What can I say about Shelley II: The Middle of My Century, that I haven’t already said about Shelley: Also Known as Shirley? For starters, Shelley II takes us further and deeper into the phenomenon that was Shelley Winters. Beginning with her divorce from Vittorio Gassman and ending with JFK’s assassination, Shelley II covers the prime of Winters’ career on stage and screen.
Despite her ill-considered and hasty marriage to Tony Franciosa, who comes off in the book as one of the dumbest (and randiest) mugs to ever hit Sunset Boulevard, Shelley matured as an artist in these years, earning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Mrs. Van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank. I believe, as did her studio, that she could have earned another supporting Oscar in 1963 as Charlotte Haze in Lolita, but she refused to be nominated for anything less than Best Actress and so sat that one out. Anne Bancroft would have been hard to beat that year anyway.
Since this is turning into the era of truth-in-biography, we must ask just how much trust can we put in Winters’ account of her own life. Well, keep this in mind while reading: She insisted she watched the Kennedy assassination live on television.
