Dancing at Ciro's : a family's love, loss, and scandal on the Sunset Strip / Sheila Weller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weller, Sheila.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Weller, Sheila.

Jews--California--Hollywood (Los Angeles)--Biography.

Jews.

Jews--New York (State)--New York--Biography.

Families.

New York (State)--New York.

California--Los Angeles.

California.

Families--California--Los Angeles--Case studies.

Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)--Biography.

Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.).

New York (N.Y.)--Biography.

New York (N.Y.).

National Book Committee.

Authors, American--20th century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Genre:

Biographies.

Case studies.

Physical Description:

339 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : St. Martin's Press, 2003.

Summary:

In 1958, Young Sheila Weller was living a charmed life with her family in Beverly Hills. Her father was a brilliant and charismatic brain surgeon. Her mother was a movie-magazine writer whose brother owned Hollywood's most dazzling nightclub, Ciro's. Then Sheila Weller's world exploded. After she witnessed her uncle's frenzied physical assault on her father, a whole store of family secrets and dramas unfolded, rivaling those that transpired in the nightclub's dressing room and banquettes every night. Weller has written a deeply felt memoir of her family's richly accomplished but ultimately tragic life, contrasted with those most glamorous days of Hollywood's golden era. While vividly describing Lana Turner's, Frank Sinatra's, and Sammy Davis Jr.'s evenings -- and breakdowns -- at Ciro's, she captures a whole subgroup of American dreamers: the New York Jews who bounded from Brooklyn to Broadway and finally to Hollywood. They expected that success and proximity to glamour would erase centuries of anxiety and melancholy -- but often discovered they'd only found a higher ledge from which to fall. Weller seamlessly weaves a history of the American nightclub into the saga of an unforget-table family. The dreamy grandeur of Hollywood in the forties and the dark tensions of the fifties come alive through the pages and through the characters, for whom love -- and the very idea of family -- is almost biblically tested, but never quite extinguished.

Contents:

Introduction: Beverly Hills: January 8, 1958 1

Chapter 1 New York: 1887-1918 21

Chapter 2 New York: 1919-1932 36

Chapter 3 New York: 1932-1936 61

Chapter 4 New York and California: 1935-1939 75

Chapter 5 Hollywood: 1939-1941 97

Chapter 6 Hollywood, New York, Boston, Hollywood: 1941-1943 125

Chapter 7 Hollywood, Boston, New York Hollywood: 1942-1945 152

Chapter 8 Hollywood and Beverly Hills: 1946-1951 185

Chapter 9 Hollywood and Beverly Hills: 1948-1952 211

Chapter 10 Beverly Hills and Hollywood: 1952-1955 237

Chapter 11 Beverly Hills and Hollywood: 1955-1958 251

Chapter 12 Beverly Hills: 1958-1959 271

Chapter 13 Beverly Hills; The High Seas; Great Neck, New York: 1959-1962 296.

ISBN:

0312241763

OCLC:

50868188