Celebrity News

Charlotte Rae reveals all the ‘Facts’

Charlotte Rae, best known for playing Edna Garrett on “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life,” is shopping a memoir called “The Facts of My Life.” The book describes how she discovered her husband of 25 years, composer John Strauss, was gay. Rae and Strauss, who won a Grammy for the soundtrack to “Amadeus,” had just moved into a new house in LA when he confessed he was gay and had been unfaithful. “First came the shock of what he had done behind my back, then the sting of being deceived for years,” she writes. “All I could feel was the betrayal and, worse than that, my shame.” The pair, married in 1950, had two kids and divorced in 1975 after Strauss came out to her. Strauss died in 2011. “John’s secret confirmed my feelings of inferiority,” Rae writes. “That I was less than a woman . . . That I didn’t deserve to be loved and valued.” Rae also discusses her time on “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life” and the “strange experience” of “working in a job where all her peers are teenagers.” Her book is repped by Jennifer DeChiara’s Literary Agency.