Adrienne Sharp's Blog: An Interview

Adrienne Sharp's Playlist for Her Novel "The Magnificent Esme Wells"

Adrienne Sharp's Playlist for Her Novel "The Magnificent Esme Wells"
The Magnificent Esme Wells
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, Lauren Groff, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.

Adrienne Sharp's novel The Magnificent Esme Wells is an entertaining and poignant coming of age story.

Booklist wrote of the book:

"Esme's dramatic and irresistible story sparkles with psychological nuance, sumptuous detail, and vivid historical perceptions as Sharp tracks the high wattage success and violence of tough Jews building movie and casino empires while Hitler bloodied Europe. With real-life figures, mushroom clouds rising from desert test sites, and arresting insights into the power and vulnerability of a daring woman performer, Sharp’s novel, like Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (2017), is propulsive and profound."


In her own words, here is Adrienne Sharp's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Magnificent Esme Wells:





In my recently published novel, The Magnificent Esme Wells, I write about the gorgeous young daughter of two gorgeous reckless parents who care more about their own ambitions than anything or anyone else, including Esme. When the novel opens, Esme’s mother is a Busby Berkeley dancer at MGM, strutting the glossy soundstages in her sequins and satin bows, and her father is a low-level bookie who haunts the racetracks of 1939 Los Angeles. Esme is a six-year-old soundstage rat (a school truant with her snarled hair and her arms strung with twenty of her mother’s bracelets and bangles), and wherever she follows her mother on the lot there is music.

“The Shadow Waltz,” sung by Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell in the film Gold Diggers of 1933, finds itself the occasion for one of Busby Berkeley’s most famous and elaborate dance numbers, and Esme’s mother was one of his dancers, all of whom are attired in platinum blonde wigs and white chiffon bell-shaped dresses and who pretend to play illuminated violins as they assume various shapes and patterns, filmed from twenty-feet above, camera then sweeping alongside them and up a twisted staircase, rattled during one afternoon of filming by an earthquake that plunged the soundstage into darkness. The song possesses an oddly melancholy set of lyrics, but the choreography and the gimmicks Buzz loved to use don’t really seem to reflect that. In my novel, though, the mournful lines from the song speak of “Shadows on the wall/I can see them fall,” and Esme keeps a photograph of her mother costumed for that number taped to her dressing room wall, her mother more siren than protector and certainly a shadow. By this point in the novel, her mother has been dead a dozen years. “Here I am/Where are you?” Her mother died in 1939, while sitting next to the six-year-old Esme in a movie theater, quietly hemorrhaging to death after undergoing an illegal abortion at one of MOBSTER Ben Siegel’s Los Angeles abortion parlors. Esme, who realizes her mother has quietly passed away, arranges her mother’s arm around her and sits there close to her through the second part of the double feature. “Take me in your arms and let me cling to you.” Which is exactly what Esme does.

“Hotel California” is not a song mentioned in my book, but the Eagle’s haunting Spanish-inflected guitar music and the mention of the mission bell powerfully calls up early Los Angeles and the Spanish colonial structures that fleck every pocket of the city and its outskirts, even the Camarillo State Mental hospital, where Esme’s mother is briefly institutionalized. It has the ubiquitous bell tower, the white washed walls, the black iron work, and the tiled courtyards of every mission that once lured hungry natives to its kitchens and to its theology. The hospital is nestled between strawberry fields in Ventura County, where you can smell but not see the Pacific. The site, where men and women once bunked in locked wards and where therapies like farming, livestock raising, insulin shock and electric shock and hydrotherapy baths were once prescribed, is now Cal State Channel Islands, but not much about the physical plant has changed. It’s to this hospital Esme’s mother is sent following her breakdown after her father’s death and where she babbles about swaddled babies tucked high up in the treetops, after which Esme is plagued by dreams of her mother climbing the bell tower and trying to fly, trying to rescue those abandoned babies. Only when she is older does Esme understand her mother was worrying about the daughter she left stranded, Esme herself.

After her mother’s death, Esme and her father move to Las Vegas, a nascent city soaked in light and music, to help Ben Siegel launch his Flamingo Club.

“Ragtime Cowboy Joe,” a 1912 tune with lyrics by Grant Clarke, is the song Esme performs when she and her father and Bugsy Siegel drive out to see the future site of the Flamingo hotel on what would eventually become the Las Vegas Strip but is then just a two-lane highway through the desert, and the Flamingo is nowhere, nothing, just a sandy few acres with an old crumbling motel, abandoned long ago. But Siegel and Esme’s dad are full of plans, and eventually Siegel invites the red-faced, overheated, bored out of her mind and miserable Esme to sing right on the spot where the Flamingo Club’s stage will eventually be built. To please him, she dances to and sings the “Cowboy Joe” song she’s been practicing back in Hollywood at Daddy Mack’s studio, a song about a cowman who sings his sheep and cattle to sleep and dances a mean ragtime while packing a 44. “He’s a high falutin’, rootin’, shootin’/Son of a gun from Arizona, Ragtime Cowboy Joe.” Esme’s rendition is complete with hee haws and simulated ropings of cows. It’s a hootenanny. Because old Las Vegas was full of cowboys in their pointy-toed boots and red bandanas hitting the Glitter Gulch and the whore houses on Block 16, she thought the song would please Benny. But Siegel isn’t pleased—his vision of Vegas is a gleaming piece of Hollywood, a shining anomaly in the sandy desert, his new Vegas, and Esme was singing about the enemy, the old ranching Vegas, which will soon confront and be subsumed by this new Vegas very much against its will.

