An Affair to Remember: My Life with Cary Grant By Maureen Donaldson With William Royce
An Affair to Remember: My Life with Cary Grant
A Revealing, Deeply Intimate Portrait of a Hollywood Legend Through the Eyes of His Final Partner
A Revealing, Deeply Intimate Portrait of a Hollywood Legend Through the Eyes of His Final Partner
Bibliographic Specifications
- Title: An Affair to Remember: My Life with Cary Grant
- Author: Maureen Donaldson with William Royce
- Publisher: Macdonald & Co., London / Sydney
- Publication Date: 1983
- ISBN-10: 035617638X
- ISBN-13: 9780356176383
- Edition Details: First UK Edition, Standard Hardcover Release.
- Binding: Original publisher's premium cloth boards with crisp gold-stamped title lettering along the spine.
- Physical Format: Octavo (8vo), 288 pages. Enhanced with 16 distinct leaves of plates containing rare, candid personal photographs from the author's private archive.
- Language: English
Official Condition Report
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The Book: Very Good Plus (VG+)
- Exterior / Boards: The original publisher's cloth casing is in an excellent, robust condition. The boards are flat and square, displaying only microscopic perimeter surface wear. The spine remains completely straight, pristine, and undamaged.
- Interior: The internal text block is completely secure, tight, and cleanly maintained. Pages are structurally perfect, fully intact, and completely free of text underlining, highlighting, dog-ears, or dealer pencil marks.
- Ageing Note: Shows natural, uniform tanning and browning across the page block margins, completely typical and expected for British paper stock allocations from this specific printing era.
- Preservation: The volume has been meticulously maintained and looked after thus far, fully housed inside a protective, archival-grade clear Cellophane cover to prevent handling damage.
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The Dust Jacket: Very Good Plus (VG+)
- Condition: The original unclipped pictorial dust jacket is vibrant and complete. It exhibits some very limited signs of wear, such as soft friction along the upper edge extremities. It lies entirely flat and smooth beneath the protective clear Cellophane wrapper.
Synopsis & Historical Value
An Affair to Remember: My Life with Cary Grant provides a sensitive, unvarnished, and deeply authentic behind-the-scenes look at the private life of classic Hollywood's ultimate matinee idol. As the woman who shared the final years of his life, former photojournalist Maureen Donaldson witnessed sides of Cary Grant that the public never saw.
Co-authored with William Royce, the memoir chronicles their intense four-year relationship in Los Angeles from 1973 to 1977. Donaldson explores the deep complexities of Grant's private world, balancing his unmatched charm and devotion to his daughter with his private battles—including his struggles with maternal abandonment, his experimental therapeutic use of LSD, and his emotional boundaries. Moving past standard tabloid gossip, this volume serves as a critical, highly collectible biographical resource for cinema historians and Golden Age Hollywood enthusiasts.
Author Profiles
- Maureen Donaldson: A British-born photographer and former media personality who established a successful career capturing intimate, candid celebrity portraiture in Los Angeles during the 1970s and 1980s.
- William Royce: A professional biographer and ghostwriter specializing in meticulously researched accounts of twentieth-century entertainment history and celebrity culture.
an affair to remember maureen donaldson cary grant 1989 first edition hardcover macdonald biography hollywood memoir vintage cinema book used collectible very good copy 9780356176383
