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Jeff Bridges taught her how to drive in his Volkswagen bus. Steven Spielberg refused to flirt with her. She successfully talked the actor Rip Torn out of assaulting the director Nicolas Roeg on a movie set. While lying on a beach in Mexico with the painter Ed Ruscha, she was grazed by a stray bullet on the thigh. Once, she pinched David Bowie’s nipples.
In Los Angeles, a city built on oversize lore and swaggering legend, where does one file away stories like these? Revealing but not gossipy. Candid but not lurid. Occasionally surreal but consistently sweet.
Candy Clark, a former actress who wears a neat blonde bob and Warby Parker glasses, was nibbling on pita and hummus. Dodging a life of mundane midcentury expectations, she started a modeling career in New York and went on to become a darling of the “New Hollywood” era in the 1970s. During her five decades onscreen, she collected over 80 film and television credits, establishing herself as a ubiquitous face who played mostly free-spirited lovers and burnouts like Debbie Dunham in “American Graffiti,” the part that earned Ms. Clark an Oscar nomination. It was her second-ever acting role.
If she ever begins to doubt that all of these things happened to her, she can flip through the stack of photos she took on a small SX-70 Polaroid camera, which she used to capture life on sets with the likes of John Huston and George Lucas.
Born in Oklahoma and raised “poor” in Fort Worth, Texas, with four younger brothers, Ms. Clark likes to say that her childhood dreams were about attainable things. She wanted to be a secretary receptionist when she grew up. But after a chance encounter with a visitor from New York in 1968, Ms. Clark impulsively bought a $45 one-way plane ticket to the big city. She was 19 years old.
She started out working as a model in department stores, living on 50 cents a day. Eventually, she began modeling for magazines like Seventeen and Ingenue. Now and then she took work as an extra in films (for the free lunch).
The book is “not quite a tell-all,” she admitted. “It’s a tell-some.”
She was a natural actress, Mr. Bridges said. “But she didn’t want to count on having all of her happiness come from an acting career, and she’s had a great one.”
She was watching the Oscars through rented binoculars on the upper decks of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Days later, she scored a chance to audition for Mr. Huston, Mr. Roos and the producer Ray Stark.
But Mr. Roos chased her down, asking her to try a screen test. As she tells it in the book, the good news made her burst into real tears. “I just want to be an extra!” she cried.
She played Faye, the pregnant girlfriend of a struggling young boxer, in “Fat City.” During the shoot, Ms. Clark and a troupe of young actors swigged tequila with Mr. Huston and tried the local Mexican food.
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