In the late forties and early 1950s, the Strip musicians would gather at the parking lot of Chuck’s House of Spirits to unwind after playing two shows and an extra late night gig. They’d sit on the hoods of their cars and drink the liquor they’d bought and talk music until dawn. In the showrooms, the singers and comics—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Rose Marie—would mingle with the showgirls who shared their stages and the band members who accompanied them. Some of that music made its way into my novel.

“Near You” is an Andrews Sisters hit of 1947 and in the novel the sisters perform the song for a small audience of mobsters at a dress rehearsal just before the Flamingo reopens in early spring. Siegel’s casino opened just after Christmas in 1946, and it lost so much money that night and over the next few months that Meyer Lansky (who hated Las Vegas and thought it a burning Hell, which didn’t stop him from investing in it) shut the place down and flew to town to inspect every nook and cranny of the hotel and its books before the place reopened—and one of the nooks and crannies he inspects is the showroom and its show. To the rendition of “Near You,” my character Esme, who has by now been promoted by Siegel against her father’s wishes from cigarette girl to Flamingo dancer, begins dancing some sinuous precursor of the type of burlesque work she will soon enough be performing on the Desert Inn stage. She’s bored by the old school sounds of the Andrews Sisters and by their cheerful presentation. Vegas, she thinks, should be about something different. So she twists languorously to “There’s just one place for me/Near you,” and the man near her in the empty nightclub, watching her, is Nate Stein, a mobster from Detroit. And once he takes her, he will always keep her near, never let her go and Vegas becomes “a special kind of heaven,” for her, “but only when I’m near you.” When she eventually tries to leave Nate, her find her good fortune and her father’s good fortune are stolen from them. But she doesn’t know that yet. For now she’s dressed like a piece of candy in a candy-colored costume, her face orange with Pan-Cake and her lashes an elongated black, her hair as long as a child’s. She’s fifteen, half girl, half woman, and in that moment she makes the transition from one thing to the other, from girlhood to womanhood, from powerlessness to a certain kind of power, adulthood with all its treacherous pleasures.

And finally, “This Town,” recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1967, his voice dark and bitter, seems to be the anthem for the Las Vegas Esme and her father find in my novel. “This town is a use-you-town/An abuse-you-town until you’re-down town.” The history of Las Vegas is a history of the murders of men who have seen their usefulness expire, and Esme watches a seemingly endless parade of men shot, car bombed, ice-picked, blow torched, or poisoned for their crimes of thievery and greed by men even greedier and more thieving than they are. And she observes, as well, the expiration date of a parade of women, some of whom walk away from their men once they fully apprehend their demonic dimensions, others of whom find themselves exchanged for a younger model. In Vegas, youth and beauty are a woman’s only source of power, and sooner or later, therefore, they are stripped of their feathers and sequins, plied with support hose, and pushed off the showroom stage and into the hotel coffee shop. From showgirl to waitress. Everybody is used, everybody is expendable, the desire for money and control is valued above human life itself. Esme could sing the lyrics “It’s a miserable town/And I am leaving this town,” at the end of the novel, where, following her father’s murder, she turns her car away from the Strip and the glare of one of those above ground nuclear tests whose luminosity rivals the morning sun, heading east, fleeing the dirty radiant light.

The Last Days of Old Las Vegas

In the late eighties, it was dirty, run down, and trashy. And we loved it.

Back then, my future husband and I started making road trips to the desert, bearing witness to the last remnants of Old Vegas. This was three decades before I ever even dreamed I would write a novel about the beginnings of Las Vegas and a time when Sin City was haunted by mobsters, entertainers, and occasionally, my grandparents. We were driving to Vegas the same way the World War II vets and their wives drove there, the same way my grandparents drove there, having dropped my mother off at a Baltimore orphanage, never to see her again, and headed west—windows rolled down, heading for the pools and air-conditioned rooms of the garden motels in the Paradise Valley desert. Ready for fun. Five hours of this and then we’d see the great neon glow ahead in the night.

The Strip.

We thought it was magnificent, even though Vegas was in full plummet then, old hotels barely hanging on, not yet imploded and replaced. They had been updated, hurriedly and unbeautifully, slapped up with new towers of rooms (now that garden style motels were no longer in vogue), new entrances, new signage. All the majestic old signage sits in The Boneyard, on the grounds of the Las Vegas Neon Museum, a great outdoor lot, pale, lost giants devoid of the hotels they once clung to.


New laws allowed corporations to own casinos, and these corporations were discovering to their delight, just as the mob had, exactly how much money was in gambling. A fortune. And these corporate owned casinos abruptly began recording record profits because, unlike the mob, they accurately reported their earnings to the U.S. government. The mob always kept two sets of books, one for the government and one for Meyer Lansky, paying taxes on the one and shipping the skim to the other for distribution to the syndicate all over the country, millions and millions of dollars every month. In addition to casino profits, drug money from Lansky’s heroin networks were laundered through Vegas. And as if that weren’t enough, casinos owners would stick up their own armored trucks filled with money, then keep the money and collect losses from their insurance companies. Once the government became aware of just how much money the mob had been skimming from every casino, it redoubled its efforts to remove mobsters and racketeers from Vegas under RICO. And so we arrived in a Vegas in transition from mobsters to corporations, before the new hotels, before Vegas became trendy again. The only way Vegas could compete before it reinvented itself was by offering cheap rooms, cheap food, and loose slots.

Offers from which we benefited.

