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.
Cover of first US edition of Queer People
• 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.
Cover of Cinelandia, the Spanish version of Movieland by Ramon Gomez de la Serna.
• 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.
Cover of Good Old Jack by Eric Hatch.
• 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.
Cover of If We Only Had Money by Lee Shippey.
• 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.
Cover of a Signet paperback edition of Dirty Eddie by Ludwig Bemelmans.
• 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.”
Cover of the Houghton Mifflin edition of Of Streets and Stars by Alan Marcus.
• 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.
Cover of first US edition of Come On Out, Daddy by Bernard Wolfe.
• 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.”
Cover of ,em>The Symbol by Alvah Bessie.
• 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.
Cover of The Manner Music by Charles Reznikoff.
• 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
Cover of Night Tennis by Annabell Davis-Goff.
• 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”
Cover of Blue Pages by Eleanor Perry.
• 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.”
Cover of Hix Nix Stix Pix by David Llewellyn-Burdett.
• 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.
Cover of Creative Differences by Buffy Shutt.
• 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.”
Publishing a book anonymously is a risky bet. For every Primary Colors, which took a long-term lease on the bestseller lists and won a film adaptation, there are a hundred books like City Without a Heart. At best, there is an initial flurry of speculation about the author’s identity, but then the practical challenges settle in. Where does a bookseller shelve it: under the As? How does a would-be buyer refer to it? “It’s a book about Hollywood.” “Do you know the author’s name?” “No.”
Novels about Hollywood are a semi-popular topic for PhD dissertations, and I’ve found City Without a Heart mentioned in the bibliographies of several, but none of the doctoral candidates in question appears to have actually read the book. I only stumbled across it searching for something completely different on the Internet Archive. Having read it, I can allay your hopes (or fears): this is not the Great Lost Hollywood Novel.
But it is an interesting novel. Now, we all know that interesting is the “Get Out of Jail Free” card of adjectives. If you can’t say anything nice about someone, say they’re interesting. It’s what you tell your best friend after they drag you to a three-hour art house movie with a dozen lines of dialogue: “Yeah, that was interesting.”
In this case, interesting is not a cop-out but a way of saying that City Without a Heart is not a particularly well-written novel but it is a well-observed one, though distorted by the author’s prejudices. When the book was published, there was that initial rush of guesses about the authorship. Candidates included Noel Coward, Michael Arlen, Getrude Atherton, Douglas Fairbanks, Louis Bromfield, and even Greta Garbo. What’s clear is that the author was someone familiar with the workings of the studio system from the inside. Someone who’d penetrated to the inner sanctum of a studio chief’s office, for example:
Mr. Schloss’s office was protected from assault by three lines of defences. The first was held by an empty table and rather a formidable filing cabinet. The next boasted a standing guard of three young things with typewriters. The third and last was occupied by a young man with a mauve face, geranium-coloured hair, and the best set of dentures Mary had ever seen outside a showcase. He was supported by an individual with such a powerful resemblance to a gorilla that Mary was quite alarmed that there were no bars in front of him.
If the author was indeed a Hollywood insider, he was someone who’d grown to hate what he knew. “You know nothing about Hollywood,” says its first representative to encounter the photogenic Mary Fresnell and her aunt in their humble village in Cornwall. “It would be a crime to send a girl like Mary into that sort of atmosphere.” Anonymous drives home this point repeatedly and unsubtly, starting with his title. “Hollywood,” declares a screenwriter she meets there, “for all the ferocity of its labours and the wealth of its talent, is as empty a shell as ever existed in the history of the world.” Another denies the assertion that Tinsel Town is a godless place. There is a god, he argues: “the god of I.”
It’s not hard to pick up a few clues about the author’s identity beside his insider knowledge. The fact that he was a he and not a she, for example. Sprinkled throughout the book are a hints of a streak of misogyny, such as his dislike of chatty women:
Mrs. Knalder was Mary’s first experience of America’s endurance-test talking women. Later she discovered that they are numerous and are without mercy. Lack of subject-matter, the inattention or obvious boredom and infuriation of a listener has no influence upon the flow of their chatter. Like the brook it goes on forever.
His suggested cure for these women is brutal: “nothing short of amputation of the tongue is of any practical service whatsoever.”
Anonymous is also an anti-Semite. Hollywood’s studio heads all “rose from the tailor’s bench,” have waists that measure “anything up to sixty inches round” and faces that “bore the prominent characteristics of a toucan.” In Hollywood, the rightful order of classes has been turned on its head:
Hollywood is a Jewish stronghold. The entire picture industry is under their control. The power they possess is incalculable…. Enthroned they sit and jest of their humble origin to a Christian community which is never weary of trying to ex¬ hume, from totally non-existent sources, ancestors of most piquant aristocracy.
Ask a Jewish executive, in receipt of five hundred thousand dollars a year, whence he sprang, and you shall hear tales of a basement on the East Side of New York. Put the same question to a ten-dollar a day ‘extra’ and you shall be buffeted with half the names in the English peerage.
Contrast this with his descriptions of the people of Cadgwith, the little Cornish port from which Mary, the innocent pulled into Hollywood’s lair by the promise of filthy lucre. Its men “are simple folk who, when not riding the waves, sit upon an old stone wall and watch the sea from which their slender blessings flow. Its women “are busy at home, for where money is scarce work is plentiful.” You may recognize them as the future inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” And Mary, of course, is the stoutest of these stout-hearted folk: “She could sail a boat, bait a line, shoot a net, and scale a cliff with any fisher lad in the village.”
She can also, we come to see, learn her lessons. Brought all the way from Cornwall to California based on her stunning beauty and vitality as caught, unaware, on a few minutes of film, she quickly falls from promising starlet to has-been (or rather, never-was) through the betrayal of a competitor unburdened by scruples, and heads home, the sadder but wiser girl.
Almost.
There is a twist right at the end that leads me to wonder if Anonymous’s chief gripe with Hollywood boiled down to something as simple as resentment that he wasn’t better paid.
I closed City Without a Heart grateful not to know Anonymous’s true identity. Three hundred pages in his company was quite enough. The book is a revealing if stilted portrait of Hollwood in one of its moments of transition, when talkies had overturned the hierarchy of silents and studios had succeeded in eliminating all but the last few independents, and for that it undoubtedly has some historical value. As a novel, however, its neglect is justified.
City Without a Heart, by Anonymous Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933
Kari Sund is a PhD student at Glasgow University working on a thesis about the Hollywood novel. She’s following in noteworthy footsteps: the late novelist and memoirist Carolyn See published her own dissertation, The Hollywood Novels: An Historical and Critical Study way back in 1963. I contacted Kari recently to ask if she’d share some recommendations from her wide reading in this genre, and she generously agreed.
What got you interested in novels set in Hollywood? Were you a film buff who got interested in literature or a literature buff who got interested in film?
Definitely the latter. I first became interested in the Hollywood novel when I was doing my Postgrad in American Literature, though the course didn’t focus on the genre. One of the texts on the core course was John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and when I had finished reading this my Kindle recommended that I read Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, which I had never heard of, but absolutely loved. As both the works were published in 1939 and both were set in California during the depression era, I wanted to write about their differing depictions of the Western Dream in American Literature, drawing from Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893).
Around about the same time, I was writing my dissertation on the portrayal of alcohol, waste and occupation in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and this led to me reading his unfinished Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon (1941). That set the ball rolling: the more Hollywood novels I read, the more I wanted to read. What most surprised me was the fact that until reading Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, I hadn’t come across discussion of the Hollywood novel as a genre. I had taken undergraduate modules on twentieth-century American literature, and a postgrad in American literature, but the genre hadn’t been covered and it wasn’t even mentioned in any of the American lit anthologies on my shelves. That added a layer of intrigue to the topic for me, which I find always helps when you are going down a rabbit-hole.
1. Merton of the Movies (1922) by Harry Leon Wilson.
This is perhaps the first Hollywood novel to become a best-seller. It’s interesting to compare what contemporary reviewers said to how the book’s remembered now. The New Republic’s reviewer, for example, said “for the thousands who will laugh with Mr. Wilson there are millions who might read his story and see nothing in it to laugh at at all.” Harry Leon Wilson has a reputation as a comic novelist (e.g., Ruggles of Red Gap): is this a comic novel or a tragi-comic novel?
For me Merton of the Movies is a tragi-comic novel, and it really surprises me how many scholars, critics and reviewers refer to Wilson’s work as simply comic. There is no doubt that it is laugh-out-loud funny at times. Merton is a small-town shop assistant who wants more from life and dreams of finding success as a serious actor. He moves to Hollywood, struggles at first, but eventually finds fame in slapstick Keystone Kops-style comedy westerns due to his remarkable likeness to an existing Western star.
The only problem is that Merton has a deep disdain for these comedies, seeing them as the lowest form of acting. But when a director recognises the humorous scenarios created by Merton’s tendency to take himself far too seriously, he exploits this, putting Merton in a comedy role without telling him. Merton thinks he has finally got the serious Western role of his dreams. This is hilarious, of course, but because all Merton’s colleagues and bosses on set are part of the ruse it’s also humiliating to witness. Merton finally reaches the level of fame and success he has long dreamed of, but by a means which he has always scorned – slapstick comedy – and so there’s a bittersweet element to this.
It’s definitely difficult to feel sympathy for Merton at times because he is pompous and judgemental, but Wilson’s novel speaks about the culture of the Hollywood film-factory utilising human beings for its own means, a culture which countless Hollywood novels would continue to explore into the 20s, 30s, and still do today. Merton can bring you tears of laughter and of pity, definitely a tragi-comic novel, and a wonderful read.
Some years ago in The New York Times, Nora Johnson called Merton of the Movies“>Merton of the Movies one of the Hollywood novels that had become “dated as old valentines in their innocence and their view of the movie capitol as exciting, amusing, certainly loony, but harmless on the whole.” Is this a fair accusation?
I don’t think this is entirely fair, no, mainly because I don’t feel that the novel depicts Hollywood as harmless. Wilson captures the excitement, or rather obsession, that people felt about potential fame and success in the field of acting, and that’s a dream that I don’t think has ever fully left Western culture. But with this obsession comes a resulting difficulty in distinguishing between reality and fantasy – another theme which Hollywood novels have continuously explored – and this is one of the main concerns of Merton of the Movies. Merton experiences delusions in his humdrum life back home, like getting into fights with mannequins at work as he envisions himself in a Western saloon scene, and becoming the laughing stock of the town when he tries to steal a local horse as his trusty steed.
