Andrea King

Andrea King is a Hollywood screenwriter.

I still have the 35-cent Pocketbook paperback. I’m sure it was my mother’s. On the cover is a photo of an exquisitely beautiful, doe-eyed Millie Perkins. Turned up nose. Beautiful lips. I’m not sure when I realized that she wasn’t Anne Frank, that she was the WASPy, idealized Hollywood version from the George Stevens film. But when I finally saw a photograph of the real Anne Frank it all made sense. The eyes. And the nose. And of course the hair. And the realization that while she looked nothing like the actress who portrayed her, she looked a lot like me. And my mother. Her words spoke to me—as a teenager, as a girl. But her face, that face, those eyes—they spoke to me as a Jew.