We stayed at plenty of those old, cheap hotels—the Tropicana, the Dunes, the Desert Inn, the Flamingo, the Imperial Palace, the Stardust. Almost all our rooms were weird, shabby, plain, misshapen things. At the Flamingo, our room was so tiny, so ordinary—two twin beds and a mid-century lamp on a nightstand between them—it reminded me of the bedroom I shared with my sister when we were little girls. At forty dollars it was a bargain. One hotel room at the Stardust had a long narrow hallway stretching from the bedroom to the bathroom, a hallway so poorly lit that the maids couldn’t see the previous guest had somehow lost her underpants on the way to the toilet, a black and slinky pair over which I tripped on my own way down that hall. God knows what I left behind. In yet another hotel room, we found a half-empty bottle of Astroglide on the carpet by the bed.

At our one and only stay at the Polynesian, we walked through a lobby so cavernous I thought we’d never reach the front desk. The casino hadn’t yet acquired its gaming license, but the space was reserved for the tables and slot machines that would someday arrive. New gleaming lobby furniture winked at us as we followed the bellhop to check into our thirty dollar a night room. This was going to be great! And then we opened the door to our hotel room, and we gradually understood that nothing here was great, that all the furniture was nicked, battered, and old, bought up from older hotels, from those 1950s rooms, bought on the cheap and stuffed in here. The pool’s swim up bar was closed and looked as if it had been for years. In the 115 degree heat we sat, crestfallen, in the center of the pool, on the submerged stools at the shuttered counter. Thirty years later, we still say to each other when something looks great, promises a lot, but actually turns out, to our slow, unhappy realization, to be a shit show, that it’s the Polynesian.

But we were newly adult then, just barely legal, so we didn’t care if the furniture was battered or the carpet unclean or the pool bar closed. We were having an adult adventure, an affordable adult adventure, which was what Las Vegas used to promise: affordability. Cheap and affordable were marquee words back then: every hotel bragged about its rock bottom prices–rooms for twenty dollars, 99 cent shrimp cocktails and free drinks, the midnight steak and eggs buffet for $2.99. And all the hotel marquees bleated, as well, that their casinos hosted the loosest slots in town, 98.9 percent return. Or maybe it was 99.9.

It was the upside down. What was usually expensive, was cheap. What was usually bad, was good. There was no bedtime. There was just sex, alcohol, gambling. And it was fascinating.

Showgirls strutted topless, men drank themselves sick for free as long as they sat by a one-armed bandit, and young men stood on the Strip openly handing out business cards that advertised men and women available to rent as escorts. Back then, big wads of money were transmogrified into chips of wax and clay and paper. (At the casinos no one blinked at a hundred dollar bill. A hundred dollar bill was like a dollar bill.) You went to the cage with your bills, got your quarters, played them all night. Now you play with a slip of paper you insert into a machine, which reads the dollar amount, and if you win, a piece of paper slides out of the slot like the tongue of a snake, telling you your profit.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Las Vegas with its smaller hotels reflected the modesty of post-war America—the small suburban houses with a single car in the garage were echoed in the scaled down Vegas casinos with just a few tables and with hotel rooms that were simple, almost spartan—like the ones at the Flamingo. During the late 1950s, the garden motels added towers of rooms, and in the late sixties, Caesar’s, the first modern multi-tower hotel was built. By the 1980s, as Hilton and Kerkorian and Adelson and Wynn and their corporations discovered just how much money could be made from gambling, they understood they could compete with the Indian reservations and Atlantic City only by building huge theme park hotels. And so, at the end of that decade, they began rebuilding Vegas, imploding the old and constructing the new. An operation that continues still. Now, even the most ordinary room at Sheldon Adelson’s Palazzo is a suite, with a sunken living room, a light up bar, a marble bathroom, and three televisions—an echo of the suburban McMansions being built in the rest of the country. Alongside the ever-increasing size of the hotel rooms are the ever-increasing sizes of the hotel casinos. You need a wheelchair to get from one end of Caesar’s to another. You need a car. And you need a credit card. Nothing is cheap in Vegas now.

The old mobsters like Moe Dalitz who’d been in Vegas since 1950 thought new corporate owners like Steve Wynn wouldn’t be in Vegas long.

Ha.


The intimacy of Ben Siegel’s 1946 Flamingo Club, which I write about in my novel is gone. For good. I was there to see the last bits, the remnants, the bones behind the flesh, of old Las Vegas, before its hysterical, bloated reinvention. I loved that the Sky Room at the Desert Inn created atomic cocktails in homage to the nuclear testing, that the pool had a nighttime water, light, and organ music show, that the musicians gathered in the parking lot of Chuck’s House of Spirits to drink and unwind after two gigs at the hotel showrooms, that the staff at the Flamingo whooped it up after their shifts at a shack called the Flamingo Annex. And maybe that’s why I wanted to write about it all, to revivify the 1950s Las Vegas still just visible then beneath the towers added to the old garden style motels, beneath the new neon and the new behemoth casinos.

And I also wanted to revivify my grandparents, whom I never met, and to imagine the life my mother might have lived with them if they had taken her along on their wild ride west. She’s never set foot in Vegas. On principle. But she’s there in my novel. She stands with her father and Bugsy Siegel on the early site of the Flamingo Club before anything was there but a crumbling old motel, feeds the feral cats that roamed the grounds for years, works as a cigarette girl on the disastrous opening night, auditions for Donn Arden who created the first floorshow for the Painted Desert Room at the Desert Inn.

She weeps when Ben Siegel is killed. She, not a cocktail waitress, serves mobster Tony Cornero the poisoned drink that kills him while he’s playing craps in the early morning hours at the Desert Inn. He wouldn’t give up the Stardust to the bigger mobsters who wanted it. She rubs shoulders with Meyer Lansky and Moe Sedway and Davie Berman. She’s standing in costume when she hears Gus Greenbaum was murdered. He wouldn’t give up his share of the Riviera, so he was nearly decapitated, in bed, while watching television, his wife’s throat cut while she lay, hog-tied, bleeding on her own living room sofa.