After he has made the pilgrimage to Hollywood he ends up so destitute that he finds himself secretly living on film sets and nearly starving, and it is because his hold on reality is so loose that he is able to normalise this situation. He constantly filters the events of his own life as they might be depicted through a Hollywood memoir, or fan-magazine interview, with a famous star. Wilson’s narrative depicts these scenes in a comedic style, but Wilson himself was not a fan of Hollywood and there is an undeniably serious message in this novel about how harmful an extreme obsession with Hollywood, film, and the cult of celebrity can be.
The exploration of this theme has endured not only in fiction, but also in films about Hollywood and the West. Sunset Boulevard (1950), Mulholland Drive (2001), and more recently Ingrid Goes West (2017), all explore the distortion of reality through their character’s proximity to, or obsession with, Hollywood and celebrity. Ingrid Goes West links this to the use of social media in modern culture, exploring how we distort our own portrayals of reality via platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, and how these portrayals in turn impact our perceptions of our own lives. So, I don’t feel that Merton of the Movies“>Merton depicts Hollywood as harmless, nor do I think that the work is dated given that one of its main themes is still so relevant today. Johnson’s words do resonate in respect of one aspect of the novel though, and that is the fact that Merton still finds success in Hollywood, even if it isn’t his preferred role.
Scholars like John Parris Springer have observed that Wilson gives in to the fairy-tale perception that dreams really do come true, and I have to admit that I also find it disappointing that he somewhat endorses the idea that anyone could make it in Hollywood.1 This truly was a harmful message, one that was bringing thousands of starry-eyed young people to the film-capital in search of fame, only to be met with disappointment and sometimes destitution. Yet without this ending—Merton’s success—it would have been a completely different novel.
2. Minnie Flynn (1925) by Frances Marion
Frances Marion was the highest-paid screenwriter (of either sex) in the 1920s. What does Minnie Flynn tell us about Marion’s view of the industry she was so successful in?
This picks up where I’ve just left off with Merton of the Movies. In Cari Beauchamp’s compelling work Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (1997), she writes that Marion wanted the novel to be “a warning to the thousands of women she saw pouring into Hollywood full of optimism and without the slightest idea of what lay ahead”.2 So Marion was open that this was a cautionary tale for young girls coming to Hollywood to try and make it as actresses.
At the time when Minnie Flynn was published, people were travelling to Hollywood in the thousands to find fame and success only to find that even extra roles were impossible to get because there was such a vast pool of hopefuls to select from. Hollywood had more budding actors than it needed. Marion’s message was that even for those young girls who did find work, it would not necessarily be the experience that they envisioned.
The novel follows a young girl, Minnie, who starts out as an extra in the East coast film industry. She is given an introduction by a minor actor she meets at a ball and who is interested in her romantically. Minnie doesn’t find massive stardom, but she does find moderate success and moves to Hollywood to continue her career.
Marion really emphasises the serious pitfalls, and one of the main ones is the loss of trust in friends and family members. Most of Minnie’s loved ones use her for what they can get when she is at the peak of her fame, and are nowhere to be found when she is down-and-out, it’s quite tragic. Then there is the added fact that, for most, fame rarely lasts.
Marion also makes it explicitly clear that women trying to make it as actresses were objectified sexually, often from a young age, as part-and-parcel of the casting process. This is one of the most significant aspects of the novel for me, as it reflects that a culture which still exists today – as we have seen in the last couple of years with the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the Me Too movement – has been deeply ingrained from the early years of silent film.
Marion confessed later that she spent four months writing the first four chapters and then finished the rest of the book in just six weeks. The “tough guy” novelist Jim Tully said she “was guilty of the artistic murder of a beautiful character.” Did you notice any significant shifts in style or quality in the course of the book?
I wasn’t aware of this when I was originally reading it, and I think it would lead to a different reading experience, so it makes me want to read the novel again! There are some aspects of the work which instantly come to mind. For example, Minnie moves from the East coast film industry to the West coast film industry, and her time in Hollywood is short in the grand scheme of the novel. I was surprised by just how much of the novel is set in the East and how little is set in the West, though this was also an aspect I enjoyed as I felt it highlighted the relevance of the East coast film industry to Hollywood, another topic which my thesis gives focus to.
As for Tully’s accusation, I guess the answer depends on how we consider Minnie as beautiful. From the start she’s described as physically beautiful but Marion also emphasises the many flaws of Minnie’s character: she is selfish, fickle, shallow, and pretty mean! If Tully means that the character was beautifully crafted, then I would agree, but I also felt the ending was effective, not rushed. Minnie ends up being used by partners, lovers, family members, and so-called friends. By the close of the book she is destitute, having lost her fame and her looks, and she’s punishing herself for her fate.
3. Twinkle, Little Movie Star (1927) by Lorraine Maynard.
This is a children’s book — what might be considered YA (Young Adult) fiction today. What interests you about this book in the context of your research?
Hollywood-related fiction for children plays a huge role in my research. The first film-related novels to be published about Hollywood were in the form of series-works for children, so they really hold a formative position in the genre, yet these and all works for children are consistently dismissed from scholarship. Because of this, I assumed that they would be irrelevant to the larger genre, yet when I started reading these works I was struck by the similarities in the themes they explore, but also by the fresh perspectives that they bring to the genre, and so I felt they warranted more attention.
The most interesting aspect of Twinkle for me is the depiction of a child star – Vivi Corelli – and that stars experience of working in the film-industry of the 1920s. The story is almost wholly set in Hollywood, bar a few visits for location shooting, yet the universe we encounter in the novel really exists in a vacuum of film sets through the eyes of a child. Through this novel, Lorraine Maynard depicts and condemns the working conditions for child actors by detailing the dangers which Vivi is at the mercy of because of those conditions. It also touches on the use of animals in the industry, as Vivi’s co-star is a beloved dog, Scamp.Illustration from Twinkle Little Movie Star
Would you consider Maynard’s child star, Vivi Corelli, a precursor to Shirley Temple?
Absolutely. Lorraine Maynard herself had worked as an actress for a short period of time when she was a teenager, so she would have had experience on film sets and in studios, and would have been familiar with the phenomenon of child stars in America. Variety also claimed that this work was allegedly based on “Baby Peggy” (Diana Serra Cary) who was one of the first child stars of the silent movie era, a real-life precursor to Shirley Temple.
4. Remember Valerie March (1939) by Katherine Albert
Like Frances Marion, Katherine Albert wrote from insider knowledge of working in Hollywood. Yet The New York Times reviewer wrote, “It would be shocking to think that her people represent a cross-section of Hollywood, and this reviewer is left unconvinced by the jacket’s assurance that such is true.” Having read a fair share of Hollywood books by now, how realistic did the book seem to you?
For me, this is a good example of a Hollywood novel being unfairly dismissed based on its authorship and the subcategory to which it belongs. The work is female-penned, focuses almost entirely on the career of an actress and has elements of romance and sensation in it. Having dissected bibliographies on the genre and having now read a fair amount of scholarship on it, works with these characteristics have often been dismissed since—and they were not even given serious attention at the time of publication either. There is nothing in this work which strikes me as more or less realistic than the next Hollywood novel.
Remember Valerie March takes the form of a mock star exposé narrated by Conrad Powers, who’d directed most of March’s films. It focuses on Valerie’s personality, her rise to fame, her acting roles and methods, and the events of her personal life. The writing is sometimes deliberately sensationalised due to it being a mock-exposé, yet the story remains believable. The New York Times review wasn’t the only one to disparage the work: Hollywood novelist and scriptwriter Budd Schulberg dismissed Valerie March, along with Minnie Flynn and a number of other works about women’s experience in Hollywood as “Glamour Books, glorified fan magazine stuff”.3
This was the common view of these works in the 1950s and there hasn’t been much to contradict this stance in Hollywood scholarship since. This is one of the reasons I feel these works warrant further exploration. Given the prevalence within the genre of surrealist novels like The Day of the Locust (1939), satires like Carroll and Garrett Graham’s Queer People (1930), and tongue-in-cheek works like Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (1948), it does become difficult to distinguish this genre as “realistic”.
One thing that sets Remember Valerie March apart is the fact that Albert related the story through the voice and perspective of a male narrator–Conrad Powers, the director who discovered Valerie March. Why do you think Albert made this choice?
I’m not sure why, but it makes for a complex portrait of a Hollywood actress. In part, it’s a necessary measure to fit with the mock star-exposé form the narrative takes. At the time, the relationship between an actress and their director was something which film fan magazines and Hollywood gossip columns would often focus on as part of their preoccupation with revealing “insider” stories (and something we still read about in gossip magazines today!), so on more obvious level it would encourage an existing readership who were interested in Hollywood to buy the novel.
I don’t know if this was Albert’s conscious intention, but I also felt the narrative perspective highlighted the way in which women in Hollywood were—and often still are—filtered through male perspectives, and this is another reason why I selected this work for focus in my thesis. Conrad Powers has a close relationship with Valerie, and at times quite a strong ability to influence her decisions. I don’t think that Albert intended for the reader to always take Powers’ view of events at face value, but for them to question if there was a different perspective.
5. In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes.
You’ve written that “For me, this is neglected in the sense that it’s not traditionally considered to be a Hollywood novel, but I think there’s a really strong argument for it being one!” How would you make that argument?
This ties in with a larger existing scholarly debate over how much of a link to Hollywood a Hollywood novel should have. Some critics think that a Hollywood novel should have a specific and significant geographical setting in Hollywood, while others feel that Hollywood doesn’t need to be a specific or central setting, but can be more of a “symbol rather than setting”, in the words of Jonas Spatz.4 To play devil’s advocate, I don’t really agree or disagree with either, or not yet anyway!
The genre has such an enormous and diverse collection of novels, all of which have varying degrees and forms of involvement with Hollywood as either a place or an industry. Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park (1951) isn’t even set in Hollywood, but with an overarching concern with the film industry and the people in that industry, no one can deny its status as a Hollywood novel. Then you have works like Remember Valerie March (1939), which are very distinctly set in Hollywood, painting a clear picture of living and working in Hollywood even down to what interior design is popular with the stars. Yet, as we have seen with the review you cited, it is still critically dismissed for being unrealistic or inaccurate.
In A Lonely Place (1949) hasn’t been discussed within the genre – to the best of my knowledge – and it isn’t recorded in any bibliographies of the genre, and I believe this is because of the book’s delicate involvement with Hollywood. Hughes goes to great lengths to utilise the geographical area, as the protagonist Dix Steele drives round specific streets at night, haunting hotspots where he *spoiler* looks for murder victims. The geographical element is very much there, but many would argue that there is no actual concern with Hollywood as none of the characters or plots are prominently involved in the film industry.
