Francesca Emerson
Author & Activist
How do we achieve this, that is the question and I don't have an answer.
I wake up each and every day with the joy and expectation of enjoying a new day and sharing that day with whoever I come in contact with a smile, polite conversation and respect if everyone would just make that simple effort every time they meet someone, whether they are a stranger, family or friend, the world would be a better place to live in”. Francesca gifts us with her story of hope!
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Francesca Emerson has been a woman of firsts since the day she was born. One of the first black Playboy Bunnies, the first black female assistant film editor and the first black real-estate broker in Selma Alabama. And the life she led to achieving her goals is the stuff of Hollywood mythology. In her tell-all autobiography, Francesca takes us on a helter-skelter journey into the star-studded land of movies and movie stars at a time before #metoo and the woke wandered the Earth.
Francesca Emerson, now in her 79th year, has written her life which reads more like a movie script than a beautiful black woman’s single-handed determination to rise from a childhood in a Harlem ghetto, to reach the highest levels of the creative machine that drives Hollywood.
Francesca has seen it all, done it all, and tells it all in The Chocolate Bunny. From being a lover and confidant to some of the most handsome and talented actors, directors, and writers in the world, to being the unwilling moll of a New York Mobster, to marrying a psychotic soldier while still a schoolgirl and narrowly escaping death at his hands. Francesca’s life would be a great work of fiction were it not absolutely true.
Now retired and living between Sydney, Australia, and Selma, Alabama Francesca takes time to reflect on her amazing life….a life which she now shares with readers in her extraordinary autobiography, The Chocolate Bunny.
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There are many autobiographies written by Hollywood movie stars, directors, and writers…..but it’s often difficult to tell what’s true and what’s wishful thinking. But when Francessca set out to write her life story, she had only one thing in mind, and that was to tell the whole unvarnished truth about herself, and the extraordinary times which she experienced.
There are amazing vignettes in her book which define the raw fleshy glamour of the ’60s / 70’s Hollywood, from Leonard Cohen serenading Francesca in a Chinese restaurant to Omar Sharif’s “lady in red”, the original celebrity stalker. There are also heart-rending accounts of what it was like to be a woman of color in the ’50s and the reality of hard-fought right of choice before the enlightenment of the sexual revolution.
Read her life story in The Chocolate Bunny, and you’ll never be able to see a Hollywood movie again without wondering what went on behind-the-scenes.