My mother haunts the stages, the casinos, the pawnshops, the short-lived racetrack, the hills of the Las Vegas Wash. She moves into the first suburban tract built near the Strip by Moe Dalitz and Irwin Molasky—Paradise Palms. By the end of the novel, she’s a headliner at the Stardust, and shortly thereafter she suffers a reversal of fortune and loses everything.

Because that’s Vegas.

My grandparents’ Vegas.

They died in Medicaid nursing homes. Penniless.

Las Vegas. My muse.

I have a guest soap from the Desert Inn on my writing desk. The hotel was imploded almost twenty years ago but the soap still has a scent.

On my last trip a few years ago, for old times’ sake, we played the poker machines at Slots A Fun, an artifact from the early seventies and the only place left on the Strip advertising loose slots. With its open front, dollar beer, and free popcorn, the place looked more like a carport or a carnival stand than a casino, so run down now we shared the space with a homeless woman carrying her garbage bags and muttering to herself, but we won money. Like the old days. I haven’t won a dollar in Vegas in two decades. Then we spent New Year’s Eve standing out on the Strip, police everywhere, SWAT snipers on the roofs of the hotels alongside the fireworks all set up to go. Post 9-11 Las Vegas. And next to me, a young man in a hoodie called out enthusiastically as each hotel—Aria, Caesars, MGM Grand, the Stratosphere, the Venetian—shot off their great fireworks display, “Man, this city is the tits!”

No, baby.

Used to be.

Link to article: https://crimereads.com/the-last-days-...

New Books Podcast

The Magnificent Esme Wells

Harper 2018


At six, Esme Wells has never attended school, but she has already learned how to take care of her father: accompany him to the racetrack, load up on hot dogs when asked, and keep an eye open for stray tickets that may turn out to be winning bets. When not watching the horses or accompanying her father to pawnshops to pay for his habit, more than once with his wife’s wedding ring, Esme hangs around the Hollywood back lots where her mother, Dina, seeks a screen test and stardom while dancing in Busby Berkeley musicals.

But Esme has dreams of her own. After her father’s criminal ties take them both to Las Vegas, still little more than a blip on the map, and she makes the acquaintance of the gangster Bugsy Siegel, Esme uses her talents as a performer and her considerable female charms to catapult her into a career as a showgirl, gangster’s moll, and burlesque dancer.

In this amoral universe, where the only unforgivable crime is to steal from the bosses, Esme struggles to find happiness while protecting her father from the consequences of his own shortsightedness. In The Magnificent Esme Wells (Harper, 2018)

Adrienne Sharp’s richly evocative prose pulls us into the sun-drenched, money-hungry world of Hollywood and Las Vegas in the 1930s and 1940s, with all its heroes, villains, and people just trying to get by. The consequences of the resulting clashes of personalities and ambitions will haunt you for days.

Link to Podcast: http://newbooksnetwork.com/adrienne-s...

Survival City: BookPage Behind the Book by Adrienne Sharp

The Magnificent Esme Wells by Adrienne Sharp transports readers to Hollywood and Las Vegas in the 1930s and ’40s, where an irrepressible, self-reliant girl named Esme grows up surrounded by the imperfect and unfulfilled dreams of her parents. It’s a vivid and heartbreaking story inspired by the author’s own family history, and here, Sharp traces her Los Angeles roots to the late 1930s and shares the story of her own mother’s survival.



My mother was the gorgeous daughter of two gorgeous, careless people who did not want to live ordinary lives.

I have three pictures of my grandfather. In one, he has his arm slung over my grandmother’s shoulder—she looks like a flapper, with marcel waves in her hair and bows on her shoes, and he looks like a somewhat sleazy man of the world—of some world, anyway. Full of moxie. My grandfather came from a family of Jewish gamblers who played the numbers and bet on the horses at Pimlico, and when the great Los Angeles racetracks of Del Mar, Santa Anita and Hollywood Park were built in the late 1930s, he and my grandmother moved west to follow the races my grandmother called “the sport of kings.” Because my mother was by then school-age and would therefore be a problem to deal with in their new exciting, peripatetic life, they left her behind in a Baltimore orphanage, the Daughters of Hannah, without a word to anyone. I’m not sure how long it took the rest of the family to discover that my grandparents had disappeared from one coast only to reappear on another. It was probably just a couple of days. But to my mother, her time in that orphanage, where she wandered, bewildered and mute, felt like an eternity. She can still exactly recall the sight of one of her uncles walking through the door to retrieve her. In fact, when he was on his deathbed, decades and decades later, she whispered to him what she had said to him many times before, “Thank you for finding me, for saving me.”

Unnervingly for my mother, her parents did not vanish totally and completely for another 15 years. They would occasionally pop back into her life now and then—to take her from the stability of one aunt’s house or another and into chaos. One year, her father took his little family to live in the projects that were built right after World War II, where the walls dripped with moisture and my mother developed pneumonia and impetigo, and where neighbor kids would throw mud at my grandmother’s laundry hung out on the line and shout, “Christ killers,” because, of course, my grandparents were the only Jewish family in the projects, and despite all this my grandfather still thought the projects were the greatest thing because they were rent-free. He was always looking for an angle, an inside tip, a scam he could take advantage of, a bonanza of some sort.

