Old Hollywood Memoirs To Add To Your Reading List

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These days, writing a tell-all seems to be just another box on the public figure career revival checklist. Auditions drying up? Write a memoir. Latest album tanking? Write a memoir. Win a reality show? Somehow, still write a memoir. With the shelves so clogged, it can be hard to find a celebrity memoir that's actually a great, well-written book. Sure, the occasional "Becoming" or "I'm Glad My Mom Died" continues to make a splash, but the story of the perks and pitfalls of fame has been told so many times that it's rare to find anything new to say about it.

Back in the day, however, that wasn't the case. The importance placed on maintaining the fantasy at all costs created a culture of secrecy in Hollywood, forcing stars to choose between speaking their truths and keeping their jobs. Only the bravest dared to take a stand — as well as the most talented, whose positions in Tinseltown were more secure. That's good news for readers, because their books tend to be better, too.

Debbie Reynolds may have waited until nearly the end of her life to tell her story, but that just means she had plenty of stories to tell. "Unsinkable" is packed to the brim with anecdotes from filming such iconic movies as "Singin' in the Rain," when Reynolds learned to dance in just six months from Gene Kelly himself, and received the enormous privilege of watching Fred Astaire rehearse after Astaire found her crying in exhaustion one day. Remember the kaleidoscopic quality of those old Busby Berkeley musicals? Reynolds reveals the director filmed them on a crane 100 feet in the air, from which he often fell in a drunken haze. "We'd just run forward and catch him," she wrote, with her trademark moxie (via NPR).

Of course, the question anyone halfway familiar with Reynolds' life is dying to have answered is, "What about Elizabeth?" In case you didn't know, Reynolds' first husband, Eddie Fisher, left her for her best friend, Elizabeth Taylor, in one of Old Hollywood's biggest public scandals. Readers will be delighted to find that Reynolds is both candid and wry about the situation. She writes in eloquent detail about how and why she knew Fisher and Taylor wouldn't last — "and that's exactly what happened, which gave me at least a little comfort," she gibed — as well as her genuinely wholesome reconciliation with Taylor years later.

Lauren Bacall was an award-winning actor, but perhaps more pertinent to fans of celebrity memoirs, she was also one-half of the original Bennifer. In "By Myself," first published in 1978 and updated in 2005, she spends plenty of time on both. From her plucky beginnings to Hollywood stardom to Broadway success, she chronicles her remarkable career, but she spares no words on her relationship with frequent costar and husband Humphrey Bogart, which began when she was only 19 and he was a married 44-year-old and ended with his heartbreaking death from esophageal cancer.

The real dish, however, might be Bacall's insider info on the celebrities she didn't marry, chiefly Frank Sinatra. Their engagement in the wake of Bogart's death ended so acrimoniously that we can't print the epithets she uses to describe him. She has warmer but no less insightful words for the friends she made as "Bogie and Bacall," the go-to Hollywood power-hosting couple, which included neighbor Judy Garland (whom Bacall describes as a "complicated woman," per Vanity Fair) and BFF Katharine Hepburn.

Of course, no Hollywood story is more sought-after than Marilyn Monroe's. In fact, the events that led to the publication of her autobiography, "My Story," are almost as intriguing as its contents. Monroe hired prolific screenwriter Ben Hecht as her collaborator in the mid-fifties, but their manuscript languished for 20 years after a deal with Doubleday fell through. Monroe subsequently entrusted it to her business partner, Milton Greene, who only decided to move forward with its publication 12 years after her death.

That might be for the best; had Monroe published her musings on her life and career at the time that she wrote them, the 1950s audiences who saw her as little more than a sex symbol may have been shocked out of their bobby socks. She writes with surprising perception and forthrightness about her abusive childhood, teenage marriage, impoverished early career, and the men (she calls them "wolves") who became her promoters and predators, occasionally at the same time. The book ends as abruptly as her life did, but she left us a wealth of material from which to fill in the gaps.

If all you know about Charlie Chaplin is his funny walk and retrospectively unfortunate mustache, you might be surprised to learn he's a controversial figure in his own right. He was married four times, including to the daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill when she was barely 18 and more than three decades his junior, and he was all but exiled from the U.S. when he was accused of being a communist sympathizer in the '50s. That's right: It wasn't the teenage wife that destroyed his career. It was a different time.

But all of that is confined to the far back end of "My Autobiography." What really makes it worth reading is Chaplin's account of his impoverished childhood in Victorian England with an alcoholic father and troubled mother, which more than one reviewer declared to be downright Dickensian in both form and content. Reading between the lines, including what a contemporary New York Times review describes as his "awkward and naive" manner and obsession with money, further provides more illumination of the Little Tramp than a more straightforward report of his scandals ever could.

Having earned a degree in history and philosophy at a time when women rarely went to university at all, it seemed more likely that Katharine Hepburn would find success in publishing than Hollywood, so it's no surprise that her 1991 autobiography tops our list of old Hollywood memoirs. It's not her literary talents that draw in the reader, however; in fact, her writing is rambling to the point of endearing in its carelessness.

That was the whole point, as far as Hepburn was concerned: casting off her public image as an untouchable to reveal the prickly, passionate, and definitely flawed woman underneath. To that end, she tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth (or at least as much as she cares to know) about everything from her brother's devastating death in their youth to all the details of her plastic surgery procedures. Amazingly, "Me" was actually a follow-up to Hepburn's first memoir, "The Making of the African Queen; Or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind," which sounds pretty rad, too.

In choosing the the best old Hollywood memoirs, we searched Reddit and Goodreads for recommendations. We selected titles written by actors who starred in at least one movie before 1958, cited by film historians as the unofficial end of the Hollywood studio system, with an average Goodreads review score of at least 3.5. Each title was given a score consisting of its average review score multiplied by the number of ratings it received, ensuring both quality and popularity, and then listed in ascending order.