Miss Rona; An Autobiography

[6], 281, [1] pages. Illustrations. Slight soiling to fore-edge, some scratches to DJ, some wear to DJ edges. Presentation copy signed by the author. Rona Barrett (born Rona Burstein, October 8, 1936) is an American gossip columnist and businesswoman. She runs the Rona Barrett Foundation, a non-profit organization in Santa Ynez, California, dedicated to the aid and support of senior citizens in need. As a teenager, she overcame a degenerative hip condition that made walking extremely difficult, and organized fan clubs for popular singers she admired, such as Eddie Fisher and Steve Lawrence.[2] She became a gossip columnist for the Bell-McClure Syndicate in 1957, and soon went to work for Bob Marcucci, the manager for teen idols Frankie Avalon and Fabian. In 1966, she began broadcasting Hollywood gossip on the Los Angeles television station KABC-TV. She could be seen on TV regularly, appearing on ABC's five owned and operated stations around the country. She developed the first in-depth personal TV specials about film, television, music, sports and political celebrities, and she had a series of magazines on the entertainment industry that were top-rated at newsstands, including Rona Barrett's Hollywood: Nothing but the Truth, published by Laufer Media. In 1991, she retired from the media and moved to her ranch in Santa Ynez, California, where she devoted her time running the Rona Barrett Foundation, an advocacy group for underserved senior citizens. This is a refreshing, open, and insightful autobiography of an individual who exercised significant influence on 'popular culture' for a major portion of the final quarter of the Twentieth Century.…