My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir

Mary Louise Wilson became a star at age sixty with her smash one-woman play Full Gallop portraying legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. But before and since, her life and her career―including the Tony Award for her portrayal of Big Edie in Grey Gardens―have been enviably celebrated and varied. Raised in New Orleans with a social climbing, alcoholic mother, Mary Louise moved to New York City in the late 1950s; lived with her gay brother in the Village; entered the nightclub scene in a legendary review; and rubbed shoulders with every famous person of that era and since. My First Hundred Years in Show Business gets it all down. Yet as delicious as the anecdotes are, the heart of this book is in its unblinkingly honest depiction of the life of a working actor. In her inimitable voice―wry, admirably unsentimental, mordantly funny―Mary Louise Wilson has crafted a work that is at once a teeming social history of the New York theatre scene and a thoroughly revealing, superbly entertaining memoir of the life of an extraordinary woman and actor.