More Neglected Hollywood Novels

Back in September 2020, I posted an interview with Kari Sund, a PhD student at Glasgow University, in which we discussed five neglected favorites she’d come across while working on her thesis about Hollywood novels. Reading the anonymous City Without a Heart recently, I was reminded of a baker’s dozen of other lesser-known Hollywood novels that I posted on Twitter around the same time and have collected here for safekeeping.

• Queer People, by Carroll and Garrett Graham (1930)

The brothers wrote this caustic satire out of frustration at not getting jobs with the studios. In it, a newspaper man gets drunk, wins studio contract, then spirals down through movieland’s denizens. Hollywood ate it up: the book went through 4 printings in three weeks. “As much like the average Hollywood yarn as a Wyoming cylone is akin to a school girl’s sigh” is how Variety’s reviewer put it. Earns a cameo appearance in City Without a Heart:

Together they entered Mr. Alexander’s outer office.
A pretty girl, with eyes like sloes, looked up over a copy of ‘Queer People.’
‘He’s busy right now,’ she said. ‘He’s in a con¬ ference right now.’
They retired.

Reissued in pulp paperback in 1950 with one of the all-time great titles: Fleshpots of Malibu, and reissued in the Lost American Fiction series in the 1970s.

 

• Movieland, by Ramon Gomez de la Serna (1930)

A somewhat legendary novel, extremely rare in English translation. Written by a Spanish author who’d never set foot in Hollywood, so he could make it whatever he wanted. “So distorted as to have little meaning for the average American,” NY Times wrote, but “as a baroque and flippant literary antic … the novel is thoroughly satisfactory.”

Much easier to find if you can read Spanish or French. In English, the one copy for sale goes for $399.

 

• Good Old Jack, by Eric Hatch (1937)

A typical Eric Hatch wacky road show comedy. Director Jack splits Hollywood to avoid creditors and girls, lands in South American backwater, ends up producing a coup. Having acted like a dictator on the set in Hollywood, Jack finds himself well-prepared to be one — but is disappointed to find that much of the native scenery “less believable” than the fake sets he’d become accustomed to on the studio backlots.

 

• If We Only Had Money, by Lee Shippey (1939)

A writer of Westerns and his wife and kids are “poor but happy.” Then a studio contract comes and the money pours in. Still happy after that? This is a cautionary tale for the tiny number of writers who won big studio contracts, found themselves swimming in cash, then wondered why they weren’t happy. Shippey’s family wises up and opts to go back to “poor but happy.”

Sounds a bit lightweight, but lots of reviewers liked it: “a true American story written with the charm, sympathy and understanding of human nature.” I suspect Dorothy Parker’s Tonstant Weader might have fwowed up, though.

 

• Dirty Eddie, by Ludwig Bemelmans (1947)

A fable about a Hollywood star who’s a pig.

A real pig (Dirty Eddie–get it?)

Bemelmans pokes fun at a business where nobody seemed to know what he was doing … and got very well paid for it. “… one of the best pictures of the Hollywood rat race … indicates that the whole business is run by the people in it as if it were a scenario for a movie they constantly rewrite and recast every morning,” wrote Variety’s reviewer. “One sees the danger of magazine fragments made into a book,” warned another critic, “for there is little progression… Each page is a delight. The total of all pages makes almost no culminating effect.”

 

• Of Streets and Stars, by Alan Marcus (1961)

Dorothy Parker called it “A novel of dazzling originality, written with compassion, sometimes with a wild humor, always in the beauty of simplicity.” Truly forgotten. The foreword by Lion Feuchtwanger (“Who?”) didn’t help. First published by Manzanita Press in Yucca Valley; two years later, Houghton Mifflin took it mass market. “His style is spare, lean, staccato. Jagged cutting in and out of scenes, in the manner of a skillful director, gives the book a breathless momentum. It needs to be read carefully, but the effort will be handsomely repaid.” Alan Rich, New York Times.

Midge Decter, applying the belated but deadly thrust often typical of New York Review of Books, thought less of the book:

[It] participates in that almost-genre, the Hollywood novel, and in so doing touches down on just about every one of its almost-conventional themes. There is the Fan Mail Department of the great studio, into which harelips from Minnesota, lonely cowboys from Montana, crazy adolescent girls from Sweden and other far-off places pour their Dreams, dutifully answered with autographed photos of the stars deposited into the mails by lonely working-girls in Hollywood. There is the old executive, called by his initials (in this case, J.C.), who terrorizes, sentimentalizes, and worries for his ailing heart. There is the second-generation executive (clearly modeled on someone like Dore Schary) who works on the principle of hard efficiency and confronts in his sleep the empty anxiety at the center of his life. There is above all the young Eastern writer, a prize-winner, who comes to Hollywood to beat the movies and instead is thoroughly beaten by them. Through it all, behind it all, move the beautiful legendary creatures in costume dropping their masks just long enough to reveal themselves as mean tippers in the studio commissary or as having to go to the toilet in the middle of a take.

