I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir
*Starred Review* Grant, the Academy Award–winning actor who segued into directing in the 1980s, was fired weeks into directing a Bruce Willis movie in the late 1990s (the movie was subsequently shut down). While it definitely wasn’t the blow to her professional life as was being blacklisted for a dozen years, thanks to HUAC’s Communist witch hunt in the 1950s, readers of this no-holds-barred autobiography can tell that it really rankled. That’s the thing: Grant doesn’t make us read between the lines here; it’s all right there, on the page. When she was jubilant after winning an Oscar for her supporting role in Shampoo, we know it; when she was disgusted, as when a television network canceled her series without telling her, we know it, too; and, of course, when she was dismayed and bewildered and depressed when she couldn’t find work during her 12-year blacklisting, we know it for sure. The title, incidentally, comes from a piece of career advice she once received and which she followed with great enthusiasm once the blacklist era was over, advice that led her to take on such diverse projects as the TV series Peyton Place (for which she won an Emmy) and such films as In the Heat of the Night, Valley of the Dolls, and Portnoy’s Complaint. An excellent show-business autobiography. --David Pitt