First published 2012
Jeanne Cooper opens her life story in the Hollywood Hills, where she still drives to work at CBS Studios three days a week after more than thirty years playing Katherine Chancellor on The Young and the Restless. Cooper traces her path from Taft, California to Los Angeles, where she worked alongside Golden Age stars like Maureen O'Hara, Raymond Burr, and Tony Curtis before finding her television home. She reveals the personal costs of her success: a failed marriage that gave her three children including actor Corbin Bernsen, her struggle with alcoholism, and her battle with breast cancer. Cooper describes how she became reality television's unlikely pioneer when cameras captured her character's facelift surgery live on air. At eighty, she reflects on surviving and thriving in an industry that discards aging women, offering readers her hard-won wisdom about resilience.
Genres: biography, autobiography, biography-memoir
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: overcoming-adversity, personal-journey
Setting: California, Hollywood, Los Angeles, Taft
Period: 20th Century, 21st Century
224 pages · Hardcover · Dey Street Books
Content warnings: addiction, terminal-illness