My Lucky Stars

Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this touching memoir, Academy Award–winning actress Shirley MacLaine “dishes up revelations and insights galore” (USA Today) about her career in Hollywood. “Robust, ribald stories . . . juicy.”—People In the memoir that made headlines, Shirley MacLaine dazzles us with the subject she knows most intimately: Hollywood, especially about the men and women—her “lucky stars”—who touched and challenged her life. She talks candidly and personally about . . . Her wildly unconventional marriage to Steve Parker “As soon as [we met], I knew my life was to take a new course. . . . Our connection had the shock of destiny to it. . , . There was nothing I could have done to alter or avoid the experience we were intended to have together.” Her friendship with the Rat Pack—especially Frank Sinatra “I was comfortable and friendly being around the guys in the group because I was perceived by most of them as a mascot. I was the only woman they allowed in the house, but that was because there had been a kind of communal decision made that I wasn’t really a girl—I was a pal, maybe even one of the boys.” The movie she made with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis “Dean, not Jerry, was the funny one to me. His humor was subtle, spontaneous—a result of the moment. Jerry’s was brilliant, but usually premeditated.” And much, much more . . .