Much of Dix’s urge to kill, though, comes from a feeling of resentment which is clearly linked to class, money, and lifestyle. He pretends to be a novelist and tries to exude the casual superiority of a man of leisure. But, of course, this only betrays an inferiority. He is financially dependent on an uncle he hates, and the perpetual land of sunshine and beautiful film-people represents, for Dix, a fantasy which he has been shut out from after serving in the war.
His experience is such a truly stark contrast to the leisurely life which was consistently promoted in Hollywood through consumerism. This lifestyle was promoted through the films being produced, by the publicity machines of film studios, by the fan magazines, even in the shop windows you would pass as you walked down the street. The message was that this life of leisure was attainable if you only looked the part.
Dix is trying desperately to look the part but only feels an increasing sense of unbelonging that adds to his resentment. I would argue that there could be no better setting to fuel this type of resentment than Hollywood itself. So, though it might seem almost like an incidental setting – just the backdrop to a serial killer’s hunt – I think Hollywood is the essential setting for In A Lonely Place. I don’t think this novel could be set anywhere else and still have the same associations.
One last question: some people say that Hollywood and the movie business is an artificial environment, so fictions set there are inherently stilted or simplistic. Others say it’s an environment that distills, drawing out and intensifying aspects of the world at large. Where do you side?
From the Hollywood novels which I have read I think the genre tends to draw out and intensify aspects of the world at large. An idea which you come across frequently in scholarship on Hollywood and the Hollywood novel pre-1950s is that Hollywood was being perceived and portrayed in these novels as a “microcosm” of America. This idea doesn’t always resonate with me when I’m reading Hollywood novels, but I think in a great many of these works Hollywood is definitely being used to explore some of the larger social, cultural, and artistic concerns which people were experiencing at this time.
The early works I examine from the 1910s and 1920s reflect the changing perceptions of social class in America, women’s role in the workplace, concerns and excitement over industrialisation, invention, and technological advancements being made. I really haven’t read one Hollywood novel that I’ve found stilted or simplistic. Instead, even the least complex works still provide insight into significant aspects of the film industry and reflect larger concerns over cultural or societal issues, and if we are examining Hollywood and the film industry from a historical perspective these are extremely valuable insights.
Footnotes
1John Parris Springer. Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature. Norman. University of Oklahoma, 2000.
2Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. California, University of California Press, 1997.
3Budd Schulberg. “The Hollywood Novel.” American Film (Archive:1975-1992), vol. 1, no. 7, May 01, 1976, pp. 28-32.
4Jonas Spatz. Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the American Myth. Mouton, The Hague, 1969.
Kari provided the following profile: I’m studying for my PhD in American Studies at Glasgow University, and my thesis is on the Hollywood novel genre pre-1950s. Other research interests include F. Scott Fitzgerald, and particularly the role played in his novels of alcohol, work, and waste. As a part-time student I also spend my time working in financial services, hospitality and teaching. My Twitter handle is @karichsund and my email address is [email protected], would love to hear from anyone with similar research interests, or fellow part-time PhD students as it’s always nice to connect with those who have a shared experience of this!
“Listen to me! Somebody please listen!” cries Henry Preston Standish, the hero of Herbert Clyde Lewis’s 1937 novel, Gentleman Overboard, as he struggles to stay afloat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, exhausted and past hope of rescue. “But of course nobody was there to listen,” Lewis wrote, “and Standish considered the lack of an audience the meanest trick of all.” Lewis died of a heart attack at the age of 41, broke, out of work and alone in the middle of New York City, a victim of Hollywood blacklisting, his three novels long out of print: a writer who’d lost his audience. No one came to rescue him. As long as a writer’s words are preserved, though, there is a chance of his work being rescued. In the case of Gentleman Overboard, it took over seventy years for someone to spot the book, lost in the ocean of forgotten books, and the rescuers came from three different continents. Lewis’s story of one man dying alone and forgotten is now being read by thousands who find it speaks to a sense of “shared loneliness.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1909, Lewis was the second son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His mother Clara came to the U.S. with her family in 1887 at the age of two. His father Hyman arrived a year later at the age of thirteen, apprenticed to work for his older brother Samuel as a tailor. By the time Herbert was born, the Lewises were living in the Brownsville neighborhood around Tompkins and Lafayette Avenues. The area was then the heart of the largest Jewish community outside Europe, the first stop for tens of thousands of like Lewis’s parents, immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Between 1890 and 1915, the number of Jews living in New York City jumped from under 100,000 to nearly one million. The name Lewis was Anglicized from Luria and Hyman and Clara helped ease their sons’ integration into American life by giving them solidly Anglo-Saxon names: Alfred Joseph, Herbert Clyde and Benjamin George.
For Herbert Clyde Lewis, Brownsville was the quintessential American melting pot — at least in hindsight. In 1943, he wrote an article titled “Back Home” for The Los Angeles Times about visiting his boyhood streets for the first time in twenty years. “As I walked slowly around the block and let the memories flood back,” he wrote, “it seemed to me that my old neighborhood was a miracle—the greatest miracle that had ever visited the earth. Here, for the first time, people came from all the corners of Europe, the Near East and China — and lived side by side in close quarters and did not cut each other’s throats.” There was something in the air, he believed, “that made us feel maybe the other fellow’s beliefs and background were all right too.”
However rosy Lewis’s memories of his boyhood in Brownsville may have been, he left home early and quickly established what became a lifelong pattern of short stays and frequent moves. He quit high school at the age of sixteen, worked a variety of jobs with local newspapers, briefly attended both New York University and the College of the City of New York (finding “neither institution suited him”), then spent the winter of 1929-1930 in Paris. He returned to America in March 1930, took a job as a sports reporter in Newark, New Jersey, then moved nearly halfway across the world to Shanghai, China. He spent the next two years there working as a reporter for The China Press and The Shanghai Evening Post.
Herbert Clyde Lewis in his early 20s, courtesy of Michael Lewis
Living in China may have satisfied his appetite for travel at first. In early 1933, Lewis returned to New York, took a job with The New York World Telegram, switched to The New York Journal American, got married, and rented an apartment in Manhattan — one of the few times he kept the same address for longer than a year. His time in China provided the material for his first ventures into fiction, which were short but action-packed. “Tibetan Image,” for example, tells of fortune hunters forced to abandon a million dollars’ worth of silver fox pelts in the Gobi Desert when they are attacked by a pack of man-eating dogs. It appeared in Argosy magazine in November 1935 and was followed by others full of stereotypes of enigmatic, slightly sinister Chinese. He also tried to his hand at writing for the stage, collaborating with a former reporter, Louis Weitzenkorn, on “Name Your Poison.” In the play, a group of petty crooks take out a life insurance policy on a homeless derelict and then attempt — unsuccessfully — to kill him through a series of “accidents.” The show opened for a pre-Broadway run in late January 1936 and closed after six performances. The play needed “repairs” was the only explanation offered by its producer, who let his option lapse a few months later.
Although Lewis claimed he was happy with his job at the Journal American, a certain discontent with comfortable situations seems to have been part of his nature. As he later told Newsweek magazine, the idea for his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, came to him as he stood on the roof on his apartment in Greenwich Village one evening in late 1936. Lewis looked down on the street below and considered what would happen if he fell: “How would a man bridge that dizzy mental gap between the security under his feet and that world ‘down there’?” He decided to write a story to find out. To emphasize that mental gap, he chose as the subject of his experiment not an itinerant reporter like himself but with a man whose very being embodies security.
Henry Preston Standish, the gentleman of Gentleman Overboard, is as solidly fixed to the bedrock of the American establishment as a man could be. His family name evokes the English man of arms who sailed with the first Pilgrims on the Mayflower, the subject of “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem memorized by generations of schoolchildren. Graduate of Yale, partner in a Wall Street investment bank, member of the Finance Club, Athletic Club and Weebonnick Golf Club, owner of a comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side, faithful husband and loving father of two, Standish is the definition of a solid citizen. “He drank moderately, smoked moderately, and made love moderately; in fact, Standish was one of the world’s most boring men.” When Standish contemplates the prospect of a world without him, he thinks with regret that “New York City would be dotted with spaces that could never be filled by anyone but the real Henry Preston Standish.”
And yet, like Lewis, Standish feels an irresistible urge to leave and find something that was missing at home. In Standish’s case, the impulse hits him out of nowhere. One day, sitting in his office, he “suddenly found himself assailed by a vague unrest.” He feels compelled to get up, leave his office, and take a walk along the Manhattan waterfront in Battery Park. As he looks out at the water, “Forces beyond his control grasped him and shook him by the shoulders, whispering between clenched teeth: ‘You must go away from here; you must go away!’”
Standish does not understand this impulse. “There was no sane reason why he must go away; everything was in its proper place in his life.” At the same time, his instincts tell him “that he never would be able to breathe freely again unless he went far away.” Standish wasn’t the first character in American literature to feel this urge to escape. Fifty years before Gentleman Overboard, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn lit out for the Indian Territory “because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Perhaps what Lewis called “security” was just another name for Huck Finn’s “sivilization.”
But when Standish sees the last sight of New York slip over the horizon as he sails away on a cruise through the Panama Canal to California, he feels as if “all his weariness, all his doubts and fears, vanished magically into the sea.” In California, the sense of relief continues. Standish discovers “a certain zest to things now that he had not experienced back home before; all his sensations were intensified.” He decides to keep going, to take another cruise, this time to Honolulu. “Why, Henry?” his wife begs when Standish calls to break the news. “I don’t know,” he replies. Even after he reaches Hawaii, he delays his return, exchanging his ticket back to San Francisco for a berth on the Arabella, a freighter taking a leisurely three-week voyage from Honolulu to Panama.
Lewis then sets his experiment in motion. Early one morning, while most on the ship are asleep and Panama still at least ten days away, Standish slips on a spot of grease while strolling on deck and falls overboard. Lewis has put his subject about as far away from the security of a comfortable life in New York City as one can get — two thousand miles from Panama, three thousand miles from Hawaii, along an infrequently-traveled route. Even here, though, conventions manage to reach out and control Standish. After he surfaces, when there is still a chance of his being heard by someone on the Arabella, he finds himself “doomed by his breeding”: “The Standishes were not shouters; three generations of gentlemen had changed the trumpet in the early Standish larynx to a dulcet violoncello.” Standish hesitates to cry out and the Arabella steams away, its crew and other passengers oblivious to his plight. Another twelve hours pass before his absence is confirmed—and, in a cruel irony foreshadowing Lewis’s own death, some onboard conclude that Standish’s accident was, in fact, suicide.
