Gloria Stuart: I Just Kept Hoping

For Stuart, playing Old Rose in Titanic was a vindication, ""my last chance to finally prove I could be a first-rank actress."" At 87, she was nominated for an Academy Award, the oldest person ever to be so honored, yet the undercurrent of this refreshingly honest, anything-goes autobiography is her lifelong frustration over not fulfilling her dream of becoming a great actress. After achieving star status by making a string of mostly forgettable Hollywood films (and admitting to a philosophy of ""free love"") in the 1930s, Stuart and her second husband, screenwriter Arthur Sheekman (whose credits include Some Came Running and Marx Brothers classics) moved to New York in 1939, where she pursued--futilely--a career on stage. Undaunted by this setback, they moved back to California, where Stuart made more movies but also gradually found new creative outlets as a painter, printmaker, poet, crafts-shop owner, bonsai expert and small-press publisher. Writing in the first person with an assist from her daughter, Thompson (The Kitchen Garden), Stuart pulls few punches about celebrity friends, including Humphrey Bogart (depicted as a macho thug abusive to women), Groucho Marx (a ""cheap, chintzy, unfeeling bastard"") and M.F.K. Fisher (a bigoted snob). She is winningly frank in accounts of Sheekman's obsessive jealousy, which almost derailed their marriage; of creating and designing an erotic art book, Eve-Venus, at age 76; and of carrying on a torrid romance with publisher/poet Ward Ritchie from 1982 until his death 14 years later. Stuart unfortunately says very little here about her political activism--she was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild in 1933 and of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936. But her sassy, disarming self-portrait is a class act. Photos. Author tour. (Sept.)