Speaking of her cinema career, Jane Powell now admits: ""For thirty-five or forty years, I was a sweet young thing. . .I carried this image far too long."" It would be pleasant to be able to report that Powell, now in her ""late fifties,"" has shed the Miss Goodie-Two-Shoes persona in this autobiography. Unfortunately, try as she may, there is still a tendency to be ""wholesome and sweet and darling"" here. The result is a disappointingly tepid recounting of life in Hollywood during the Golden Age and beyond. Powell is fairly forthcoming in recounting her five marriages, though the reader gets little real idea of what went wrong in most of these alliances. Between the lines, one can discern intimations of career demands superseding domestic concerns. Powell admits to an affair with costar Gene Nelson, but again the details are curiously lacking. Some space is devoted to an ongoing conflict between her and her drink-and-drug-addicted son, but the matter is treated far too sketchily. (The young man in now recovered and they are reconciled.) Even Louis B. Mayer is depicted as a sweet and lovable father figure, Hollywood tales of his nastiness to the contrary. As a contemporary of the likes of Judy Garland, June Allyson, Elizabeth Taylor, Fred Astaire, Jeanette MacDonald, and Debbie Reynolds, Powell must have some interesting anecdotes in her make-up kit. If so, she's not sharing them with her readers. Reticence? Or an ingrained tendency to be inoffensive? Whatever the cause, the result is a pallid self-portrait.