THE MEMORY OF ALL THAT

Stage and screen actress Blair follows her own muse—as a professional actor and committed leftist—in this ever-surprising memoir.

At the age of 16, Blair answered a call for dancers, where she met the young Gene Kelly. They married a year later. She might have been a child bride, but she was also her own person, someone who “voiced bumptious left-wing opinions, wasn't smothered in lipstick, and made a social gaffe by not retiring with the ladies,” at a formal dinner. Her progressive inclinations gave her pause when she considered her privileged position; Kelly's star was on a meteoric rise, they were living in Beverly Hills, and their relationship was pretty darn fine: “What I want,” he told her, “is what I have—you—to pick flowers and read by the fireplace and sing around the house.” Blair's acting career was moving forward as well, but more so was her work with leftist groups, including the Actor's Lab, that “nest of Reds.” The HUAC came calling: Welcome to the blacklist, Miss Blair. But Senator McCarthy wasn't the only snake in her garden. Of the first love affair of several that would end two marriages, she remarks: “I have to admit that I loved it, the secrecy, the adventure, the danger, the sheer wickedness. . . . I felt free—I owned my own body. . . . I didn't belong to anyone.” She never gives the impression that her husbands felt she did belong to them, but it is part of the parcel of the unshrinking Blair's search to understand her life and get her feelings on paper: her guilt, or the lack of it, the nature of her friendships, the studio system, transformation in acting roles (Marty won her a Golden Palm), calling a spade a spade.

Tart and emotional, with the right degree of circumspection for the parties concerned—or at least those who deserve it. (96 photographs)