With cool precision, Lewis peels back the layers of “sivilization” as the hours pass and his subject tries to stay afloat, waiting to be rescued. Standish kicks off his shoes, then bit by bit removes his clothes, until he is naked, his eyes and lips scorched by the sun. At first, he feels embarrassed at making the Arabella turn around and rescue him; then pride in his “tremendous adventure” of staying alive until his rescue; and finally, when he realizes there is no hope, of regret. “And with each thought a pang came to his heart that had shattered, a pang of regret that he could not go on like other men having new extraordinary experiences day after day.” Extraordinary experiences like his heart “having gone on beating thirty-five years without once stopping”; like never having gone hungry; like having been given everything he had ever desired. In the end, “there is one desire that will not be satisfied”: to live.
When Lewis finished writing Gentleman Overboard, his own situation was precarious. He’d been living beyond his means, borrowing money and falling months behind in his rent. Just weeks before Viking published Gentleman in May 1937, Lewis declared bankruptcy with debts of $3,100—over a year’s income for a newspaperman—and “no assets, except possible royalties” from the book. It would not be the last time that Lewis would find himself flat broke. Reviews of Gentleman Overboard began appearing soon after—the first on May 23 in The New York Times, the same paper in which his bankruptcy notice had appeared. Reviewer Charles Poore called the book “entertaining” and “a flight of fancy,” but sensed Lewis’s underlying design: “Standish seems to be undergoing an experiment rather than an experience.”
The book’s brevity seems to have led many reviewers to consider it insubstantial. “It is a good enough book of its kind, but it is one of those stories that might have been a masterpiece and is by no means one,” William Rose Benet wrote in The Saturday Review. Only Arnold Palmer, reviewing the British edition published by Victor Gollancz in the magazine Britannia and Eve, saw the book’s length as a virtue: “He has told, with unusual skill and intensity, a story which ninety-nine writers in a hundred would have ruined by expanding into a full-length novel or compressing to the requirements of a magazine editor.” Evelyn Waugh on the other hand, writing in Time and Tide, thought it wasn’t short enough: “In spite of its brevity it is too long; a Frenchman could have told the story in 50 pages.” Viking issued a second printing; Gollancz did not.
Hollywood came to Lewis’s rescue. In August 1937, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Metro Goldwyn Mayer had signed Lewis as a “term writer” — a staff writer with a contract for a term, usually six months at the then-lucrative salary of $250 a week. Lewis, his wife Gita and their infant son Michael headed for California, arriving in early September “in our original protoplasmic state,” as he wrote his brother Ben (on MGM stationery). By Christmas, Lewis could report that he was busy working on a remake of the silent movie Tell It to the Marines and expected to “be here for a long time.”
He was still struggling to pay off his debts, though. He wrote Ben that people were “pressing me for debts and making my life miserable by threatening to sue me and attach my salary.” “All the other writers live in big houses and entertain,” he complained, “and we live in a shack.” MGM shelved the remake of Tell It to the Marines and Lewis’s contract was not extended. He was able to get a job with RKO, collaborating with Ian Hunter on a pair of B-movie musicals starring the boy tenor Bobby Breen, Fisherman’s Wharf and Escape to Paradise, both released in 1939 and both forgettable. By the end of that year, Lewis quit RKO and moved back to New York City with a job offer from the J. Walter Thompson advertisement agency and the manuscript of a second novel in hand.
Lewis’s anti-war sentiments had been stirred by the outbreak of war in Europe. In Spring Offensive, Peter Winston, a young American out of work, unhappy in love and at odds with the isolationist mood in America, concludes “There was no place for him in his own country” and travels to England to enlist in the British Army. When he completes his training and deploys to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, however, he finds there is nothing to do in the months of stalemate known as the Phony War. He decides to make a small protest by sneaking into the no-man’s land between the Maginot and Siegfried lines and planting a packet of sweet pea seeds. As Winston crouches there planting his seeds in the early hours one morning, however, the Phony War comes to an abrupt and violent end. He finds himself stranded between the two sides, unarmed and with little chance of survival. Like Standish in his last moments, Winston loses all hope: “There was no one who wanted him anywhere.” A shell strikes and Winston is obliterated.
Lewis’s timing could not have been worse. Spring Offensive was published in late April 1940. Two weeks later, German panzers began rolling into Belgium, France and the Netherlands. By the end of June, France had capitulated. “For its own sake, this slender novel should have made its appearance well before the beginning of the actual Spring Offensive,” concluded The Saturday Review. Ralph Ellison predicted in his New Masses review, “little will be said of it these days in the capitalist press.” He was right: the book sank without a trace.
Lewis still had hopes for his career as a novelist, though. Convinced that his handicap had been trying to write while holding down a full-time job, he took his family, now including a baby girl, Jane, to quiet Provincetown, Massachusetts. There he wrote his third novel. Focused on the residents of a rooming house in Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve, Season’s Greetings is a love-hate letter to New York City. Lewis allowed himself a much richer prose style; the book is filled with vivid descriptions:
Slowly the noises of the city came to life, autos shifting gears, horns honking, doors slamming shut, trains rumbling underground, machines chugging and whirling, feet tramping, babies wailing, children shouting, peddlers calling their wares. Slowly the smells of the city came to life, coffee brewing, bacon frying, garbage stewing, chemicals churling in cauldrons.
Despite the vitality of Lewis’s writing, though, his subject once again was grim: “the problem of loneliness in a city of eight million people.” One of the residents is a German refugee without a single friend or acquaintance in his new country. Another is an embittered alcoholic, a third an old woman who has outlived her family. Although some of the residents do come together to create, for a few hours, a sort of community, Lewis refuses a happy ending for all. As his neighbours gather for an impromptu Christmas party, Mr. Kittredge, who began the day convinced “there was no purpose in living any longer,” finds that nothing in the course of the day has changed his mind. He quietly slips out to Washington Park with a rifle and commits suicide—alone and unseen: “Around the whole windswept park, in all the apartment houses and brownstone mansions and college buildings, not a single window opened and not a single person looked out.” Less than ten years later Lewis himself died alone and unseen in the Hotel Earle across the street.
Published in September 1941, Season’s Greetings received favourable but not glowing reviews. The New York Times’ reviewer called it “a story that pulses with feeling for the complex and comprehensive personality of New York.” The American Mercury did not care for Lewis’s change of style: “Overwritten in spots, it belabors its point, yet it holds the reader’s interest.” Once again, Lewis was a victim of bad timing. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, fewer Americans were in the mood to buy books about Christmas. The short biographical sketch on the back of Season’s Greetings mentioned that the author and his family had returned to New York and promised that “This time Mr. Lewis expects to stay home for good.” But it didn’t work out that way.
After working for The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter for about a year, Lewis tried again to make it on his own as a writer—without much luck. As Los Angeles Times’ film industry reporter Fred Beck later told the story, by late 1942, Lewis “was a small, sad man, shivering on the streets of New York.” A short story Lewis had written, “Two-Faced Quilligan,” had been rejected by 33 magazines and he worried that his family “would have salami for Christmas dinner.” As Beck put it, “Herbie wished somebody he knew would come along so he could borrow a buck.” Instead, Lewis came home to find an acceptance letter from Story magazine and a check for $50—enough for a generous Christmas and a month or two more. Soon after, Variety reported that 20th Century Fox had bought the movie rights for the story and hired Lewis as a writer for $500 a week. Lewis and family returned to Los Angeles.
Despite the turnaround in his financial situation, Lewis was never content in Hollywood. “Life is rather dull here,” he wrote his brother Ben in July. “It’s completely unreal going to the studio every day and writing scripts about make-believe people while the real people are cutting each other’s throats with gusto everywhere.” In November, he complained, “I look around me and see the things that success buys out here, and I don’t like any of them. Swimming pools get full of dead flies and uninvited guests. Big houses get full of live flies and uninvited guests.” Lewis wrote that he had decided to take a job offer with radio comedian Fred Allen and move the family back to New York. Fred Beck made the news public in The Los Angeles Times with a sly aside: “Fred Allen has a new writer, brand new, and I’m just wondering if everybody is now going to be happy now that they’ve got what they wanted.”
The answer was no. Lewis expected to replace several writers who were going to be drafted. They weren’t. After eight weeks with Allen’s show, Lewis decided “I was tired of taking money under false pretenses” and returned to Hollywood. Lewis continued with 20th Century Fox, which released the movie version of Lewis’s story, Don Juan Quilligan, in June 1945. As little as he cared for the work, Lewis desperately needed the studio’s money. In early 1945, he complained to Ben that “the Internal Revenue Bureau has attached my salary to make me pay off an old tax debt to Uncle Sam, which cuts down my fun, finances and practically eliminates (for the next few months) all the plans we had to send you our wedding gift.”
Herbert Clyde Lewis (lower left), Dalton Trumbo (rear center), and other reporters in the South Pacific, June 1945
Lewis’s only break from the studio grind came in May 1945 when he, Dalton Trumbo, and four other writers were sent on a six-week tour of combat areas in the Southwest Pacific at the invitation of General Henry “Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. “I’m really seeing the war on this 16,000-mile junket,” he wrote from Guam on June 16, 1945: “the planes, the fleet, the infantry, almost everything else.”
The war ended just two months after Lewis’s return from the trip. He sold more stories: “D-Day in Las Vegas” to RKO and “The Fifth Avenue Story,” which Lewis co-wrote with Frederick Stephani, to Liberty Films. Filmed as It Happened on Fifth Avenue, the story earned Academy Award nominations for the two writers in 1947. But by then Lewis’s life had begun to fall apart. He was drinking heavily and taking barbiturates to help him sleep. His son Michael remembers seeing his father “naked and completely comatose, in a chair” around this time. “My mother told me it was alcohol and seconal.” Gita Lewis had begun to work for studios as a writer herself. As Michael recalls, “my & my sister’s real parents” during this time were the full-time maids his parents hired. The couple separated in 1947.
Lewis’s professional life was also coming apart. In January 1947, he became a member of the editorial staff of The Screen Writer, the magazine of the Screen Writers Guild. Unfortunately, the Guild was about to become the focus of Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiries into possible Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Working in support of the U. S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the F.B.I. interviewed dozens of witnesses and collected thousands of documents related to liberal political activities in Hollywood. An F. B. I. informant identified Lewis as a member of the American Communist Party.
Whether the allegation was true or not, Lewis had taken up with the losing side. He joined over 100 writers, actors, directors, and musicians signing a full-page advertisement protesting the House committee’s hearings — which only added to suspicions about his politics. A month later, Dalton Trumbo and nine other members of the Screen Writers Guild were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the committee. A group of the most powerful studio executives met in New York in December and issued a statement vowing, “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States.” The practice of blacklisting had begun. “The swimming pools are drying up all over Hollywood. I do not think I shall see them filled in my generation,” Lewis remarked to a reporter, jokingly. But he did not take the experience so lightly. He suffered a nervous breakdown in mid-1948 and was unable to work for a year.
