Breathing Out

May 30, 2005
Lipton's story is clichd, and her writing's clunky to boot. But that's no matter, because the main reason readers will pick this book up is for its pages on the sexual encounters Lipton--who played the hip chick of TV's undercover Mod Squad in the late 1960s and early '70s--had with Paul McCartney and Elvis. Born in 1947 and raised on Long Island, Lipton was a model at 15 and had started acting classes by the time her family moved to California a few years later. Hanging out in Hollywood, Lipton soon became a mod version of the "it" girl. After ridding herself of her virginity, her first goal was to seduce McCartney. That accomplished, she slept with a series of alcoholic or abusive married men, meanwhile experimenting with a variety of drugs. Her psychedelic adventures with actor Terence Stamp were quintessential Haight-Ashbury; she even had a fling with Elvis: "He was a great kisser," she allows, "but that was about it." In 1974, she married musician Quincy Jones, who didn't want her to work. A full-time mom until their marriage fell apart, Lipton then struggled with depression and debilitating fatigue, finding strength from her guru, Gurumayi, from acting work and from her two beloved daughters. There's a lot of '60s and '70s color--joints smoked in the bathroom, an interracial marriage, a trip to an Indian ashram--but it all boils down to an old-fashioned kiss-and-tell. 16 b&w photos.

April 15, 2005
What do Paul McCartney, Sammy Davis Jr., and Elvis Presley have in common? Peggy Lipton had sex with all of them. Well, Elvis was a little too pumped with drugs to really close the deal. Other high (and low) lights for this nice blond Jewish girl? Stardom on "The Mod Squad," marriage to Quincy Jones, motherhood, spiritual journeys, and a return to television after the marriage broke up.

Lipton is a virtual Zelig, in the background whenever stars gather from the 1970s on. In this memoir, she and her cowriters have managed to make her various encounters into more than mere name-dropping, with each short chapter becoming a small slice of her life.

Alternating between tough and neurotic postures, Lipton describes her childhood sexual abuse, her drug use, the experience of raising biracial children, and in an extremely abrupt ending, her recent bout with colon cancer.

Many readers will not have thought about Lipton for years, yet her story holds our attention both for the life it chronicles and the changing times it encompasses. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)