cover image Include Me Out: My Life from Goldwyn to Broadway

Include Me Out: My Life from Goldwyn to Broadway

Farley Granger, . . St. Martin's, $25.95 (255pp) ISBN 978-0-312-35773-3

With a title taken from Samuel Goldwyn's famed malaprop catchphrase, this polished and perceptive memoir etches a scintillating portrait of life inside Tinseltown soundstages where "nothing was real except anxiety, insecurity and fear." Granger notes that only three of his films (Senso , Strangers on a Train and They Live by Night ) gave him a "sense of pride" as he struggled to free himself from his Goldwyn contract in order to do theater. Granger arranges his life into three acts: Act I begins with a 17-year-old Granger being discovered by Goldwyn's casting director, his first films and his WWII navy hitch in Hawaii. In Act II he recalls working with Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray. By Act III, Granger is on the East Coast doing theater and live television. Contrasting fame and obscurity, Granger regales the reader with anecdotes about the people in his past, recollecting relationships with Ava Gardner, Arthur Laurents and Shelley Winters: "She adored being a star. I hated it." The book has a huge celebrity cast, from Mike Todd, Rita Hayworth and Cornelia Otis Skinner to Leonard Bernstein and Peggy Guggenheim. Granger and Calhoun write with a stylish and iridescent flair, in this autobiography's anecdotal 100 short chapters. 16-page b&w photo insert. (Feb. 6)