My second photograph of my grandfather comes from the period when they lived in Los Angeles. In it, my grandfather and my uncle—for my grandparents had a second child after the war—are walking a downtown Los Angeles street. It’s probably 1946. My grandfather looks troubled now, confidence gone, hairline receding, older than his age, though he couldn’t have been more than 35, and my uncle, maybe 6 or 7, strides beside him in tall cowboy boots and suspenders, his own face clouded, uncertain. They had a difficult, unsettled, constantly uprooted life out West, a life filled with hotels (my grandmother thought hotel-living was glamorous, Hollywood-like) and movie magazines and evictions and horses and tip sheets my grandfather forced my uncle to sell outside the gates of Hollywood Park on Inglewood Boulevard, and lots of hot dogs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and I cannot imagine, given the proximity of Las Vegas and its desert postwar boom, that my grandparents would not have gone there to gamble, if not to live for a while. In all this tumult, my uncle rarely attended school, a truancy he relished as a kid and rued as an adult. He was left practically illiterate by it. He finally escaped his life with his parents and reinvented himself by joining the Army, and to this day he will not utter their names.

Eventually, my mother and her brother pieced together their histories, the mutual and the solo of it, the back and forth from Baltimore to Los Angeles, his life versus hers. She envied his life with their parents, despite their screaming rows and their constant packing of the bags. She had not had enough of them, as my uncle had, and she wanted to know where they were, what had become of them. But because he had endured his parents’ company for so long, my uncle had no interest in their lives that had gone on and on without him. In fact, he told my mother if they ever came to his door, he would shut it in their faces. He envied my mother’s life with the aunts, her relative stability, her education. My mother had been a double major in chemistry and biology, achieved through the aid of a tottering tower of scholarships that covered every last thing, including her cap, tassel and gown. And after graduation, though the pediatrician my mother worked for part-time offered to put her through medical school and then to make her a partner in his practice—people often stepped forward to offer my mother amazing things—she declined. She had met my father, she felt she could no longer live off the charity of her aunts and uncles—one of my uncles had her take her bedding out of the den that was her little ad hoc bedroom whenever he wanted to watch a movie on the television and had her sleep on the living room couch and one of my aunts, when my mother begged her for a purse, covered a Kleenex box in wrapping paper and gave that to her to use—and she wanted to create a family of her own, a stable, solid confection of a husband and three children and house in the suburbs, exactly what her parents did not want and exactly what she did. As did my uncle.

She got it. She got it all. He did not.

My mother saw her mother for what would be almost the last time in a Baltimore department store—Hutzler’s to be exact. It was the night before my mother’s wedding. Apparently, my grandparents had dropped back into town again. For a moment or two. Her parents had not been invited to the wedding, of course, had no idea about it, had no known address, but her mother had a word of advice for her: “Keep your bangs. You look like Audrey Hepburn.”

After that, no one saw or heard from my grandparents for 50 years.

All that time, my mother hoped that they thought of her, hoped that they would remember her in some way, perhaps leave her something in their wills, let her know that despite everything, they had loved her.

Ten years ago, she tracked down her parents. They had, ultimately, it seemed, remained in Los Angeles. They had been placed, somehow, in a Medi-Cal nursing home. My grandfather had died without a note, a phone call or a word to his two children, and had been buried with strangers in a California veteran’s cemetery. He had served during World War II. Whatever belongings he once had had vanished. My grandmother was alive, overtaken by dementia, with no idea who my mother was when she came to visit. She also didn’t understand that her husband was dead. She thought he had run off with another woman. The story of her life with him had to have been a difficult one. When my mother told her her name, my grandmother responded that she had a daughter with that name. But when told that my mother was in fact her daughter, my grandmother, whatever she understood of this, responded that she didn’t want to talk about what she called “family matters,” which must have been my grandparents’ defense against quarrels between the two of them over what they had done or against the questions of strangers: Where are you from? Where are your children, your sisters, your brothers?

Children, sisters, brothers were all accounted for. They weren’t the ones who had vanished.

My mother sent her mother the sweaters and movie magazines she asked for. Not long after this, on a call to the nursing home, my mother learned that her mother had died a few weeks ago and that her body had been stashed in a county freezer. At some future time in some Los Angeles location where the indigent were interred, my grandmother’s remains would be buried.

No remembrance for my mother—no ring, no bracelet, no letter.

And so ended my grandparents’ great adventure.

But not my mother’s love for them. Because she could not bear to let my grandmother endure the bleak fate the state of California had assigned her, she made the necessary arrangements for my grandmother’s remains to be sent to the Veterans Cemetery in Riverside, California, where she was buried with my grandfather. After all, my mother said, they should be together in death. They gave up so much to be together in life. Whether they ever loved her, thought about her or missed her is unknown. What is known is that she loved them, thought about them, missed them. And she still does. And there’s nothing any of us who love her can do about that.

Because I’m a writer, my mother wanted me to write her story, the story of a young girl who was abandoned by her parents, who survived that abandonment and who, at the end of the novel, stood by her parents’ graveside. My mother has actually not yet seen her own parents’ graves. She’s not well enough anymore to travel. It’s a very nice gravesite. My brother took a picture of it. My last photograph of my grandparents. I will never go the cemetery. I’m like my uncle. Shut the door in their faces. And I could not write that novel. What I did write was a novel about an absolutely magnificent woman who uses her mother’s beauty and her father’s charm and her very own exquisite intelligence and drive to make her way through the world my grandparents lived in and my mother never set foot, a world anathema to her but sweet honey to them—the racetracks and casinos and mobsters and boozers of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. And my character makes a success of herself, despite her parents’ best efforts to wreck everything around them, much as my mother did. My original title for the novel was Survival City. But I changed that, too.

Link to Article: http://bookpage.com/behind-the-book/2...