In September 1949, he returned to New York City for what would be the last time — alone. His wife Gita chose to stay in Hollywood. He took a job as rewrite man for The New York Mirror. “I’ve enjoyed myself thoroughly and straightened myself out completely,” he wrote Ben from New York in October 1949, adding that he’d sold several of his stories to provide an allowance for Gita and the children. Michael Lewis recalls that “the four of us tried living together again as a family” in New York around Christmas 1949, but the marriage may have reached a breaking point. Gita took Michael and Jane back to Hollywood and moved in with Tanya Tuttle, wife of blacklisted director Frank Tuttle, who had gone to France in search of work.
In April 1950, Lewis filed for bankruptcy, citing over $26,000 in debts and unpaid income taxes. He moved into a room at the Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village. Although once considered among the best residential hotels in the city, in 1950, the Earle was, in the words of the poet Dylan Thomas, who stayed there around the same time as Lewis, “a pigsty.” Lewis moved from the Mirror to Time magazine, but he was still broke. He apologized to Ben for not being able to help pay their father’s bills from a prostate operation.
In late September, he left Time—whether voluntarily or not is unclear. Three weeks later, he was found dead in his hotel room. Although his death certificate stated the cause was heart attack, some of his acquaintances believed Lewis had committed suicide — which, Dalton Trumbo wrote his wife, was “sad, but no more than to have been expected.” “The only food on which a drowning man could subsist was the hope of being rescued,” Lewis wrote in Gentleman Overboard. Perhaps he had lost hope of being rescued himself.
He passed on to his widow only the prospect of future sales of his writing — of which there were few. In December 1950, one of his early stories, “Surprise for the Boys,” was adapted for the CBS television series Danger. A few years later, a producer bought the rights to Lewis’s story “The Bride Wore Pajamas,” but the film was never made. Finally, in 1959, Gita, now remarried, sold his unfinished novel, The Silver Dark, to Pyramid Books, a paperback publisher. Despite a cover plug by novelist Budd Schulberg proclaiming it “A genuinely original and compelling novel,” the book was never reviewed and never reissued. According to WorldCat.org, just two copies remain in libraries.
The Silver Dark might have marked the end of Lewis’s story. His work was ignored in studies of American novels. His film credits alone kept his name alive in occasional reference books. His daughter Jane died in 1985 from complications related to diabetes; his brothers both died in the late 1990s and his widow Gita in 2001. Only Michael, with a handful of his father’s letters and one lone page from his journal, remained to remember Lewis.
In the spring 2009, I came across a review of Gentleman Overboard while browsing through the archives of Time magazine. “What would it feel like to fall off a ship in mid-Pacific?” the reviewer asked. “With as much calm authority as though he had fallen overboard himself, Herbert Clyde Lewis tells just what it feels like.” Having established this website three years earlier, I was looking for long-forgotten books with unique qualities and Gentleman Overboard sounded like a perfect candidate. I located a copy, read it and posted a short enthusiastic review. Without having seen the Newsweek article describing Lewis’s original idea, I referred to the book as an experiment:
What matters is not whether it succeeds or fails but simply seeing what happens. Lewis puts his subject into the experiment and observes. This novel holds his notes. Few scientists could have recorded the results with such an elegant and light touch. It’s been said that a true artist knows when to stop … and does. By this criterion alone, Herbert Clyde Lewis proves himself a true artist with Gentleman Overboard.
A few months later, I received an email from Diego D’Onofrio, an editor with La Bestia Equilatera, a small Spanish-language publisher in Buenos Aires. “I would like to ask you,” he wrote: “Which neglected book do you recommend me to publish?” Not familiar with La Bestia’s audience, I was reluctant to offer many suggestions, but replied, “If I had to pick one off the top of my head that is very accessible to a wide range of readers, I guess I’d pick Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. It should be relatively easy to translate and has a strong narrative line that should grab most readers very quickly.” Diego thanked me and said he’d order a copy.
Diego and his editor-in-chief Luis Chittaroni loved the book and in May 2010, they contracted for a translation and scheduled the book for publication. The Spanish title would be El caballero que cayó al mar (The Gentleman Who Fell into the Sea). The challenge of publishing a neglected book in another language is considerable, D’Onofrio later wrote. “Because nobody knows the author, not least the book, which is also not known in his native language … the only tool you have to sell the book is that it must be extraordinary in itself.”
By this standard, El caballero que cayó al mar performed exceptionally well. Its early reviews were consistently enthusiastic: “Simple y magistral. Sólo eso. Sencillamente eso,” Alejandro Frías proclaimed in El Sol de Mendoza: “Simple and masterful. Only that. Simply that.” Another reviewer called it “una perlita”: “a little pearl.” The book continued to win critical acclaim as its readership spread beyond Argentina. In August 2018, one of Spain’s leading critics, Ignacio Echevarría, praised the book in his monthly column for El Cultural and in September 2019, a feature on CNN Chile recommended it: “Con magistral sencillez, Herbert Clyde Lewis lleva el relato a una dimensión filosófica.” (“With masterful simplicity, Herbert Clyde Lewis takes the story to a philosophical dimension”). Eight years after the first publication of El caballero que cayó al mar, D’Onofrio reported, “It is the book with the most unanimous praise from our entire publishing house, which now has more than 90 books.”
Even as the Spanish translation was underway, Luis Chittaroni began to share PDF copies of the original Viking edition with acquaintances in the Argentinian literary community. The novelist Pablo Katchadjian in turn recommended the book to his friend Uriel Kon, an Argentina-born Jew living in Jerusalem and then starting up his own small press, Zikit Books. Looking for English-language novels that could be easily translated and published in Hebrew, Kon found the book matched his criteria perfectly: “Clear, elegant prose; a compelling, existential story; a book you can sit down and read in a night.” He arranged for a Hebrew translation and Zikit published האדוּ שבפל לים (roughly, The Nobleman Fell into the Sea) in June 2013.
The book struck a chord among Israeli readers. A feature review in Ha’aretz, one of Israel’s most widely read newspapers, called it “A miniature masterpiece that emerged from oblivion.” Zikit printed 1,00 copies — a number Kon considered “somewhat optimistic” at the time. That edition sold out in under two months and Zikit went on to sell over 7,000 copies. “There are around three to four thousand serious literary readers in Israel,” Kon estimated. “By that standard, this was a huge best-seller — a cult classic.” Standish’s predicament — lost and forgotten in a great ocean — Kon believes, “Resonated with many Israeli intellectuals who felt themselves isolated—not only as Jews surrounded by the Arab world but also unheard in a society dominated by conservative forces.”
In September 2019, Auteursdomein, a small Dutch press based in Amsterdam, published the English-language text of Gentleman Overboard under the simplified title, Overboard. This edition was sponsored by Dutch novelist Pauline van de Ven, who had come across Gentleman in a box of old books and ashtrays left by a distant uncle. As she writes in her foreword, “I read it without interruption from cover to cover and was impressed by the austere language, the strong images and the universal scope of the haunting story.” For van de Ven, the book’s power lies in its appeal to a paradoxical sense of “shared loneliness.” It belongs, she believes, in “same gallery of honor” as Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a another short novel about a prosperous businessman facing his imminent death: “It’s an existentialist masterpiece.”
Despite its rescue by publishers on three different continents, however, Gentleman Overboard remains out of print in the United States. Just three copies of the 1937 Viking edition are available for sale. The book’s success with readers in Argentina, Chile, Spain, Israel, and the Netherlands suggests the time is ripe for its reissue in its native country. There is still a chance for a new generation of American readers to discover Herbert Clyde Lewis’s “little pearl.” All it will take is the right person to listen.
My sincere thanks to Michael Lewis for allowing me to quote from his father’s letters and his own emails.
When poet Charles Reznikoff died in 1976, his wife, Myrie Syrkin, gave his papers to publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, which had begun collecting and issuing his poetry and other writings. A while later, Martin called Syrkin to say he’d found the manuscript of a completed novel titled The Manner Music. She knew nothing of it — and Reznikoff had usually discussed anything he was working on with her. What’s more, Martin added, it’s a Hollywood novel. For a couple of years in the late 1930s, Reznikoff had worked in Hollywood as a researcher and assistant to Albert Lewin, an acquaintance from his Brooklyn youth who’d been a protege of Irving Thalberg and worked his way up to producer. Maurice Zolotow later compared the discovery to finding a T. S. Eliot novel about banks or one by Wallace Stevens about insurance.
The Hollywood label has stuck with The Manner Music ever since. In reality, saying The Manner Music is a Hollwood novel is like saying Moby Dick is a Nantucket novel: not untrue but generally missing the point. Milton Hindus, a friend of Reznikoff and a stalwart supporter, came closer to the mark in noting the parallels between the book and Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Both stories involve two men: one a prosperous pragmatist, the other an ascetic idealist. In both stories, the narrator is nameless; in both, he is at a loss to understand the other man’s obsession. Both are case studies demonstrating the observation of Reznikoff’s friend William Carlos Williams that “The pure products of America go crazy.”
Reznikoff’s Bartleby is a composer named Jude Dalsimer. Like Reznikoff, Dalsimer works and lives alone in Hollywood while working for a studio producer, known as Paul Pasha in the book, so that his wife could stay in New York and keep her job as a teacher. He doesn’t mingle with the other writers, avoids most parties. He rents a room in a little hotel in Santa Monica, far out the tramline from the studios. Like Reznikoff, he prefers to walk, usually for miles along the beach, down the coast as far as Redondo and Hermosa Beach.
In his introduction, Robert Creeley observes that the two characters in The Manner Music resemble two aspects of Reznikoff himself. As Reznikoff did for a time after leaving college, the narrator is a traveling salesman in dry goods, and his work allows him to meet his friend Jude in both New York and Hollywood. Like Reznikoff, who held down a steady job as a social workder for years, the narrator accepts the monotony and occasional humiliations of the work in return for its security: “Like all salesmen, I suppose, I am very patient. We soon learn to wait for hours in anterooms and to send our cards again and again and still to be pleasant and to smile.” The narrator accepts listening to Jude performing his music on the cheap piano in his apartment in the same manner. “I listened patiently then for an hour or more — most likely less — and again heard nothing that moved me.” Jude’s music isn’t to his taste — not like band music or “an old fellow singing old songs for pennies in the backyards.”
