How I Lost 10 Pounds In 53 Years

From burlesque to vaudeville to big bands and nightclubs, from movies to television to Broadway, Kaye Ballard has seen it all and done it all. Now she tells it all, in a gossipy, upbeat memoir filled with great anecdotes about hanging out at the Actor’s Studio with Marlon Brando, playing Greenwich Village cabarets in the 1950s, performing with Lenny Bruce at the Hungry I, doing live television in the 1950s and The Mothers-in-Law in the 1960s.

Meeting Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand, Doris Day, Judy Garland, Rogers and Hammerstein, Paul Lynde, Jimmy Durante, Bert Lahr, and practically everyone else in showbiz in the last sixty years, through the eyes and distinctive voice of the inimitable Kaye Ballard. Affectionate, amazing, and impossible to put down, How I Lost 10 Pounds in 53 Years is a wonderful tribute to a well-loved trouper and her times. Includes more than 100 never-before-seen archive photos.

Kaye Ballard, star of stage, screen, and recording studio, has been in show business for more than sixty years. In 1946, when she was a movie usher, Spike Jones hired her right out of the aisles. In the following years, she sang with big bands, starred in The Golden Apple, Oklahoma!, Carnival, and many other shows on Broadway and off, appeared on the cover of Life, headlined the classic sitcom The Mothers-in-Law with Eve Arden, and acted in countless movies. Today she travels with her own one-woman shows, makes movies, and tours. She lives in Palm Springs, CA

To be published by Backstage Books, February 2007, RRP £16.99, ISBN 978-0-8230-8478-4.