Yiddish Book Center Podcast Interview

The Magnificent Esme Wells: A Coming-of-Age Story With a Tinge of Noir

Author Adrienne Sharp speaks with us about her latest novel, The Magnificent Esme Wells (April 2018). The story finds its voice in the perceptive and irrepressible Esme Wells—daughter of a two-bit gangster and a movie showgirl—as she grows up in the golden-age of pre–WWII Hollywood and postwar Las Vegas. Adrienne shares the Jewish roots of the story and the personal journey she took in writing this beautifully crafted novel.

Link to Podcast: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/lan...

Adrienne Sharp in Kirkus Reviews

Adrienne Sharp

Author of THE MAGNIFICENT ESME WELLS

Interviewed by Alexia Nader on April 11, 2018

Performance is power. Esme, the showgirl protagonist of Adrienne Sharp’s newest novel, The Magnificent Esme Wells, thrives by following this mantra. So does the city that makes her career, late-1940s Las Vegas, on the cusp of becoming an entertainment powerhouse. The landscape of early Vegas first inspired Sharp to write her novel. “I thought, ‘What a great landscape—big desert, this whole empire being built, the second Jewish empire out there,’ ” she says. She just had to create characters spirited and plucky enough to match her setting.

Sharp turned to her family’s stories. Like Esme’s father, Sharp’s own grandparents on her mother’s side were compulsive gamblers. In the early ’40s, they left their hometown of Baltimore for Los Angeles and a life at the racetracks. Eventually, they abandoned Sharp’s mother in an orphanage and, several years later, had a second son whose care they largely neglected. Sharp began developing a protagonist inspired by her uncle but soon realized that a male protagonist was wrong for her story. “So that’s when I started thinking, ‘Alright, we’re going to revamp this,’ ” Sharp says. “I found a good voice for her, and I gave her a lot of my mom’s characteristics, her incredible drive and spunk and will to go on.” Still, Sharp drew on the haphazard nature of her uncle’s life for the backstory to Esme’s Las Vegas adventure as a showgirl. Comprising almost half of the novel, Esme’s childhood story illuminates fascinating parallels between the worlds of gambling and show business in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where Esme ultimately launches her career.

Esme Wells Part of the charm of The Magnificent Esme Wells comes from seeing Las Vegas through Esme’s insider eyes, as it was before the tower-building boom of the ’50s. To achieve this effect, Sharp had to pinpoint the historically appropriate size of the city’s casinos and hotels. Touring the Flamingo’s historical guest rooms and looking at photographs of the casinos from the ’40s, Sharp marveled at the “little rooms with two twin beds and lamps that were from 1948,” the casino floors that held just a few tables and one-armed bandits. “It was much more intimate in the way that America was more intimate—our houses were smaller, there was one car, the bedrooms were small—Vegas was the same way, on the same scale.” Similarly, Sharp’s careful research into the lives of infamous gangsters who built up the city, like Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, allowed her to write about them intimately. “I was trying to see Bugsy Siegel just as a man who showed kindness to Esme, made her feel important, showed attention to her,” she explains.

Strong and sharp, Esme’s voice has a finely calibrated distance from her surroundings. She is bracingly self-aware of her need to make it as a showgirl and what it might cost her personally; professionally, she’s equally aware of what her talent and beauty should cost others. “Esme recognizes that beauty and femininity are real commodities,” Sharp says. “She’s smart, and like her dad, always looking for an angle, and she realizes, ‘I’m not going to just get my salary, I want a cut of the drinks, I want a cut of the tables; I’m filling this place and they’re drinking because I’m here.’ ” Sharp enriches what Kirkus’ reviewer calls the novel’s “subtle feminist trajectory” with the immersive experience of the pains and pleasures of performance. “I knew what it felt like to stand on a stage and be costumed and made-up and to be this sort of beautiful, idealized version of femininity,” Sharp, who is a trained ballerina and has written extensively about ballet dancers, says. “I knew that sense of the audience out there, the adrenaline rush for the performer on the stage.”

Link to Article: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/feature...

Adrienne Sharp's Girl’s Life in Publisher's Weekly

In The Magnificent Esme Wells, Adrienne Sharp’s latest novel, old Hollywood and the beginnings of Las Vegas come to life

By Wendy Werris | Dec 01, 2017


Unbeknownst to her father, a small blonde Jewish child has hidden in the backseat of his Cadillac while he drives to a clandestine meeting of Nazi supporters at the Deutsche Haus in Los Angeles. It’s 1939, the dawn of World War II. The intention of her father, and mobsters such as Mickey Cohen, is to storm the meeting and beat the crap out of everyone in attendance—men and women who hate Jews and are devoted to Hitler. When the little girl walks into the meeting, she is mistaken for an Aryan and brought up on stage to wild cheers, introduced as the perfect example of a future Hitler Youth. She is seven years old.

Meet Esme Wells, the central character of Adrienne Sharp’s novel, The Magnificent Esme Wells (Harper, Mar. 2018). She’s the child of a beautiful, narcissistic mother, Dina, who dreams of movie stardom in the heyday of old Hollywood, and Ike, a hapless, unlucky gambler of a father who bets at the track daily and gets involved with the gangsters of the era. As Sharp writes of Esme, she is “a slip of a girl, a pickpocket, an urchin, a sound stage rat, used to gliding unnoticed around the backlot and the grandstand” where her troubled mother works as a dancer in Busby Berkeley musicals.

When Dina is admitted to a mental hospital for a few months, Esme is abandoned at an orphanage. Her father returns for her when Dina comes home, but the family continues to crumble. Not for the first time, Ike pawns his wife’s wedding ring as they are evicted from their house, all their furnishings left in the front yard.

As a teenager, Esme moves to midcentury Las Vegas—which is starting to turn from a sleepy desert town to the gambling and entertainment mecca it is today—with her father. Before she turns 21, she becomes a headlining showgirl and the mistress of a wealthy mobster.

