Ursula Thiess was a remarkable woman. She survived a childhood in Nazi Germany, giving birth to a child in the midst of the World War II bombing of Hamburg, fighting to keep her children alive in the devastation that was Germany at the end of that war. She was ultimately saved by her beauty, working as a model in Europe. Howard Hughes spotted her and brought her to Hollywood.
There she met film legend Robert Taylor. After a difficult and emotional courtship, the two married in May of 1954. The marriage was a good one and they had two children, a son and a daughter. She also had two children by her first husband, German film director Georg Thiess. Ursula Thiess voluntarily cut short her film career to be a full time wife and mother. She was very good at handling the complex Taylor. For instance, he had a reputation for location romances. By spending as much time as possible with him on location, she kept him in line.
Thiess' life fell apart in 1969 when both her eldest son Michael and her husband died in the space of two weeks. Barbara Stanwyck made matters worse by demanding back alimony from Taylor's estate. Robert Taylor was the love of her life but she eventually moved forward. Four years after his death, Thiess married Marshall Schacker, a wealthy film distributor and stayed with him until his death from lung cancer, the same disease that killed Taylor.
After Schacker's death Ursula Thiess devoted herself to her family, hospital volunteer work and painting. The tone of the book is warm and loving, especially when talking about Taylor. The frustration comes from a lack of organization. The book is set at the time Thiess is about to have surgery for a brain tumor and she is looking back at her life. She died in 2010, 41 years after Robert Taylor.
I wish she had had a ghost writer. It is often unclear what year she is talking about. She shifts back and forth, saying for instance that Taylor's personality changed as his disease progressed but doesn't say just when this took place. I'm probably nitpicking but I like this book so much I wanted even more from it. Highly recommended.
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 3, 2017
