A Path Lit by Stars : Memoirs
by R. Eric Gustafson
Publication Date: December 17, 2025 | 200 pp.
Paperback: $16.95 USD | ISBN 978-1-58775-062-5
E-Book: $9.99 USD | ISBN 978-1-58775-063-2
About the Book | About the Author | Praise
About the Book
A Path Lit by Stars collects eighty vignettes—elegies and dishes of the famous—paired with photographs, detailing encounters with actors, singers, composers, dancers, visual artists, and political figures. Gustafson tells the tales of the stars who lit his path, with good and bad examples of a life well lived.
About the Author
R. Eric Gustafson and Cyrus in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Santa Fe, NM
From the author’s collection
R. Eric Gustafson has spent his life in the company of art, artists, and the unexpected. Born in the Bronx in 1935, he studied theater at Carnegie Mellon before beginning his career at Parke-Bernet Galleries, advising legendary clients from Greta Garbo to Jacqueline Kennedy.
His curatorial work in New York, Santa Fe, and Italy produced landmark theatre design exhibitions. Museums and universities on both sides of the Atlantic sought his eye.
As founding director of the Apollo Muses Center for the Arts, he created a vibrant haven where celebrated performers and emerging talents met on equal footing. His books-ranging from memoir to travel writing to cultural history—include Cinderella Is a Man, Last Guy Waltzing, and Expect the Unexpected. Having made Santa Fe his home, he continues to chronicle the pleasures, paradoxes, and serendipities of a wide-open life.
Praise for the Work of R. Eric Gustafson
This intriguing modern-day Odyssey about a creative, outrageous, and charming knight errant searching for life’s meaning takes an extraordinary turn. Cinderella Is A Man is a witty, titillating, extremely well-written story with an inspiring, heart-warming denouement.
— Ruth Warrick, actress
If life is an opera, then Eric Gustafson hits all the high notes. He designs the sets and costumes, too, and assembles an all-star cast from across the panorama of modern life. He’s offering readers one of the best seats in the house. A fascinating memoir by a fascinating man.
— Michael Redmond, music critic
In his enchanted kingdom, Eric Gustafson once presented concerts, lectures, exhibitions, and theatricals in intimate, lovely settings imbue with a flavor that is uniquely his. Compassionate, original, vibrant, spontaneous, unpredictable, this flavor carried over to the dinners, balls, fêtes that made Eric’s world as close as one gets these days to the court of his mentor, Louis XIV. To the large and adoring circle who has surrounded him, his ability to tend to what he would call “the Garden of Life” made Eric’s presence a vivid and compelling example of a life of art, which is of course the Art of Living. He swaggered through several careers: New York art and antiques specialist, gallery director, curator of theater designs and museum exhibitions; and, he achieved a unique apotheosis as a Renaissance impresario in New Jersey’s posh central hills as founding director of Apollo Muses Center for the Arts. Author, travel journalist, and lecturer presented him with more hats to don. His bon vivant lifestyle of rubbing elbows with celebrities fueled the peripatetic quest for self-fulfillment. His on-going quest was to connect his life to his dreams. We all share this yearning, and Eric’s experience was a quavering candle in a speeding world that has all too little time or energy for dreams.
— Bruce Whitacre, Executive Director of Theatre Forward
A lifetime’s uncompromising devotion to the arts, threaded with personal insecurity, excess, rehab. And finally, acceptance of a kindly divaship. Courageous and inspiring.
— Valmai Howe Elins, author of he Dreams of Zoo Animals
I admire all that you’ve done to promote art and artists. They are noble efforts and you should be proud of your accomplishments.
— Frederica von Stade, international opera star
‘Knew everyone, went everywhere, and did everything’ might well describe the journey of Bronx-born bon vivant Eric Gustafson. This is likely to be the most intimate peek into the glitz, glamour, and glory — and the perils and pitfalls — of high culture, art, and entertainment you’ve ever read. George Bernard Shaw said he wanted to die all used up. Gustafson is on track to do exactly that, for he has held nothing back.
— Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind
Thanks for your goodwill. friendship, and kind support. I love your personality, wit, and social genius. My best to you always.
— Cyrus Casells, poet
Cinderella Is A Man is a very personal conprmation of the regenerative power of the arts.
— Celeste Holm, Academy Award–winning actress
Eric Gustafson’s remarkable journey from the streets of the Bronx to the elegant haunts of the glittering and famous, an odyssey of self-image molded by the movies, theater, ballet, and opera, is also a cautionary tale of giddy, alcohol-fueled excess, dawning self-awareness and redemption. His tale is both deliciously gossipy and spiritually enlightening. And what more could you ask?
— Jonathan Richards, actor, cartoonist, movie critic, co-author of Nick and Jake
The truly amazing testament to luck, pluck, and greatly-deserved rewards. The pinpoint recall of pin-pricked illusions-unsentimental, smart as a whip-and happily, as well and rightly mastered from the performances of his avowed role model, Mae West, the whip is turned not on self, but on the big cats in the gilded cage. Eric has come through-come out of the cage very much more alive than ever. The big cats can go back to sleep-their roaring is of small interest to us now: we want to see what Eric is going to do next. Bravo!
— Jimmy McCourt, author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz