The legendary clarinetist and Swing Band leader Artie Shaw talks for the first time with great candor about his musical career at its height, his famous marriages to Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, psychoanalysis, MGM, Roy Eldridge, marijuana and McCarthyism. An intimate self-portrait by the reclusive Shaw drawn from recorded conversations with Aram Saroyan, his friend and neighbor during the late 1980s in Southern California.