Sharp, 60, is the author of The True Memoirs of Little K (FSG), which was named one of Oprah’s Book Club’s 10 Fantastic Books in 2010. She says she didn’t have to look far to find the basic premise of the novel: “This is really my mom’s story, with a twist. She grew up in Jewish Baltimore, and her dad was a gambler at the Pimlico race track. He was a very handsome, charismatic guy. My maternal grandmother was a beautiful wannabe flapper. They met, married quickly, and had a baby girl who was my mother.”

Sharp’s grandfather stole a check out of a mailbox and was sent to prison; on his release, Sharp’s grandmother was waiting for him. “They moved to L.A. and followed the [horse-racing] tracks so he could continue to gamble,” Sharp says. “For quite some time, they moved back and forth from coast to coast. Eventually my mother became an impediment because she had to go to school, and my grandparents wanted the freedom to gamble when they liked. They left her in an orphanage.”

Fortunately, some of Sharp’s aunts and uncles removed her from the orphanage and raised her in a stable, loving home in Baltimore. “But there was another child—a little boy, my uncle—and they traveled with him all around the West Coast,” she says. “He never went to school.”

Sharp’s uncle, who hawked his father’s tip sheets at the gates of the tracks, was finally able to escape his narcissistic parents by joining the Army. “So my uncle and mom kind of melded together into this character, Esme, who was dragged around by her parents and was scrappy and inventive,” Sharp says. She adds: “Esme was a boy and the story was told from the third person [in early drafts]. I rewrote the book a number of times—more than the usual amount. Esme took me five or six years to write. I had to realize there was so much potential in Esme as a woman, so much to explore.”

Sharp wasn’t intending to place most of the story in Las Vegas, either, but the original Flamingo hotel there plays a primary role in The Magnificent Esme Wells. Sharp and her husband, Todd Sharp, a reality TV writer and producer, first went to Las Vegas with his family when they were grad students in the mid-1980s. “We stayed at the Flamingo in a room that hadn’t been refurbished yet,” she says. “It had two beds and a nightstand, and one of those 1950s lamps. That wing must have been a remnant, because Las Vegas hotels don’t look like that anymore. I loved the way the city was back in the day.”

Sharp’s meticulous research gives the novel authenticity. She captures the design and atmosphere of 1950s Las Vegas down to the plastic ashtrays, the slot machines that took tokens, and the characters in the casinos. Sharp’s descriptions of the wildly popular showgirls of the era, who strutted and danced at all the hotels in Las Vegas as opening acts, are spot-on—from the bejeweled and beaded costumes that hid the women’s breasts before nudity was allowed to their bright red spike heels and beautifully styled hair.

The novel also captures how Esme is shaped by her experience. “She could have turned out to be such a lost, timid person,” Sharp says. “But she didn’t. Her family is always scrambling, but Esme has so much integrity. She believes in herself and is watchful; she learns from what she sees.”

With parents so distracted that Esme isn’t bathed regularly and goes hungry more often than not because they forget to feed her, somehow she learns to seize opportunities and build a life for herself in Las Vegas. “Esme uses her beauty and her brains to benefit herself,” Sharp says. “She has the ability to make people want to take care of her—there’s a certain vulnerability people pick up on. There’s a hole in her soul, but it’s filled with her father’s genuine love for her.”

Sharp’s mother and brother tracked her grandparents down some years ago. Her grandfather had already died, but the grandmother was living in a nursing home. They went to visit her, but dementia had set in and she didn’t really know who they were.

“I didn’t go see my grandmother in the home because I was still so furious over the pain she caused my mom, over which she had no regrets, no empathy,” Sharp says. “Something was broken in her. She never cared what happened to my mother.”

Still, Sharp’s mother, who, she says, “turned out fine,” always had the desire to be loved by them regardless of what her parents did to her. There is a thread of abandonment in her life, as there is in Esme’s, but neither of them ever stops loving and forgiving the people who hurt them the most. There is something magnificent about this indeed.

Link to article

The Magnificent Adrienne Sharp in Publisher's Weekly

Open Book: The Magnificent Adrienne Sharp

Over drinks, HarperCollins editor Sara Nelson shares news of a spring novel

By Louisa Ermelino | Aug 04, 2017

In 1945, in the dust of the desert on the site of the future Flamingo hotel, an eight-year-old girl sings and dances to a show tune from Oklahoma! for mobster Benny “Bugsy” Siegel. And so the stage is set for the story of Esme Wells, who, as the title of Adrienne Sharp’s latest novel states, is nothing if not magnificent.

Esme is intuitive, even at this young age, and realizes homespun is not Siegel’s vision for the future town of Las Vegas. He’s thinking glamour. World War II is over and, as Siegel sees it, “every GI and his wife was going to be looking for fun and adventure.” The chapter closes with the narrative voice that promises a story and will carry the book: “By the time Las Vegas was finished with me, I would be exactly what [Siegel] and everybody else wanted.”

The Magnificent Esme Wells was one of the first books executive editor Sara Nelson bought when she came to HarperCollins in July 2016. Nelson, too, was seduced by the opening: “ I fell in love with the book from this first scene, as the little girl dances for Siegel,” she tells me.

Nelson remembered Sharp’s work from a previous novel, The True Memoirs of Little K, about a ballet dancer who recalls her affair with Czarevitch Nicholas and her life during the last years of the reign of the Romanovs. Nelson, who was then at Oprah magazine, made Little K that month’s lead review.

So when literary agent Gail Hochman sent over Sharp’s new book, the story of a young girl growing up in the heyday of old Hollywood and the beginnings of Las Vegas, with movie stars and mobsters and the excitement of a seminal era, Nelson was definitely interested. She made the purchase in early fall 2016, when she was barely settled in at HarperCollins (galleys will go out the end of this month; pub date is Apr. 10, 2018).

