Customer Reviews

Dancing at Ciro's: A Family's Love, Loss, and Scandal on the Sunset Strip

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this book was so interesting because it took you back in time to a whole different era, very glamorous, even if superficial. her gossip on the stars was really nothing compared to the drama her family played out. she's a strong person and rather than feeling disgusted and sorry for her you really cheer her on for her good sense and survival instinct.

When I ordered this book I thought I was buying an exposé about life at Ciro's in it's heyday, with emphasis on celebrities. Light summer reading, you know.. But this book is not about that and I could not have been more surprised or pleased. Sheila Weller's experiences as an adolescent trying to fit in with the Popular Girls rings so true that I felt like I was in Junior High again, only with her. The painful stories she relates about her family, especially about her father, made me think she must be a wonderfully strong woman to be able to write with such honesty. And with a wry sense of humor threaded throughout, even in the painful parts of her story. I highly recommend this book and look forward to more from this author.

Sheila Weller has told the story of her family lovingly and without self-pity. Although she describes many supremely painful moments - her rejection by her father is foremost - I never had the feeling she was wallowing in the past. She did her homework and the history of her parents and grandparents was more interesting than descriptions of the celebrities who visited Ciro's. We hear enough about celebrities these days. Weller maintains good tension throughout the book. Once I began reading I didn't want to put it down.

I just finished reading Dancing at Ciros by Sheila Weller. The author's uncle ran a nightclub in L.A. that was a hangout for all the top movie stars of that day. Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Judy Garland all spent their evenings in Ciros night club.

Weller's mother wrote for movie magazines of the day and her father was a surgeon. It seemed like an ideal life, but there were cracks in the foundation and Weller's world fell apart when her dad started dating his sister-in-law. Her dad left her mother and indeed the whole family. Weller's rich life style evaporated as she faced the pain of a broken family.

While I am not the child of divorce, I did grow up in the 1950's so this was in many ways a story about the world where I grew up. Sometimes Weller's memories brought back good and bad memories of my own.

How difficult it is to write honestly about one's own family, yet on this level--and several others--Sheila Weller triumphs. Her neurosurgeon father, her show-biz-journalist mother, and her uncle Herman, owner of a once-famous nightclub all had careers that had a profound influence on Sheila and her sister Liz.

The author's careful, meticulous documentation of those three livelihoods, plus a "you are there" look at her childhood in Beverly Hills (a decade before my childhood fifteen miles away) paint a many-faceted portrait of her family and the times, with joy and pain and glamour. The untimely deaths, the splits in the family bonds, all are described unflinchingly. Weller even gives a less-than-flattering description of her own girlhood, and how hard she tried to please a reserved father who reluctantly gave her a pet name, Brooksie. She was delighted until he added, "Because you babble."

An admirable effort from Sheila Weller. And bless her and her sister, for coming out whole!

During the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood's golden era coincided with the height of going out on the town for a night of dinner and dancing. And if you lived in Los Angeles and were lucky enough to be able to afford it, one of the places you might have gone is the legendary Ciro's nightclub on the Sunset Strip. Ciro's was at the apex of glamorous Hollywood nightclubs and probably there is nobody better to tell its story than Sheila Weller whose mother was a Hollywood gossip columnist and whose uncle managed Ciro's. But more than just an account of a ritzy nightclub, Weller's book is a thoughtfully written memoir of family life during an era upon which so much invention and ballyhoo was heaped.

Maybe its just me ,but I had a hard time getting into this book. I have read all of the author's other books and really enjoyed them but found this to be a very slow read!!