Customer Reviews

My Life With Stella Kane

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Linda Morganstein does a great job of portraying the story of Nina and Stella and their growing love for each other at a time when being gay was punished and had to be hidden to exist at all. The book is also filled with wonderful, factual, fascinating details of old Hollywood.

Amos Lassen wrote: I love novels about Hollywood and the movies because we always get some good dish. Linda Morganstein wrote a novel that I could lose myself in and have a great time and that is just what I did with "My Life with Stella Kane". We meet Nina Weiss first when she was a junior at Barnard from an upper-class family; an intellectual nice Jewish girl. In the summer of 1948, Nina takes a summer internship at the Hollywood studio that belongs to her uncle. She finds that that the studio's new discovery, Stella Kane, takes an interest in her. Nina is assigned to "handle" the young actress and act as her publicist and Nina is very business-like--she wants to do her job and go home but the fact that this glamorous soon-to-be movie star is interested causes her to rethink her decision. However she is attracted to Stella as well. Nina is told by Stella at the end of her internship that she will return and she does, but she is a bit different.

She now is able to create positive news about young stars as well as knowing how to keep them out of trouble. "When one of the gay male actors is threatened with having his liaisons exposed, Nina goes to work devising a relationship between Hollace Carter and Stella Kane". In fact the story was so successful that the two actually wed. But something else is going on with Nina--she struggles to deal with her own feelings toward Stella and to accept herself for who she really is. When the struggle is over, Nina and Stella are able to deal with their feelings but everything must be kept under wraps.

Morganstein uses a non-chronological approach to telling the story and I found myself feeling like it was going on all around me.Morganstein takes us into the Hollywood closet when it was closed tight but she does more than that--we are made aware of the politics of Hollywood, of characters and of secrets. From Nina's confession at the start of the book, we go backwards in time and see that so many of the rumors we have heard are true. The book grabs you on the first page and does not let you go for a second. The characters are large while their lives are intimate and Linda Morganstein gives us one great story.