Endless Highway

David is the Carradine brother who played Woody Guthrie in the movies, not to be confused with another one, Keith, who played Will Rogers on Broadway. Their father was character actor John Carradine, and David Carradine says they were once considered princes of Hollywood. His autobiography is breezy and anecdotal and so good-natured--even when blaming everyone else for all its author's failures--that only toward the end does it come through as the dreary catalogue of human disaster it actually is. Carradine tried to kill himself when he was five. Later, his drunken mother, confusing him with his long-departed father, tried to seduce him. Schooling consisted of one expulsion after another. The high point of his acting career came in the early 1970s with Kung Fu, a popular TV series. As recorded here, the rest of his adult life is remembered in terms of LSD, pot, peyote, cocaine, alcohol, unsuccessful films, cars, horses, wives and wandering children. And always there are blithely belabored excuses for everything. The book ends with a long journal of the first seven months of 1995, with Carradine attending A.A. meetings and shooting a new Kung Fu series on the cheap in Canada. Photos. (Dec.)