Charles Reznikoff in the late 1960s
Jude Dalsimer, on the other hand, represents Reznikoff’s artistic self. Though he wrote and published his poetry throughout much of his working life, Reznikoff never gained much recognitition for it until very late and he tended not to discuss it with many of his acquaintances. As a fellow Brooklyn poet, Harvey Shapiro once wrote, “Reznikoff devoted his entire life to verse, and whatever he did is characterized by meticulously fine and painstaking craftsmanship.” None of his poems, Hindus observed, “were made merely in order to ‘sell and sell quickly.’ They are without exception patient labors of love, pure skill and artistic integrity, and they seem bound, in time, to find fit readers (however few or many) to respond to their muted appeal.”
Jude is not particularly concerned with the success of his music: “As to whether it will be sold or not, sung or played, that is really not my business. I am not going to bother about that too much: my job is to write it. That no one else can do.” If anything, he is deeply suspicious of the American culture of consumerism. He tells of a dinner party at which a German refugee, a former concentration camp prisoner, was asked to speak. Instead of talking about his experiences in Germany, however, he told the story of a friend who’d committed suicide soon after arriving in America. “Why? Why did he do it?” the man asked. “I will tell you why. Because of the indifference here!” Late in the book, when destitute, homeless, and hopeless, he burns all his compositions in a trashcan in Central Park.
Both Dalsimer and Reznikoff were also great walkers and listeners. Reznikoff’s letters to Syrkin are full of things seen on his walks:
A study in tempo of conversation: a pretty big boy and a little boy are walking together. The little boy is really tagging after the other one- eager to be a fellow. The older fellow is wearing a peculiar hat and the younger fellow asks, “What kind of hat is that?” No answer. “What kind of hat is that, Stanley?” emphasizing the name. Stanley answers cheerfully, “A monkey hat.” “What kind of hat is that?” the little fellow asks again, not what kind of hat is that (namely a “monkey hat”) but what kind of a hat is that (namely, the hat you have on). And again Stanley says curtly and cheerfully, pleased with his own wit, “A monkey hat.” But, after a pause he adds, “A small round sailor hat.” Specific enough, to be sure, but the little fellow now says aloud to himself, “A monkey hat,” wondering, perhaps, if it is really a kind of hat and if so what an attractive name for a hat and could he get one …
Dalsimer’s music is also drawn from what he sees on his walks. The narrator compares one piece to the sound of the wind “blowing down a street on an April evening, rattling windows and making the swinging signs of the stores squeak.” When Jude tries to recount recent incidents, the narrator says, “‘Better yet,’ and here I lied as all salesmen lie and flatter, ‘play them.'” “Well,” Jude replies, “I was taking a walk,” and he proceeds to play.
Some of the walks in The Manner Music show us a country deep in the grips of the Depression:
As I walked along the drive again, I saw a man coming towards me; a poor man by his clothes: he had no overcoat and his trousers were of a cheap goods without the tailor’s crease. We were alone, for the day was cold and the drive was windy. I saw that he had stopped and was watching me furtively; a man of forty or fifty with an honest face, I thought, lined by cared. When I had passed, I could see that he stooped to pick up something — probably a cigar butt or cigarette that someone about to step on a bus had thrown away. Perhaps he had been ashamed to stoop for it in front of me.
The narrator has his last encounter with Jude in an automat in Manhattan. “I noticed that a seam in the collar had parted and another in the shoulder and that the thread that edged the buttonhole in the lapel was unraveling.” Asked where he’s staying Jude replies, “I have the airiest room in New York.” Only later does the narrator understand what this means.
A number of Reznikoff’s poems make their way into The Manner Music — or perhaps vice-versa. In the novel, for example, the narrator recalls,
When I left the theatre it was raining. I went to my hotel through the wholesale district, the streets of which were empty at night, rain or no rain, although busy enough by day when offices and lofts were full of people. I passed an old woman selling newspapers from the shelter of a doorway. As I bought one, I glanced down at her feet.
“You were looking at my feet, weren’t you?” she asked. “Aren’t they terrible—so big in these rubbers. But it is better to have your feet look big than to get them wet,’ she added, still dubious. “A man lent them to me. They are rubbers for a man and I had to tie them with a string. But better than to be sick, eh?”
I took shelter in the doorway, too, to get out of the rain for a moment. “But how big my feet look in them,” she went on. I wondered as I listened, Does this old woman selling newspapers in the rain on this lonely corner still think it matters how her feet look—big or small? I looked at her again: whatever she had been only life was left — and vanity.
This shows up again in a passage from Inscriptions: 1944-1956:
It was raining and the street empty. I passed an old woman selling newspapers. As I bought one I glanced at her feet. “So big in these rubbers. But it’s better than to get them wet,” she added, dubious, “and to be sick. A man lent them. They are rubbers for a man, not me, and I have to time them on with a string. But how big my feet look!” I looked at her again: only this was left — vanity.
Sirkin thought her husband might have kept the book a secret because of its portrait of Jude Dalsimer’s wife: “A petulant, pretty, notably unsympathetic female, a Zionist, a high school teacher who tactlessly keeps complaining about her fatigue and lets her talented, unappreciated husband end his poverty-striken quest in Bellevue. A roman-à-clef with a vengeance!” Reading Reznikoff’s Selected Letters, however, one sees that much of it was drawn from his letters to her. In September 1939, for example, as he saw his job with Albert Lewin about to come to an end, he wrote:
At lunch, and we go to lunch together every day, I am silent for long stretches and obviously comfortably so; now he makes conversation, tells stories I have heard before, and which he feels, somewhat uncomfortably that I have heard him tell; they are not particularly good stories, for example, how he dined with a certain friend and this friend engaged in a quarrel with somebody at another table, who was then insignificant but is now the head of a studio—a great man; I listen politely and think with some satisfaction that now I can make a suitable reply.
In The Manner Music, this becomes a lunch between Jude Dalsimer and Paul Pasha:
Paul and he went to the studio each day, but did nothing, waiting for the next move by the heads of the studio. They went out to lunch together, daily, for Paul no longer had any appointments. There was a change between them — slight but perceptible to both. Now that the relation of master and man was about to end — most likely in a week or two — they became equals again. At lunch Jude was generally silent. Comfortably so. It was Paul who tried to make conversation, who told stories which Jude had heard and which Paul felt, uncomfortably, that Jude had heard him tell.
Myrie Sirkin suspected that he wrote The Manner Music after William Carlos Williams suggested that the exercise might help him overcome a writer’s block he was experiencing in the late 1940s. “Perhaps it was the writing of this novel which enabled Reznikoff to overcome what appears to have been a psychic or spiritual blockage (whatever the causes were) to rediscover his ancient springs, to return to poetry,” Anthony Rudolf later speculated. This should not, however, diminish the value of The Manner Music. It is, in the words of Milton Hindus, “a small, multi-faceted gem” that deserves its place on the shelf of great American short novels alongside Bartleby.
The Manner Music, by Charles Reznikoff Santa Barara: The Black Sparrow Press, 1977
Born in Galicia–meaning Poland–er, now Ukraine, coming of age in Vienna, working as an actress on stage and screen, marrying screenwriter and director Berthold Viertel, living in Berlin in the days of Brecht and Weimar, moving to Hollywood just ahead of the first Nazi persecutions of Jews, becoming something of a center of the German intellectual exile community, then surviving the McCarthy Red Scare, Salka Viertel came to know, clink glasses, break bread, and shed tears with about half of the entries in James’ encyclopedia. Kafka and Max Brod dropped by her Prague apartment for supper; she and her husband worked at the legendary Berlin film studio, UFA; Eisenstein wrote to her in desperation when he ran out of money filming “Que Viva Mexico!”; she wistfully knocked back vodka shots with Garbo on New Years Eve after Berthold left her for a younger woman; her son, Peter, worked on “The African Queen” with John Huston (and later turned the story into the novel White Hunter, Black Heart). Hers was a fruit cake of a life story.
Sergei Eisenstein and Salka Viertel on the beach in Santa Monica, 1930
I was going to write up a longer post about The Kindness of Strangers, but then I discovered that NYRB Classics is about to reissue it in a few months. So, in commemoration of Independence Day, I will just quote the following story from her time in America.
Having room to spare in her house in Santa Monica in the 1950s, Salka offered the use of a studio over the garage to the black documentary filmmaker, Carlton Moss, and his wife, Lynn. Because Lynn was white, the couple hadn’t been able to find anyone willing to rent to them. A while after the Mosses moved in, Salka had an encounter with her neighbor:
In all the years I had lived on Mabery Road, I had exchanged merely friendly nods and brief greetings with my next-door neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Ferris, an old retired couple. Aloof and gentle, they did not even reproach me when my dogs dug a hole under the fence and killed their pet duck, Matilda. Lynn and Carlton had lived for some time in the “Schloss,” as Carlton called the house (pronouncing it “slush”), when early one morning, as I was watering my roses, I saw Mrs. Ferris cutting flowers in her garden. I wished her a pleasant day; she called back: “Oh, I am so glad to see you,” and came to the fence with a huge bunch of sweetpeas.
“I’d like you to give this to your mother.” I thanked her and said that my mother would be enchanted with the lovely bouquet.
Then Mrs. Ferris asked: “That nice couple over your garage, are they staying with you for any length of time?”
“As long as they wish it,” I answered defensively.
But Mrs. Ferris had more on her mind and slowly and hesitantly it came out. “You know that Mrs. A., the lady who owns that large Spanish house down the road, has been canvassing for signatures to protest your renting to Negroes?”
“No one can tell me who should or should not live in my house …” I burst out angrily.
Mrs. Ferris reached over the fence and put her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t get excited! I want you to know that no one signed. We, the property owners on this side of the Canyon, had a meeting”–apparently I was not considered a “property owner” as I had been excluded–“and my husband told them: These are friends of Mrs. Viertel. We are pleased she is our neighbor.”
Moved by the unexpected support, I thanked Mrs. Ferris profusely. But she had not finished. Taking a deep breath, she shook her head and looking reproachfully at me, added: “Yes, that’s what my husband told them, regardless of the fact that we’ve seen you driving around with that ‘Roosevelt for President’ sticker on your car.”
Dear Mrs. Ferris! This was the only time in my life I regretted not being a Republican.
Alone, she persuaded Wall Street bankers to finance her unit, Gloria Swanson, Inc., to the extent of $1,200,000, taking as consideration her box office record and her insurance policies of several million dollars. Alone, she must make the money to pay her $10,000 monthly living expenses. She must keep up her $100,000 penthouse on top of the Park Chambers Hotel in New York, her Hollywood home, her $75,000 Croton country estate. Tied to her by a monetary thread are her four secretaries, her press agent, her vice-president, her production manager, her scenario manager. Her days are a constant series of disturbances by butlers and maids, by secretaries and camera men, by electricians, and writers and bill collectors.
