgar, breathless, and, at moments, divine. This is the kind of book you lug to the beach and become so immersed in that you leave with a sunburn.

Cybill Shepherd was forged in the crucible of the New Hollywood of the nineteen-seventies, an era when the classic back-lot system was crumbling, and new directors (mostly white, mostly male) were ascendant. It was also a heady period of transition for actresses, who were no longer bound by repressive studio contracts and could be more free in their public personas. Shepherd, a former teen model from Tennessee, came to Hollywood as a churchgoing naïf and, as she records in her memoir (co-written with the journalist Aimee Lee Ball), quickly found herself swept up in an affair with the married Peter Bogdanovich while filming “The Last Picture Show.” What makes “Cybill Disobedience,” published in 2000, so compelling is its ambivalence; instead of boasting about her escapades in Hollywood, Shepherd interrogates them, questioning the psychology behind her desires and compulsions. Of cheating on Bogdanovich, she writes, “Was I trying to reclaim some control over the man who represented all the power, all the money, just as my grandfather had?” Her book serves as a kind of bridge between the old guard of Hollywood memoirs (excessively name-droppy, cloaked in innuendo, braggadocious to the level of camp) and a more modern style that is interested in exploring intimate terrain. It is also a bold act of branding: Shepherd was America’s sweetheart after her turn on “Moonlighting,” but she posed for her book cover in a black latex miniskirt and high heels. Her memoir is not exactly timeless, but it is a potent artifact of an era when stars were openly grappling with thorny sexual politics.

In the biography “Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge,” from 2019, the journalist Sheila Weller writes that Fisher “was born into a fantasy world, with a brain and a sensibility that found comfort there, and she fought her way to reality.” For Fisher, who was Hollywood royalty from birth (her parents were the actors Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, subjects of ceaseless tabloid intrigue), breaking into show business was nowhere near as difficult as untangling herself from it and trying to see clearly its shallowness and hypocrisy. Fisher, who found global fame at twenty as Princess Leia, regularly turned to writing to process what she had been through. Her 1987 novel, “Postcards from the Edge,” is a veiled story about her struggles with drug addiction. In “The Princess Diarist,” from 2016, Fisher annotates the diaries she kept on the set of “Star Wars.” But the best of Fisher’s books is “Wishful Drinking”—published in 2008, and adapted from a one-woman show of the same name that she eventually performed on Broadway—in which she serves up a soup-to-nuts overview of her life, beginning with her father leaving her mother for Elizabeth Taylor and winding through her relationships with men and substances (in both cases toxic, for the most part). Fisher, who died at the age of sixty, in 2016, is ferocious and raw in her writing, and she doesn’t shy away from moments of great pain. But she is also exquisitely witty and terribly unserious when it comes to her own legacy. She writes that George Lucas wouldn’t let her wear a bra in “Star Wars” because in space bodies expand but underwear does not: “I think this would make a fantastic obit—so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.”