A FRONT ROW SEAT, as close as we can get to the Golden Age of Hollywood in real life

A FRONT ROW SEAT
NANCY OLSON LIVINGSTON
University Press of Kentucky (Screen Classics series)
$34.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From her idyllic childhood in the American Midwest to her Oscar–nominated performance in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and the social circles of New York and Los Angeles, actress Nancy Olson Livingston has lived abundantly. In her memoir, A Front Row Seat, Livingston treats readers to an intimate, charming chronicle of her life as an actress, wife, and mother, and her memories of many of the most notable figures and moments of her time.

Livingston shares reminiscences of her marriages to lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner, creator of award-winning musicals Paint Your Wagon, Gigi, and My Fair Lady (which was dedicated to her), and to Alan Wendell Livingston, former president of Capitol Records, who created Bozo the Clown and worked with legendary musical artists, including Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Band, and Don McLean. One of the last living actors of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Livingston shares memorable encounters with countless celebrities—William Holden, Billy Wilder, Bing Crosby, Marilyn Monroe, and John Wayne, to name a few—and less pleasant experiences with Howard Hughes and John F. Kennedy that act as reminders of women's long struggle for equality.

Entertaining and engrossing, A Front Row Seat deftly interweaves Livingston's life with her observations of the artists, celebrities, and luminaries with whom she came in contact—a paean to the twentieth century and a treasure for readers enamored with a bygone era.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oscar nominee for her second role, in Sunset Boulevard, Olson was a woman with a future in acting on stage and screen. Instead, she hitched her star to two powerful men and became a wife and mother. As they were powerful, she was never far away from the glamour of the industry she'd left behind.

She never stopped working, she never made it as big as she would have had she stuck it out, but this lady had herself one amazing ride through the greatest years of the industry she walked away from serving.

Imagine her two daughters born in the early 1950s as Mom and Stepdad bring 'em to meet the Beatles.

What this book does is give you exactly what the title says it will: A front row seat, next to a bona fide insider, at all the major theatrical, musical, and entertainment world events of the Jet Set/Rat Pack era.

The personal life the lady led was honestly one of pretty typical stuff for a woman in that time...a lot of hard work supporting the career of her husband, a lot of swatting away the eight hands most men seemed to grow when her lovely blonde-capped profile hove into view, raising three children in an ever-scarier world. She stints with none of it.

Come for the glamour, the nostalgia of this bygone cultural moment; stay to get acquainted with someone you can easily imagine becoming your friend. A book of delights and pleasures that raids a scrapbook of stunning depth and fun! There are so many more images than I could show to you, but I chose some to demonstrate the feel of them all.

Your women-in-film reader, your glamour-chaser giftee, and your own good self could really sink into this charming hostess's beautifully curated cocktail party. Great for #Booksgiving.