Hers is a mad, chaotic organization, set into the tumultuous life of a tired, worried woman whose temperamental sympathies are fluid, running in channels dammed by her assistants. Everyone and everything influences her. She listens and weeps. She hires and fires, shoots situations that are never used, orders sets, and countermands, pays for sub-titles and throws them out the window, announces that she will not be bothered by details any more, and then insists on licking each fan mail stamp. And now, in the midst of the whirlpool of her life, brave and bewildered, is Gloria, going around faster than she ever believed possible. The waves wrap her, and she strangles in the seaweed tentacles of her octopus of troubles, her responsibilities, her enormous debts, her file of lawsuits for the non-payment of her extravagant bills.
From Doug and Mary and Others, by Allene Talmey with woodcuts by Bertrand Zadig New York: Macy-Masius, 1927
“The action begins just before Christmas 1956 and ends two years later,” Gavin Lambert writes at the The Slide Area. From that, a reader could easily conclude that the book is a novel, and, indeed, Lambert refers to his stories as “sections.” I’m not sure that it makes much of a different whether one labels The Slide Area as short story collection or novel. It’s a marvellously well-written work of fiction regardless how it’s categorized.
As anyone who’s lived in Los Angeles knows, the city sits on the wrong side of a great geological fault line and its hills aren’t much more than temporarily-stabilized piles of earth and rock and have a tendency to fall away in great hunks with little notice, taking with them the big, showy, and expensive houses built along their flanks and ridges. So L. A. residents get used to seeing “Slide Area” signs, usually surrounded by scattered chunks of dirt offering hints of things to come. What goes up must come down–and afterwards, there’s room to erect yet another showcase home.
In much the same way, L. A. residents get used to see people falling from great heights while others are fighting their way up. The Slide Area is filled with such stories. There is the Countess Osterberg-Steblechi, “a great aristocratic wreck,” “a balloon blown up into roughly human shape and ready to burst.” But she has enough cash still left to entice her hangers-on to stage, in “The End of the Line,” a grand tour of the Continent that never actually takes her beyond the confines of her living room. It’s a cleverly-told tale but by far the weakest in the book, the closest Lambert ever comes to a stock magazine short story.
His forte is the character sketch. But in Lambert’s case, his characters are as shifting and unstable as ground they walk upon. They aspire to leave Nebraska or Oklahoma or Colorado behind, change their names, change their looks, lose their histories, and become what everyone else wants to be. Of Julie Forbes, a Joan Crawford/Bette Davis-like eternal star, coming into her living room as if walking onto a stage, he writes,
Her skin was golden, her figure trim and pliant as a young girl’s. She had been created a moment ago. There was no childhood, no past, nothing. I thought of a joke about the mortuaries in California: they supply human ashes to cannibals in the South Seas, who make them flesh by adding water. Instant people, like instant coffee. Julie Forbes, I decided, was an instant person. That must be her secret. Every few years she was reduced to ashes, then reconstituted in a new form. Different. Shining. Instant.
And of all Lambert’s characters, perhaps the greatest is Los Angeles itself. The Slide Area is studded with some of the best writing about L. A. ever put on paper:
Los Angeles is not a city, but a series of suburban approaches to a city that never materializes….
How to grasp something unfinished yet always remodelling itself, changing without a basis for change? So much visible impatience to be born, to grow, such wild tracts of space to be filled: difficult to settle in a comfortable unfinished desert. Because of the long confusing distances, the streets are empty of walking people, full of moving cars. Between where you are and where you are going to be is a no-man’s land. At night the neon signs glitter and the shop windows are lighted stages, but hardly anyone stops to look. A few people huddle at coffee stalls and hamburger bars. Those dark flat areas are parking lots, crammed solid.
The city itself is a mirror of the constant metamorphosis of inhabitants. And, of course, the combination of shape-shifting people and ever-remodelling city creates a reality that’s almost unreal. Looking down upon the city from high on one of its unstable hills, one of Lambert’s characters observes, “Looking down on the straight intersecting lines of pink and yellow and green is like finding a vast abstract painting laid out on the earth. It has nothing at all to do with living.”
When I first read The Slide Area about four years ago, I dog-eared at least two dozen pages featuring this sort of striking writing, and reading it again recently, I dog-eared at least a couple dozen more. Indeed, I could easily just fill this piece with quotes from the book. Although best known for his novel, Inside Daisy Clover, which was made into an even better-known movie starring Natalie Wood, “Inside Daisy Clover”, Lambert deserves to be recognized for The Slide Area, which ranks with The Last Tycoon, The Day of the Locust, and anything Raymond Chandler ever wrote about Los Angeles.
The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life, by Gavin Lambert London: Hamish Hamilton, 1959
The first half of Elliott Nugent’s memoir, Events Leading Up to the Comedy, is pretty forgettable. Nugent, a classmate of James Thurber at Ohio State University, is probably best known for The Male Animal, the play he co-wrote with Thurber. The son of two professional actors, Nugent first hits the boards at the age of eight, and after his graduation from college, became an actor himself.
He soon expanded into writing, and quickly gained a hit on Broadway with Kempy, in which he co-starred with his father and sister. He married a fellow player, Norma Lee, and became a producer and director as well.
In 1929, MGM picked up an option to use him in their movies, and his first starring role was in “Wise Girls,” the film version of Kempy. Then, starting with “The Mouthpiece” in 1932, he became a film director as well. He went on to play in over twenty movies and direct over thirty–few of them much remembered today, however. Despite its rich potential for anecdotes, though, Nugent relates his story in an uninspired, “this happened, and then this happened” manner that would have led me to set the book aside after a few chapters had there not been a promise of something remarkable to come.
That something is an account of his battle with an illness he never actually labels, but which has all the signs of manic depression. Starting in the mid-1940s, Nugent’s pace of activities reached a frenzy. At one point, he watched in make-up the opening act of a play he was producing, then cut across the alley and took his first entrance in another play he was performing in. Aggravated by too much drinking and too little sleep, his few reserves of patience and perspective were exhausted and he began acting erratically.
He would go for days on end from work to parties to spur-of-the-moment trips, spending wildly, accosting strangers, and launching into angry tirades against long-standing friends. Then, days later, he found himself toying with the idea of suicide:
I scribbled a note to Norma, shoved it deep in a trouser pocket, got in my car, and drove to the Roosevelt Hotel. I remembered a certain fire escape on the tenth floor and in the back of the building, near the room my father used to occupy.
I checked my hat and coat downstairs, then rode up in the elevator, nodding to the operator as if I were one of the guests in the hotel. I pulled open the hall door to the fire-escape door, went outside, and closed it, then peered over the railing to the alley ten stories below. Instead of climbing the railing, I lighted a cigarette and sat on the railing, experimentally teetering a bit. In another moment, I might have toppled over backward, but the door opened and a stranger emerged. He gave me a curious look.
“It’s getting colder,” I said casually. “I don’t think I’ll stay out here very long.”
I offered the man a cigarette, bu he refused and went inside. I imagined that he could see me through the Venetian blinds of my father’s old room. Abruptly I rose and went downstairs, almost without thinking or making any decision.
Nugent’s behavior reached a point where his wife resorted to having him committed to a Connecticut mental hospital known as the Institute of the Living. There, he was subjected to most the known treatments of the day short of electric shock: drugs, wrapping in cold towels, spending nights in tepid baths, and insulin shock. The latter finally brought him to a level of self-control that convinced his wife and psychiatrist to release him.
Within months, however, he was back on a high. This time, he headed off on a cross-country tear that landed him in jails in Palm Springs and Hollywood and nearly got him drowned in riptides off Acapulco. His wife finally tracked him down after he returned to New York and checked into four different hotels under four different names–all in the course of one day. This time, he was sent to Bellevue Hospital and then a reputable facility upstate.
Nugent’s account of his bouts of manic depression reminded me very much of those of Washington Post publisher Phil Graham–as seen from the perspective of his wife, Katharine, in her memoir, Personal History. Except that Nugent survived where Graham took his life. Both men’s illness was ineptly treated, though they had access to the best care available, and endured by their bewildered family and friends.
Written in 1965, nearly twenty years after the start of Nugent’s illness, Events Leading Up to the Comedy comes to a rather abrupt end. Aside from the need to “try to forgive myself,” Nugent takes no great lesson from his experiences.
Perhaps, as a writer of light, comedic plays, Nugent lacked the darkness of imagination to really convey the terrors of his depressions. The passage above, for example, is utterly matter-of-fact–no different in tone, really, from that of the rest of the book. And so, in the end, Events Leading Up to the Comedy amounts to an interesting but not particularly moving account of mental illness.
Nugent, whose stage and film career ended by the late 1950s, wrote one other book after this memoir. Of Cheat and Charmer tells of the end of a Hollywood film director on a bout of drinking and fighting and womanizing that must draw heavily on Nugent’s own adventures while on manic highs. Nugent died in New York City in 1980.
Events Leading Up to the Comedy, by Elliott Nugent New York City: Trident Press, 1965
Fred Allen. To ninety-nine out of a hundred people under the age of sixty, that name means about as much as John Smith or Jane Doe. I recognize it because I was suckered into sending off for one of those old-time radio compilations they used to hawk at every other commercial break during the Saturday afternoon showing of old movies featuring W. C. Fields, Mae West and the Marx Brothers. One of the records included a routine from “Allen’s Alley,” Allen’s hit NBC radio comedy series from the 1940s, that was full of fine and horrible puns, barbed put-downs, and various other antics, all delivered at machine-gun speed.
Allen’s nervous energy seems not to have been just an act, and he burned himself out early, dropping dead of a heart attack on a New York street at the age of 61. He’d made the switch from radio to TV and was a regular on “What’s My Line?” but he’d also slipped from star to wise-cracking character on a show that, hit though it was, was still just a game show. Had he survived into the 1960s or 1970s, he might have been remembered as well as Jack Benny.
In 1965, Doubleday published a collection on Allen’s letters edited by Joe McCarthy (no relation to the Senator): Fred Allen’s Letters. I use the word “edited” because that’s what it says on the jacket. I suspect he just tossed a boxful of the letters down a staircase and let that determine his sequence. The book is divided into sections with titles such as “The Early Days,” “Old Friends,” and “Show Biz People,” but there’s no particular rhyme or reason to what goes where.
Not that it makes much of a difference. There’s a certain appropriateness in the randomness of the selections that fits with Allen’s sense of humor, and it guarantees you never know quite what’s coming next.
Allen composed at the typewriter and rarely bothered with the shift key, so these letters might remind some of Don Marquis’ The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel (which is a Penguin Classic now–wow). I’ve kept this book by the bedside, dipping into every few nights, and my wife is heartily sick of having me shake the bed with muffled chuckling.
