Amazon.com Review
My Secret Mother is a delicious blend of memoir and mystery. Richard de Mille, Cecil B. DeMille's adopted son (Cecil contracted his last name to make it easier for moviegoers to remember), recalls a happy childhood set in a house full of children against a backdrop of early Hollywood. De Mille learned early that he was adopted, along with two other siblings, but his loving parents rendered this fact a mere triviality to the boy. Soon, however, he was troubled by his striking resemblance to his paternal grandfather. Incidents in which schoolboy friends and caretakers claimed to know "something" about him only enhanced his curiosity about the circumstances of his birth. He believed he might have been his father's illegitimate son, accepted into the family by his even-tempered mother. It was not until 1955, when he was in his 30s, that de Mille learned his history: he was, in fact, the son of his paternal "uncle," William, and the novelist and silent-film scenarist Lorna Moon. But solving the mystery of his origins revealed yet another enigma: Moon.
In My Secret Mother, de Mille sets out on a journey to discover his mother, dead for 25 years, and in the process uncovers a history of two families that stretches as far back as Belgium in the first century B.C. on his father's side and the hardscrabble village of Strichen, Scotland, on his mother's. Part genealogy, part homage to a lost mother, part portrait of one of Hollywood's most powerful families and enduring legacies, My Secret Mother is an engrossing study of one man's attempt to solve the mystery of identity.
From Booklist
Richard DeMille grew up as the adopted son of Cecil B. DeMille in a wealthy and indulgent household. The strong physical resemblance that he bore to the DeMilles had always led him to believe that he was Cecil's illegitimate son. When he was in his thirties, he was told that he was the son of Cecil's brother William and screenwriter Lorna Moon. To avoid scandal, Richard waited until Cecil's death several years later before actively seeking information about his birth mother. He found two siblings, also abandoned by their mother, and an entire family in Scotland and Canada. The author does a scholar's job of tracing the DeMille family back to the early 1600s and the Lows (Lorna's family) back to 1802. He describes life in the powerful DeMille household during those early Hollywood years and the rather humdrum existence of the Scottish/Canadian working class. Lorna, born Nora, was no heroine, despite what her son would like us to believe; instead, she was a woman born in a time not tolerant of her unconventional behavior and dead too soon. Danise Hoover