 

• Come On Out, Daddy, by Bernard Wolfe (1963)

Bernard Wolfe’s sex/drugs/girls/jazz take on Hollywood, full of starlets, faded matinee idols, and producers on the rise and on the fall. Wolfe probably came closer to translating the spirit of a Lenny Bruce routine to fiction than any other novelist of his time. Overdue for reconsideration.

“… hilarious and grotesque, penetrating and compeling, and on occasion … thoroughly original. And there is something more–style. He writes as though the words were invented yesterday,” wrote Robert Kirsch in the Los Angeles Times. Over on the East Coast, however, Gerald Walker in the New York Times felt the book was “overwoven” and compared reading it to “wearing a 30-pould turtleneck sweater.”

 

• The Symbol, by Alvah Bessie (1966)

Wanda Emmaline Kelly, orphaned at two, foster homed, raped at nine, married at 16, pin-up queen by 18. Then Buck, the football player, lunky and loving and Calvin, the NY intellectual/painter.

Yeah … Marilyn.

Compared to Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls, wrote one reviewer, this is the Sistine Chapel.

Consider it a rough draft of Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, a much better novel. However, I should say that Bessie earned the right to lambaste Hollywood after doing time as one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.

 

• The Manner Music, by Charles Reznikoff (1977)

“Unlike any other Hollywood novel ever done,” wrote Maurice Zolotow. “It is like T S Eliot writing a novel about banks, Wallace Stevens writing one about insurance companies.” A young composer goes to work as factotum to a movie producer named Paul Pasha. Wall St crashes, the studio folds, he heads back to NY, ends up burning his compositions in Central Park. In a just world, we’d recognize this as a minor American masterpiece.

I wrote about The Manner Music back in May 2020: Link

 

• Night Tennis, by Annabel Davis-Goff (1978)

Davis-Goff was Mrs. Mike Nichols #3.

“Reads almost like a handbook on film-making” wrote one reviewer. “A Hollywood novel that has an authentic contemporary feel (without ramming it down your throat),” Kirkus concluded.

I love this from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Edna Stumpf: “The bleakest book about fornicating and making movies I’ve ever read. It’s a real little sobersides of a fable about weighing the odds and taking the consequences and biting the bullet.” “Call me corrupt,” Edna continued, “but when I read a Hollywood novel I want to have fun, if only the fun of a cheap contempt for bratty stars and money-mad moguls and noontime sex with catered champagne in interior-decorated trailers”

 

• Blue Pages, by Eleanor Perry (1979)

An autobiographical novel written after her divorce from Frank Perry: “I’ll be the first to say it’s a disguised version of my experiences, told from a middle-aged writer’s point of view.” “Novels by men which draw portraits of women as bitches or shrews seem to cause no particular comment. But let a woman write about men as master seducers, users, monsters and there are cries of ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,'” Perry remarked.

On the other hand, Perry reported that women saw “Blue Pages as a book about working women and above all, middle-aged women and their plight.”
“The book makes a woman in her late 40s a viable, sexual being, not somebody ready for the ash heap.”

 

• Hix Nix Stix Pix, by David Llewellyn Burdett (1984)

“Take Doctorow’s Ragtime and West’s Day of the Locust, chop them up, mix them together, and let the fragments fly,” was how NY Times’ reviewer summed up this debut novel. It’s a wild hodge-podge running from silents to talkies, with tons of cameos by Chaplin, Hitler, Salvador Dali, and many others. Most reviewers hated it, but the book has a small cult of die-hard fans.

 

• Creative Differences, by Buffy Shutt (1990)

Hollywood seen through the eyes of a woman who rises through a series of scut jobs to become an executive VP for production, in charge of solving daily crises, mostly over male egos. This may resonate more than when it first came out. The narrator is nameless, for example, only because to all the male characters, she is either “Babe” or “Honey” or “Pet.” And, of course, the male egos are more fragile than the thinnest egg shell: “Several film-makers ask me where they’re sitting on the dais. By the way they ask, you’d think their entire self-worth is tied up in whether they are on the first tier or the second tier.”