Myself among others

"Ruth Gordon has been an actress since 1915 and her renown and activity on screen and stage have never been greater than they are now [1970], in her 75th year. She has also written successful plays and movies. She is a wife and mother, and she has attracted a staggering number of friends and admirers on two continents. Out of her experiences and particularly out of her fantastic friendships she has written an absolutely distinctive, irrepressibly bright, refreshingly vital and utterly charming book. Since it is a kind of autobiography, Miss Gordon is inevitably the star, but she shares the lights with one of the most fascinating casts ever assembled (see back of jacket). She knows how to convey the essence of things as they were half a century ago--and as they are right now--in the theater and the movies, in Boston and Hollywood, in London and New York, in shops and restaurants, in manners and morals, in the ways people feel and the even more surprising ways they behave. Nobody is like Ruth Gordon, and no book is quite like this one."--Jacket flap. "Features (among others and in no order of appearance, importance or alphabet): Alexander Woollcott, Billie Burke, Florenz Ziegfeld, Helen Hayes, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Moss Hart, Booth Tarkington, Ethel, John & Lionel Barrymore, Jerzy Grotowski, Helen Keller, FDR, Dizzy Gillespie, Lillian & Dorothy Gish, Herbert Bayard Swope, Charles Laughton, Marc Connelly, Jed Harris, Thornton Wilder, Martin Beck, Alice Duer Miller, Harpo Marx, George Bernard Shaw, Dame Edith Evans, George S. Kaufman, Katharine Cornell, Vivien Leigh, Bernard Baruch, John Golden, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Paddy Chayefsky, Edna Ferber, Abe Burrows, Ring Lardner, Henry Fonda, Prince Rainier & Princess Grace, Walter Matthau, Hedda Hopper, Susan Strasberg, Cecil Beaton, Tyrone Guthrie, Ina Claire, Maude Adams, Robert E. Sherwood, Dorothy Parker, Heywood Broun, Somerset Maugham, Pearl White, Otis Skinner, Sydney Greenstreet, Ruth Chatterton, Sacha Guitry, Leslie Howard, David Belasco, Daniel Frohman, Humphrey Bogart, Condé Nast, Don Rickles, Frank Sinatra, Jeanne Eagels, Fiorello LaGuardia, Frank Lloyd Wright, Elsie de Wolfe, Lee Shubert, Cole Porter, René Clair, Jean Renoir, Mia Farrow, Laurence Olivier, André Previn, Raymond Massey, Theda Bara, Anita Loos, Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud, Arnold Rothstein, Alice Longworth, Noël Coward."--Back of jacket.