«Hidden in a compartment of my grandmother’s bottom dresser drawer was an old scrapbook. Pressed inside were photographs of a beautiful young woman and hundreds of newspaper clippings about vaudeville shows and the movie industry. This is how I learned about my great aunt, Ruby Adams. As a child, I combed through the items that chronicled her life as a vaudeville headliner—her success and her tragedy.»
So begins this novel set in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Prohibition and vaudeville in San Francisco in 1925. Waiting in the Wings tells the story of Ruby Adams, a vaudeville actress and jazz virtuoso with the Will King Follies. As she stands in the wing, waiting to go on stage of the Strand Theater an incident occurs that changes the course of her life.
With the support of her fiancé, a successful speakeasy owner, Ruby and her attorney battled unscrupulous theater owners, a shady attorney, and the corruption of city government to reveal the truth and motives that prematurely took away her career but not her spirit.
What happens next is an unbelievable response which is both tragic and uplifting. Prohibition, the heyday of the 1920s, a burgeoning movie industry, political corruption, graft and fraud all combine to paint an intriguing picture of San Francisco in the 1920s.This human history highlights one person’s fight for survival and the compulsion of greed.
