Dancing at Ciro's: A Family's Love, Loss, and Scandal on the Sunset Strip
Veteran journalist Sheila Weller's childhood memoir is as starkly compelling as it is emotionally and historically complex, lifting the veil on a life of rarified privilege. Weller's father was a pioneering Los Angeles neurosurgeon, her mother the acclaimed Hollywood gossip columnist Helen Hover, and uncle Herman Hover owned Tinseltown's most famous nightspot, Ciro's. Nonetheless, Weller reveals a childhood haunted by dysfunction and denial, a hidden familial drama played out in the idyllic village that was Beverly Hills in the '40s and '50s, and one that segues to dark tragedy as it wends inexorably toward a final act scarred by scandal and life-shattering violence. Weller's richly detailed, emphatic prose skillfully interweaves ruminations on the phenomenon of American Jewish reinvention that drove her family of overachievers, with observations on the Old Hollywood movers and shakers who were her neighbors, friends, and casual acquaintances--reminiscences that are all the more poignant filtered through the wondrous eyes of a child. No mere star-studded autobiography, Weller's work here is framed by an almost palpable sense of personal exorcism and, crucially, a quest for ultimate familial redemption. It's an enlightening personal journey, one whose troubling tales of domestic disconnection may seem all-too-empathetic to many, yet one that ultimately finds a place of warm, if bittersweet, understanding.--Jerry McCulley