The Star Shiner poses the question: Can a young man from a small rural Kentucky town—fleeing a domineering mother and an abusive, alcoholic father—find recognition and happiness in New York city, working with the high-powered fashion and cosmetic industries, and with some of the world's most famous people—without losing his values and his soul?

After a notable career in fashion illustration and modeling in Paris, Richardson becomes a makeup artist, working with Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and photographers Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Frecesco Scavullo. The book is more than a celebrity memoir in that it is particularly a narrative of the '70s into the '90s, a time in New York's history of financial difficulties and corruption.

This was the golden era of fashion and cosmetics when Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland, Charles Revson and Estee Lauder, the king and queen of cosmetics and Avedon, Penn and Scavullo ruled the industries. The reader is taken into wild nights at Studio 54 and into New York's downtown after-hours dungeons, seething with sex, drugs and danger, where individuals are treated as sexual stepping stones.

Then the party ended with the scourge of AIDS that took Richardson's partner and turned Richardson's life around with a spiritual awakening.