Confessions of An Unsuccessful Actor

This memoir-histor by producer-performer-actor-TV critic-teacher, Sidney Eden, reads like a novel and has a Who's Who of the Theatre and the Golden Age of Jazz as cast of characters culled from the author's youthful experiences with Lester "Prez" Young, Charlie "Bird" Parker, Thelonious Monk, the Baroness Nica de Konigswarter, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Lorraine Hansberry, author of "A Raisin in the Sun," singer-songwriter Oscar Brown, actress Diana Sands, the great actor-director Jose Ferrer ("Moulin Rouge" and "Cyrano de Bergerac") Burgess Meredith, Duke Ellington, Tennessee Williams, Larry Parks, Betty Garrett, Edgar Bergen, and the original Mama of Hansberry's famous play, Claudia McNeil. But for the centerpiece the author, who has acted with, directed, and, as a producer, presented some of the biggest stars of stage and screen, recounts the never-been-told story of one of the biggest flops in the history of the American stage, "Kicks & Co.," endorsed by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, among others. Eden's national summer tour of A Raisin in the Sun, along with the unproduced but recorded Miles Davis-Charlie Parker musical, Lookin' For the Man, and the author's adventures in the nascent Sexual Revolution, comprise the remainder of this explicit, highly entertaining, confessional.