Leona Gage Ex Miss USA Memoir 1st Edition
$80
In stock
Description
My Name Is Leona Gage Won’t Somebody Please Help Me? By Leona Gage ( Miss USA ). Holloway House Publishing, 1965. First Edition, First Printing. H-119.
First edition, first printing of the ghost-written memoir of disgraced Miss USA winner Mary Leona Gage published 8 years after the pageant’s decision to revoke her crown.
Quoting from the back cover, “[Gage’s] beauty attracted brutality; her love, rejection; her tenderness, contempt. Suicide, birth, stardom, drugs, beauty, madness — here is the fantastic true story of Leona Gage, ‘the most beautiful girl in the world,’ at 26 ready for death, ready for life, ready for love — she doesn’t care which!” According to Gage’s later account, however, almost none of the book — with its various, by today’s standards tame sex scenes– is true.
Originally crowned Miss USA at the 1955 pageant, Gage caused a scandal when it was revealed that she was married (but separated) and the mother of two young children, violating the pageant rules limiting entry to the unmarried and childless. After the following media frenzy faded, however, Gage’s struggles with drugs and alcohol proved their own impediments to her later career. Paid only $900 for the rights to her “story” and unable to read the book before publication, it is speculated the release may have had some impact on her suicide attempt in November of the same year.
Decidedly exploitative, featuring Gage wearing only a sheet on a cover labelled “For Adults Only”, it is a time capsule of a more complicated time for unconventional women. Gage died in 2010.
8vo, printed paper wraps, bookseller’s stamp to first free end paper. Pages and bookblock yellowed. Binding tight. Some reading creases to spine with wear along bottom wrap edges. Some scratching to back wrap, with minor crease on front wrap corner. Very good condition.
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