cover image Looking for Gatsby: My Life

Looking for Gatsby: My Life

Faye Dunaway. Simon & Schuster, $24.5 (16pp) ISBN 978-0-684-80841-3

Actress Faye Dunaway had a peripatetic childhood, bounced from Florida's flatlands to Germany, Texas, Utah and back to Florida with a philandering army sergeant father and a mother who instilled in her a desire to be the best. Born Dorothy Faye, the struggling Broadway actress became a film star overnight in the mid-1960s. Through two marriages--to J. Geils Band lead singer Peter Wolf, then to her manager, film producer Terry O'Neill--and through love affairs with actor Marcello Mastroianni, director Jerry Schatzberg and others, Dunaway struggled to balance her career and personal life and to overcome emotional patterns set during her rootless girlhood, which taught her ``not to care too deeply.'' ``In many ways,'' she writes, her father, John MacDowell Dunaway, ``was my Gatsby.... It's my love that transforms him.... They say when Gatsby smiles at you, you feel as if he believes in you just as you would like to believe in yourself.'' For all its moments of disarming candor, this star-studded autobiography (written with New York Times Los Angeles correspondent Sharkey) remains a self-conscious, guarded performance. Photos. First serial to Cosmopolitan; author tour. (Nov.)