WHY I FAILED CHARM SCHOOL

Book excerpt: In the words of television and movie actress Tisha Sterling, the daughter of renowned Hollywood actress Ann Sothern: "My cards were dealt generously. From my parents and the good Lord, I inherited beauty and was blessed with a sparkling future. On the surface, I had a life most people could only dream of having." However... "Every morning for four years, I had been swallowing 100 milligrams of methadone, mixed with Kool-Aid from a little white paper cup. Like clockwork, I dressed in yesterday's dirty clothes picked up from my tiny apartment I shared with my 16-year-old daughter and headed for the West Los Angeles Methadone Clinic. That morning what I felt inside: anger, fear and shame. I thought about my mother, a one-time important film actress whose career had flourished from the 1920's to the present time and stupidly compared it to my own career that was by now in the toilet, almost nonexistent. Yet I stubbornly hung on to a glimmer of hope (maybe my only salvation) that some successful auditions for me on television and film would be forthcoming and that soon I would be back to work on a Hollywood set doing what I did best acting." And thus Tisha begins her heartfelt memoir chronicling what on the surface appeared to be a dream life as Ann Sothern's daughter, but which at times was precisely the opposite. Along the way, Tisha paints an intimate portrait of Hollywood and its personalities during Hollywood's bygone Golden Age in the 1930s through the 1960s, a portrait that only one who lived and worked inside the Hollywood of that glamorous era could present. "