Here are a couple of samples to whet your appetite:
To Mabel Dawson (a fan)
dear miss dawson …
thank you for your letter.
you will be glad to learn that the honey arrived in excellent condition. portland had some at breakfast yesterday and reported it was the best she had ever tasted.
we don’t get much honey here in new york. we have had one bee for some time. we have no flowers and have to let him out to sneak into the various floral shops in the neighborhood. i think our bee is nearsighted. it must spend a lot of time on artificial flowers, for the amount of honey it gives some months is negligible.
our bee has no comb. it carries the honey on its person. when we want honey we summon the bee, point to the biscuit, or whatever object we want honey on, the bee flies to the table, squats and buzzes a little and when it arises we have about enough honey to float a caraway seed.
we can imagine what a boon it is to us to have three large jars of honey. we are sending our bee down to florida for a good rest this winter. i am sure that when it returns, brown and healthy, it will be ready to pick up where it left off and keep us in honey for years to come.
we are having a difficult time finding guests to use on the program but i guess we will manage to keep going some way during the coming season. if not, some week, i may put our bee on the show and there will be a real b on n.b.c.
To Ed Simmons and Norman Lear (yes, that Norman Lear), two comedy writers who had sent Allen a joke letter asking his permission to start a polish fan club.
… for many years, i have been against fan clubs. i remember back in 1902 a group of girls got together in littleton, new hampshire, to form a guy kibbee fan club. mr. kibbee, even at that early age was as bald as a boy scout’s knee, and the girls all shaved their heads to look like their idol. all through the summer the little baldheaded girls had a jolly time. they had guy kibbee meetings, they talked like guy kibbee and when field days were held the fan club would rush out and spell guy kibbee in different formations and in different languages. with their little bald heads they were a shiny sight. when the cold weather arrived, however, it was another story. thirty of the baldheaded girls contracted penumonia and within three months the entire guy kibbee fan club was wiped out.
that is only one reason i hesitate to sponsor a fan club. if beri beri or scurvy breaks out in your group how is it going to look with little emaciated bodies lying around the streets of california wearing my fan club buttons.
Fred Allen’s Letters, edited by Joe McCarthy New York City: Doubleday, 1965.
The Wikipedia entry for Speed Lamkin quotes composer Ned Rorem’s characterization of him as “the poor man’s Truman Capote”–which is probably not how Lamkin would choose to be remembered. The comparison was unavoidable, however, at least for the first thirty-some years of his life.
Born in Monroe, Louisiana, son of a wealthy businessman, Lamkin like Capote went North young–to Harvard in 1948 at the age of 16. He quickly found his way into the circles of Eastern avant-garde and gay society. As early as 1949, Tennessee Williams mentioned “Speed Lamkin, whom you may know or know of, sometimes referred to as the new Truman Capote” in a letter to a friend. He published his first novel, Tiger in the Garden, while still an undergraduate. Drawing heavily on Lamkin’s perceptions of Monroe society, the novel was, in the words of Time’s reviewer, “made up of old ingredients: miscegenation, aristocratic drunks and flowerlike ladies, languid Southern talk and fiery Southern tempers.” While there was no doubt that Lamkin’s book was informed by personal knowledge of at least a few skeletons in Louisiana closets, most reviews found the book a bit artificial: the New York Times’ reviewer said it gave the “sense of a low-powered, highly polished Hollywood product.”
This was a prescient comment. In the same letter, Williams wrote that Lamkin “wants to get a Hollywood job,” and less than a year later, Christopher Isherwood, living in Los Angeles, mentioned Lamkin for the first time in his diaries. Lamkin was the first to try to adapt Isherwood’s Berlin stories for the screen, and while he didn’t succeed in this effort, he did work as a screen writer, mostly in television for most of the 1950s.
In 1954, he published his second novel, The Easter Egg Hunt (later retitled Fast and Loose in paperback). Although labeled a Hollywood novel, the book is, to be more precise, a novel of Beverly Hills. The distinction is subtle but important. A Hollywood novel is, in some way or another, about the business of movie-making and the people involved in it.
Beverly Hills, on the other hand, while populated by many in the entertainment business, is first and foremost a town of the rich–or, as Lamkin describes it, small “wealthy city, two thirds suburb, one third resort.” The Easter Egg Hunt is more about lives lived around expensive homes, poolsides, and nightclubs than about directors, actors, and producers.
During the photographing, new people arrived. Cobina Wright’s secretary; and the Abe Abramses, who had money in Van-color; and an Egyptian princess, who had drifted to Beverly Hills in the entourage of the Queen Mother Nazli; and a blank-faced Dutchman, who owned a pepper business; and a man in pink shorts, who sold Fords; and the man who had once played Dagwood Bumstead
While many of the extravagances described in the book relates to the efforts of Clarence Culvers, a Louisiana tycoon, to make a star of his young second wife Carol, show business is never more than a presence on the periphery of the story.
The story itself is pretty thin. Lamkins’ narrator, Charley Thayer, a young writer for Time magazine from Miro (read Monroe), Louisiana, encounters Angelica O’Brien, a a childhood playmate and bright young thing, now married to Laddie Wells, a pompous would-be intellectual and assistant to a producer of “A-movie” westerns. At first the narrative seems to be leading into a triangle between Charley, Angelica, and Laddie, but then Charley, whose bumper sticker must have read, “I Brake for Bright, Shiny Objects,” becomes the confidant of Carol Culvers and the course takes a sharp turn. From there on, we follow the rocky course of Carol, who idles at unstable and regularly revs up to self-destructive, her affair with Laddie, and the ambitions and jealousies of Clarence. Although Charley hints at one point about halfway in the story that this all will climax in some violent, headlines-grabbing event, what we get at the end is more whimper than bang. Overall, I thought The Easter Egg Hunt an utter failure as a novel.
At the same time, however, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Lamkin might not have been an effective novelist, but he is a terrific observer. If he kept a diary during his time in Los Angeles, somebody needs to convince him to publish it. The Easter Egg Hunt is a treasure trove of descriptions of the people, places, and trappings of Beverly Hills in the early 1950s. If you read L.A. Confidential and other James Ellroy novels for the scenery, you’ll love The Easter Egg Hunt. Take, for instance, just a portion of the account of one of the Culvers’ frequent parties:
They sat drinking in sixes and eights around the tables under the marquee; and they would dance for half an hour to the bouncy music of an orchestra playing the songs of South Pacific. Then the orchestra would alternate with a rumba-mambo-tango band. People spread their fur wraps and lay down on the grass, and people had their fortunes told by a swank Beverly Hills numerologist. Two snobbish English actors arrived with Vera Velma the strip-tease queen, who wore pink dyed fur and was introduced as Mrs. T. Markoe Deering of Southampton and New York.
At two-thirty sharp the man who had played Washington in Valley Forge vomited over the buffet, and a sturgeon and three red herrings had to be taken away. Down the hill in the Japanese tea house two ensigns were having a crap game with Len Evansman, the columnist. Len Evansman wanted to know if I could change a thousand-dollar bill. At a quarter of three a dozen Hawaiian girls did the hula-hula and a dignified producer, who had an obsession for pinching young women’s behinds, got his face slapped by the ukelele player. A thin man who did rope tricks followed the hula girls. It was during the rope tricks that somebody started throwing the plates out over the hill. “Look,” cried a starlet, “flying saucers! ” Forty-five people rose from their chairs to look. Three men started throwing plates, then a woman started.
The book is rich of succinct character sketches full of efficient defamation: “George Martin was not handsome, he was not well-mannered, he was not entertaining in the least; in fact, every remark he made, every opinion uttered, was something stupid and inane; yet when George Martin entered a room, the eyes of every woman in it went to him.” Or the studio founder who “lived on in a Norman castle on Doheny with trained nurses to tend his artificial bowels.”
Although Lamkin’s alter ego Charley has a one-night stand with Angelica, his role and perspective seems more gay than straight. He becomes the confidant of both Angelica and Carol without stirring up much in the way of a jealous reaction from either husband. He spends much of his time in the company of an English novelist named Sebastian Saunders, who is clearly a fictionalized Christopher Isherwood (to whom the novel is dedicated): “His court consisted of two sailors in uniform, a trim little middle-aged Englishman, to whom he addressed most of his remarks, and a boy who could not have been over fifteen years old.” I don’t know if Lamkin was trying to camouflage his homosexuality or just using the language of his time, but there are regular references to gays that are likely to offend today: “Gladys Hendrix typified the sort of well-off older woman who goes around with swish young men; and the Titson twins with their talk of ‘stunning’ this and ‘smart’ that were horribly, horribly swish.” Charley and Angelica go to a “pansy bar”; the Culvers’ personal secretary, “a tall, stout, broad-shouldered woman with the complexion of a steaming red crab” is known as “Butch” Murphy.
The Easter Egg Hunt did well enough to be reissued as a lurid-covered paperback, but got reviews that consistently riffed on the theme of “imitation F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Lamkin abandoned the novel after this, but he did get one play, “Comes a Day,” produced on Broadway starring George C. Scott, in 1958. He returned to Monroe in the early 1960s and appears to have devoted his energies towards collecting. The New Orleans Museum of Art featured a number of items from his collection of furniture, paintings, vases, and other items in the exhibition, “A Taste for Excellence,” several years ago.
Kari provided the following profile: I’m studying for my PhD in American Studies at Glasgow University, and my thesis is on the Hollywood novel genre pre-1950s. Other research interests include F. Scott Fitzgerald, and particularly the role played in his novels of alcohol, work, and waste. As a part-time student I also spend my time working in financial services, hospitality and teaching. My Twitter handle is @karichsund and my email address is 
If you loved Clive James’ 
“The action begins just before Christmas 1956 and ends two years later,” 
, is pretty forgettable. Nugent, a classmate of James Thurber at Ohio State University, is probably best known for 
, the play he co-wrote with Thurber. The son of two professional actors, Nugent first hits the boards at the age of eight, and after his graduation from college, became an actor himself.
. Except that Nugent survived where Graham took his life. Both men’s illness was ineptly treated, though they had access to the best care available, and endured by their bewildered family and friends.
tells of the end of a Hollywood film director on a bout of drinking and fighting and womanizing that must draw heavily on Nugent’s own adventures while on manic highs. Nugent died in New York City in 1980.
. I use the word “edited” because that’s what it says on the jacket. I suspect he just tossed a boxful of the letters down a staircase and let that determine his sequence. The book is divided into sections with titles such as “The Early Days,” “Old Friends,” and “Show Biz People,” but there’s no particular rhyme or reason to what goes where.