Lovers and adulterers, heroes and harlots, gossips and thieves, and maybe the occasional ghost (and certainly skeletons in the closets), the Miller and Baker families had their share, and Tom Miller, writing as Tom Canford, is willing to tell all. This memoir, initially written for distribution to family members, had been intended for publication, but the author did not get around to editing it before his death. His friend Jonathan May has managed that feat in part as a gift to Miller family members as well as to all readers intigued by the tale of a boy growing up and life in Southern Illinois and Las Cruces, New Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s (with family tales tall and otherwise taking it back further in time and the author's own musings bringing it well into the early 2000s). Since the author had always thought of himself primarily as a lyricist, a selection from his musical plays and his occasional lyrics appears at the end. The descriptions of life in Southern Illinois, particularly Carrier Mills, in the early part of the last century, and in Las Cruces, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, in the 1930s and later will be of interest especially to people who know those areas and their inhabitants and also to anyone curious about family life and social life of the times. Readers who have met the author through his autobiographical World War II novel Boy at Sea and through A Fever of the Mad, his memoir about working as a publicist on movies with special emphasis on his experiences on Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky and Francis Coppola's The Cotton Club will be pleased to see this earlier version of the Tom they have come to know. His late sister Norma Miller was invaluable to him in providing stories from the past and reminders and refreshers on tales he remembered. Quotations from her diaries and from letters written by various family members and friends add to the pleasure of the work.

Movie publicist Tom Miller, writing under the name Tom Canford, tells of his experience working on films such as Francis Coppola's "The Cotton Club" and Elaine May's "Mikey and Nicky." He provides intriguing insight into the process of movie-making from a privileged position deep inside the productions and also sharp portraits of directors, actors both major and minor, and behind-the-scenes people involved in bringing their films to you. In addition to those mentioned in the subtitle of the work, many other artists and film personnel make their appearance: Robert Mitchum, Paul Newman, Diane Lane, Robert DeNiro, Gregory Hines, Bruce Dern, Lonette McKee, Barrie Osborne, Milena Canonero, Nicolas Cage, Robert Evans, Bobby Zarem, Julian Beck, Gwen Verdon, Herb Ritts, a very young Sophia Coppola. Editor Jonathan May in his introduction and afterword provides further information about the author.

Adored by some, abhorred by others, actress Vilma Valentine is presumed dead after a fiery automobile collision in Mexico, her body never recovered. In the intervening years the fabled star is sighted more often than Bigfoot. Is it her ghost that crashes a party for Ronald Reagan in Juarez, appears at the deathbed of her estranged father in Rome, flees from Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst at the Parthenon?

In 1969 Virginia Dofstader wins the Valentine lookalike contest publicizing "The Curse of Vilma Valentine" by literary heavyweight Gerald Carstairs. In the course of the book's promotion, it is discovered that Virginia's mother looks even more like Vilma than Miss Dofstader does.

As notorious in death as in life, Vilma haunts the imagination of aficionados of 1940s movies. Did she really kill all those husbands? Was she a Nazi spy? Was she truly responsible for the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

Her story, a suspenseful stew of WWII saboteurs, stolen European artworks, murders and massacres, is told in the words of major Hollywood figures-lovers, friends, enemies, and Vilma herself. It's all seasoned with a knowing dose of romantic comedy.

Fronting a country and western band called Bar-X Boys, Jack Linden wants out. The road is a bitch. Bed bugs and Gideon Bibles. Honky-tonks and tricks. He asks a talented kid thirteen years his junior to fill in on guitar for what he hopes will be the band's last hurrah, last tour. Pecos Farley welcomes the opportunity to hear his songs played live and to stretch his songwriting abilities with Jack. He puts his first year of college and girlfriend Ruth on hold. Can Ruth find solace elsewhere? Pecos does have a twin brother, Gila. Sharing lives, beds, and bodies and collaborating on songs, Pecos and Jack find themselves popular on the podunk circuit. Unexpectedly a single song catapults them to the heights of the politically-oriented rock music scene, and they become heroes of the anti-Vietnam war movement as well as rock stars. Pecos, influenced by zealous Students for a Democratic Society, begins thinking like them, spouting their rhetoric. Jack begins to feel he's just along for the ride, a hypnotic with guitar. The relationship is floundering on a more personal level as well, each knowing an inevitable split is coming, neither guessing how final and traumatic it will be.

Kenny Roper has seen too many movies about WWI to hang around and be caught in the draft of WWII. If he goes down, let it be in water and not in trenches. He joins the U. S. Coast Guard. He won't have to go overseas, will he? Guess again, Kenny. You're in for a rude awakening, as well as a riotous and raunchy adventure.'Do you like girls?" he is asked in the examination room. What do they think, he's antisocial? So begins "Boy At Sea," a novel that, as the title suggests, is about conflicted sexuality as revealed through the picaresque adventures of a college freshman-turned-sailor.Kenny meets great guys on ship and on land, but none so intriguing or troubling as blond gunner's mate Blake, stationed aboard the same destroyer escort in the South Pacific.Kenny's travels take him from Wilmington and other parts of California to New York and Boston, Brisbane, Samoa, the Panama Canal Zone and Alaska.He experiences the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in 1943 and the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, but nothing sears itself into his consciousness like his relationship with Blake.