Dancing at Ciro's: A Family's Love, Loss, and Scandal on the Sunset Strip

By Sheila Weller

Book Overview

In 1958, young Sheila Weller was living a charmed life with her family in Beverly Hills. Her father was a brilliant and charismatic brain surgeon. Her mother was a movie-magazine writer whose brother owned Hollywood's most dazzling nightclub, Ciro's. Then Sheila Weller's world exploded. After she witnessed her uncle's frenzied physical assault on her father, a whole store of family secrets and dramas unfolded, rivaling those that transpired in the nightclub's dressing room and banquettes every night. Weller has written a deeply felt memoir of her family's richly accomplished but ultimately tragic life, contrasted with those most glamorous days of Hollywood's golden era. While vividly describing Lana Turner's, Frank Sinatra's, and Sammy Davis Jr.'s evenings---and breakdowns---at Ciro's, she captures a whole subgroup of American dreamers: the New York Jews who bounded from Brooklyn to Broadway and finally to Hollywood. They expected that success and proximity to glamour would erase centuriesof anxiety and melancholy---but often discovered they'd only found a higher ledge from which to fall. Weller seamlessly weaves a history of the American nightclub into the saga of an unforgettable family that, while fatally flawed, is never whiny or "dysfunctional." The dreamy grandeur of Hollywood in the forties and the dark tensions of the fifties come alive through the pages and through the characters, for whom love---and the very idea of family---is almost biblica

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312241763
• ISBN13: 9780312241766
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.9" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Just a wonderful book, on many levels

How difficult it is to write honestly about one's own family, yet on this level--and several others--Sheila Weller triumphs. Her neurosurgeon father, her show-biz-journalist mother, and her uncle Herman, owner of a once-famous nightclub all had careers that had a profound influence on Sheila and her sister Liz.The author's careful, meticulous documentation of those three livelihoods, plus a "you are there" look at her childhood in Beverly Hills (a decade before my childhood fifteen miles away) paint a many-faceted portrait of her family and the times, with joy and pain and glamour. The untimely deaths, the splits in the family bonds, all are described unflinchingly. Weller even gives a less-than-flattering description of her own girlhood, and how hard she tried to please a reserved father who reluctantly gave her a pet name, Brooksie. She was delighted until he added, "Because you babble."An admirable effort from Sheila Weller. And bless her and her sister, for coming out whole!

A wonderful surprise!

When I ordered this book I thought I was buying an exposé about life at Ciro's in it's heyday, with emphasis on celebrities. Light summer reading, you know.. But this book is not about that and I could not have been more surprised or pleased. Sheila Weller's experiences as an adolescent trying to fit in with the Popular Girls rings so true that I felt like I was in Junior High again, only with her. The painful stories she relates about her family, especially about her father, made me think she must be a wonderfully strong woman to be able to write with such honesty. And with a wry sense of humor threaded throughout, even in the painful parts of her story. I highly recommend this book and look forward to more from this author.

kept me on my toes

this book was so interesting because it took you back in time to a whole different era, very glamorous, even if superficial. her gossip on the stars was really nothing compared to the drama her family played out. she's a strong person and rather than feeling disgusted and sorry for her you really cheer her on for her good sense and survival instinct.

Fascinating

Sheila Weller has told the story of her family lovingly and without self-pity. Although she describes many supremely painful moments - her rejection by her father is foremost - I never had the feeling she was wallowing in the past. She did her homework and the history of her parents and grandparents was more interesting than descriptions of the celebrities who visited Ciro's. We hear enough about celebrities these days. Weller maintains good tension throughout the book. Once I began reading I didn't want to put it down.