Who would have thought that an acting career that began as a teenage star on "The Mickey Mouse Club" would lead to the role of assistant to Southern California crime-boss Mickey Cohen? King of the Sunset Strip takes readers through the author's dramatic Hollywood story to the curtain call that eventually led him out of the life of crime.
Consider this book your ticket to a private screening. Take a seat as the lights go down. The projector rolls, and that familiar sign on the hill fills the screen: H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D.
But this Hollywood is different from the one most people know, and few know Hollywood better than Steve Stevens. He will tell you, "It's everything you've ever heard about it, and more." It's also less, especially if you're not part of the glamour and glitter of the film capital.
As a kid, Stevens literally snuck through a hole in a studio wall onto a movie set-and immediately into a job. That serendipitous bit of good fortune resulted in a career in Hollywood filled with great memories and friends. But that's another book.
King of the Sunset Strip is about striving and thriving in Hollywood when it was still the Hollywood it imagined it was: a world of glamour and affluence dominated by the heads of film studios, the directors and producers, and their product-the stars and their films. It was all an attractive illusion. Just like a movie set.
Just beneath the surface, however, lay another strata. There you could find the enticements that supposedly were not available in top-drawer Hollywood: gambling, sex, drugs, pornography-just about anything you couldn't buy over the counter, along with a colorful cast of individuals who were more than willing to sell them.
That's what this story is all about: a two-year real-life audition with Hollywood's most powerful and charismatic mob boss, Mickey Cohen. It's about how Stevens got the part, how he got "into" the mob and eventually got "out"-just barely. Beginning with the casting call that resulted in his association with Cohen, King of the Sunset Strip takes readers through the excitement to the curtain call that eventually got him out of a life of crime.
As Steve is fond of saying, "It's all about luck and timing." And it's our good luck as much as his that he is still here to tell the story as he lived it.
