Hollywood Mother of the Year: Sheila MacRae's Own Story

by Sheila Macrae, H. Paul Jeffers

He was the handsome, velvet-voiced heartthrob of Oklahoma!, Carousel, and a dozen other Hollywood musicals. She was his loving wife and stage partner, and theirs was a storybook romance. They had four children, success in show business, money and fabulous friends--Sinatra, Lucy and Desi, movie moguls, top stars, royalty, and some of the biggest names in politics. Yet, behind the glitz and the glamour lurked tragedy. And in Hollywood Mother of the Year, Sheila MacRae reveals how her ideal marriage fell apart...and how she put her life back together. Gordon MacRae was a reckless alcoholic and compulsive gambler whose film career was on the skids. Sheila faced the private heartbreak of Gordon's binges and sudden disappearances, his gambling debts and the hounding of the IRS as it sought to recover unpaid taxes. And when, at last, the marriage reluctantly ended in divorce, a woman who had always been "Mrs. Gordon MacRae" suddenly had to begin a life on her own and search for her own identity. In this candid and memorable autobiography Sheila reveals how she picked up the pieces. For a time she starred as Alice Kramden on "The Honeymooners" with Jackie Gleason, and eventually launched "The Sheila MacRae Show, " a syndicated TV talk show. Hollywood Mother of the Year is peppered throughout with Sheila's compelling remembrances involving the stars of Hollywood--from Shirley Jones to Frank Sinatra (who became Sheila's lover)--and an unforgettable scene in which President Lyndon Johnson tried to bed her in the White House. And throughout this remarkable story of a woman striving to find herself, there is always Gordon MacRae--her first, true love--and the touching, moving end of his life.

Genres: Biography

271 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1992

Reviews

[Lisa]

Oh, Lord. Where to start with this mess.
First: It jumped all over the place. At one point she's talking about the first time she had sex with a particular guy, and I'm thinking, Wait, you were married to him a few chapters ago...Oh, have we gone back in time? Totally unclear.
Second: Typos galore. Too many to list (like "apparantly"), but Dan Dailey's name was spelled two different ways in one paragraph, and her second son was called "Gar" and "Garr."
Third: Factual errors. She stated that Van Heusen and Cahn wrote "Young at Heart," and they did not. That one I knew without Googling, so there may be others I didn't know.
Fourth: Gordon MacRae was never all that and a bag of chips. To call him the "World's Greatest Singer" is just silly, and to call him that in a sentence that mentions Frank Sinatra is criminal. And If I had to hear him called a "Golden Boy" once again...well, mercifully, the book ended just short of my head exploding.
Fifth: "Sheersie" and "Gordo"?
Last: This book reminded me of Tony Curtis's memoirs, in which he regaled us with tales of all of the women he had sex with. Sheila, instead, lets us know of all of the men who wanted to have sex with her (JFK and LBJ among them), and of her affairs (Bob Fosse, Albert Finney, and many, many others), and all of the men who wanted to marry her (including the aforementioned Mr. Sinatra. When she rebuffed him, he married Mia Farrow the very next day....so she claims.)
OH, and the pictures. Lots and lots of pictures of Sheila, in many many dresses and with many many men. There were some interesting stories about Jackie Gleason and others, but unless you're a hug fan of Gordon or Sheila, you can safely skip these memoirs.

[Stacia]

The thing about memoirs by those who were on the periphery of fame is that they're filled with stories about very famous people that happened to others, but which they now claim as their own. Hollywood Mother of the Year is no different, except that these anecdotes are often so stilted and implausible that they sound like they come straight from the movie Walk Hard. MacRae pads the book with little biographical passages of famous people and descriptions of movies and shows, and glosses over a hell of a lot on the way to her own near-stardom, beginning as her husband Gordon's co-star in a series of stage appearances. Her childhood sounded fascinating but she barely mentions her early life at all, and Gordon's alcoholism, supposedly the centerpiece of this tell-all, is described in vague terms, while her time on a soap opera is excruciatingly detailed. Personally, I was willing to put up with the padding and the ego trips, until she claimed a critic lauded her as "the next Gertrude Lawrence." All in all, it's a fast and easy read, but not the most believable memoir out there.

[Robert Andres]

Very frank.