I won’t compete with several e-book titles I have out which provide biographical material on me. There is volume I of my official bio, “THE FIRST 85 YEARS ARE THE HARDEST,” I became distracted and have to date failed to publish volume II. Then there are my times in music, an avocation, titled, “IT AINT FINE IF IT DON’T RHYME” which offers over 60 years of lyrics plus bits and pieces on artists I’ve recorded or who recorded my songs – folks such as Paul Simon, Carl Perkins, Fred Neil, Lillian Briggs and some 25 others. “THE ZSA ZSA AFFAIR” is also biography, covering a few of my 20 years on Madison Avenue, leading up to the production of a TV commercial with Zsa Zsa Gabor and an aborted partnership in a cosmetics company in her name which we had planned. There is a delicately handled more personal bio, titled, “MY HILARIOUS SEX LIFE” which got some raving reviews but like most ebooks, sad sales. But wait, there’s more. You like biography? I’m a veritable bio machine. My very latest, titled, PANIC IN PERFORMING is a very brief bio of my performing years which is how and where I started in my working life, and which I continued intermittently while multi-tasking, writing, producing, marketing, you name it. In my 89th, year I was called to an audition for a bilingual role in a lozenge commercial, for which, apparently they auditioned from coast to coast. It was for an English and a French version of the same commercial and I figured that would be easy. I spoke French before I learned English, which is really my fifth language. The English version was a breeze but I had spoken Parisian French, not French Canadian, and the director gave me the line in French which sounded like Godforsaken gibberish and I panicked. I’m pretty effective aping dialects or accents but his version sounded so dreadful to me I simply panicked and couldn’t do it. I had never in my life panicked before in the performing arts and this prompted me to review my performing efforts from the age of six on when I did a solo dance performance which got me enough applause to addict me to the habit. The book is partly a psychological self-analysis along with several pages of photos covering a part-time career that started in 1933. And since my motto is – “I grew too old to retire and then became too busy to die,” I look forward to playing an action hero on my 100th birthday. To me, one of the most interesting biographical efforts I put out may be the postscript in my eBook adaptation of my screenplay ONE HUNDRED NAKED GIRLS in which I trace the development of that story over a period of over 40 years. This book adaptation, by the way, is my most constant and best seller among the twelve titles I have.
Interview with Author – Andy Halmay
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