“Flesh was born in Seattle in 1933. Her mother, Kaye Brinker, was an actress on radio soap operas. Her stepfather, Manfred B. Lee, was the creator and co-author of the Ellery Queen mystery novels, radio and TV shows and movies. She fell in love with dancing after seeing a performance as a child.

At 17, she got “this harebrained idea to go to Paris to study ballet. My parents let me go, but I didn’t study a lot,” she recalled.

She learned enough to win a position with what was then called Ballet Theatre, and she later became part of the corps de ballet for the Chicago Lyric Opera and toured in the DeMille shows with such stars as Zero Mostel, Barbara Cook and Jeanette MacDonald.

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Frederick Kohner’s daughter talks about being “Gidget”, her father’s best-selling book and his screenwriting career.

“Kohner was a screenwriter in Hollywood. In 1939, he was nominated for best writing original story in ‘Mad About Music,’ in which a young woman at a boarding school in Switzerland writes herself letters from an imaginary explorer-adventurer father.

His credits include numerous stories such as ‘Bride for Sale,’ ‘The Men in Her Life,’ and ‘Three Daring Daughters’ that were made into films starring some of the greatest leading ladies of the day, including Loretta Young, Jeanette MacDonald and Rosalind Russell. His style of writing about spunky women was perfectly suited for ‘Gidget,’ and the book became a national bestseller, reaching seventh on the chart, above Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road.’:

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