Nita Nolan came to Hollywood in 1921, star-struck, beautiful and broke, like thousands of other young girls who dreamed of becoming the next Mary Pickford, Mabel Normand, or Theda Bara. Nita made her first screen appearance as a pie-throwing cutie in a comedy two-realer, but soon, with the help of comedian Billy Bowers, she became a member of the dazzling, glamorous movie-star world she'd only read about.
Nita learned, however, that Hollywood's glittering surface concealed a morass of depravity and violence unlike anything she'd ever experienced. Drugs, bootleg booze and sexual permissiveness threatened to destroy both her movie career and the new love she'd found with screen idol Eric Gray!
William Edward Daniel Ross, W. E. Daniel "Dan" Ross (born 1912) is a bestselling Canadian novelist from Saint John, New Brunswick who wrote over 300 books in a variety of genres and under a variety of mostly female pseudonyms such as Laura Frances Brooks, Lydia Colby, Rose Dana, Jan Daniels, Ross Olin, Diane Randall, Clarissa Ross, Leslie Ames, Ruth Dorset, Ann Gilmer, Jane Rossiter, Dan Ross, Dana Ross, Marilyn Ross, Dan Roberts, and W.E.D. Ross. As Marilyn Ross he wrote popular Gothic fiction including a series of novels about the vampire Barnabas Collins based on the American TV series Dark Shadows (1966-71).
The story of the early days of Hollywood as seen through the eyes of Nita Nolan, who makes the transition from vaudeville, to the silent movies, to the beginning of the "talkies". Featuring sex, drugs, booze, bootlegging, the casting couch and murder, Nita soon discovers all that glitters is not gold.