“When I got the manuscript, I read 100 pages in one gulp and knew—the same way a reader knows—that I had to have more,” Nelson says. “I felt that Esme’s voice was as seductive as Little K’s: wise, mordant, and world-weary, even though Little K was in her 90s and Esme is barely out of her teens.”

Hochman had a similar experience with Esme. She tells me about taking half the manuscript away for the weekend (“I’m always carting manuscript pages—we all are”) and being frantic at midnight when she’d torn through the pages she had. With no internet, she says, “I couldn’t get to the rest until I was back in the city!”

Nelson and I have a long history. We met in the offices of Top Cops, a TV show one of our more clever colleagues called “Kabuki television,” but we bonded early on over books, reading them, reviewing them. Nelson’s had many incarnations in the industry since then. Though this is her first as a book editor, she’s always been passionate about books, and I trust her judgment—although we don’t always share the same taste.

With The Magnificent Esme Wells our reactions line up. We’ve all read those glowing editor letters—“I couldn’t put it down; I stayed up all night reading.” But for this book, for me, it’s accurate. Esme, as Nelson says, has all the elements: it’s a tender coming-of-age story, it’s got a great setting, great characters, great prose (“No one went to bed until the sun had bleached the neon to a pathetic pallor”), but basically it’s about relationships.

The story moves back and forth in time and place. There’s Los Angeles in the late 1930s, with Esme the observant narrator of her childhood. Her father, Ike, is a gambler and small-time bookie who falls in with mobster Mickey Cohen and later Siegel; her mother has movie star aspirations, dances in Busby Berkeley musicals, and takes to her bed when Ike pawns her diamond ring to pay the rent.

They’re dreamers, Esme’s folks, and she grows up at race tracks and on studio lots. Her mother’s shot at stardom is a screen test (won after an afternoon with movie star Robert Taylor), and when it doesn’t pan out, she gives up, until Ike, by now connected to Cohen and part of his muscle against Nazi meetings in L.A., comes through with a big diamond ring and a solo act in a local nightclub.

Tragedy and hope bring Esme and Ike to Vegas and into Siegel’s orbit. Savvy for her age, Esme can sum up situations, and she understands where she fits into the equation. In her first meeting with Siegel’s girlfriend, Virginia Hill, she’s aware that she’s inciting jealousy: “I found Virginia’s face two inches from mine, that block jaw of hers wide as a wall, her black painted eyebrows jammed together like an automobile accident.”

Esme starts her career at the Flamingo Hotel as an underage cigarette girl, becomes a showgirl at 15, and catches the eye of Nate Stein, a 50-year-old gangster and Vegas player. Stein moves, Esme tells us, “as if he were wearing a mink coat.... The man had a pinkie ring on his left hand and a cigarette in his right, and he transferred the one to the other as he approached and that’s how I knew he was going to touch me for the first time.”

After Siegel is murdered, Esme convinces her father to stay in Vegas, and, thanks to Stein, her life is sweet. But still she experiences rejection, channeling her mother, when she auditions as a showgirl: “It’s never easy, that rejection. It’s so personal. You. Your face, your body, I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. Get off my stage. Cow.”

Esme takes charge in the Vegas sections, and the plot careens into a follow-the-money mystery as the suspense builds. She becomes her father’s protector; he fears her associations but she does what she has to do. She’s headlining in a burlesque show but she’s not fooling herself. “I was... a stage show vulgarity in a satin dress and glass jewels,” she says.

Mob stories are reliably intriguing, and The Magnificent Esme Wells has historical and fictional mobsters, along with Hollywood stars and powerhouses, and the bond between a father and a daughter (Paper Moon comes to mind). Sharp sees her novel as a family story. I see that as well, but what I love most is this young woman who makes the world bend to her will. She’s street-smart and tough but vulnerable. As she sums herself up at one point: “If nothing else, I was used to slippery indefinable untrustworthy older men.”

The Cleveland Plain Dealer said of The True Memoirs of Little K: “Sharp has taken equal parts truth and conjecture and put spinning at the center of her story a charming, willful, and, at times, unreliable narrator.” In The Magnificent Esme Wells, Sharp has created another memorable character in another unforgettable era.

A version of this article appeared in the 08/07/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: The Magnificent Adrienne Sharp.

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The Magnificent Adrienne Sharp

Mathilde Kschessinska: Mistress of Self-Promotion

She was born in Russia in 1872 into a family of dancers from the Imperial Ballet and she died in Paris in 1971, a princess and the sister-in-law of the Russian emperor in exile. How did she do it? With many little steps.

First. After meeting with the future Nicholas II at her graduation from the Imperial Ballet School in 1890, Mathilde wrote in her journal, “He will be mine!” In pursuit of that goal, she chased him all over Petersburg by foot, by carriage, by troika and finally all the way out of town by train. She caught up with him again at Krasnoye Selo, south of Petersburg, where the court and the regiments gathered for maneuvers each August, and where artists from the Tsar’s theaters performed each evening on the little stage there for their pleasure. She charmed the shy Nicholas with a deft bit of flirtation.

Step Two. At some point during their polite, ongoing, and relatively chaste courtship, Mathilde took matters into her own hands and told Nicholas he should set her up as his mistress. Obedient, Nicholas rented for her the house of the composer Rimsky-Korsakov. Weeks passed, however, without a retreat to the bedroom. It took further badgering on Mathilde’s part to consummate the relationship, after which Nicholas gifted her with a necklace of walnut-sized diamonds, which Mathilde wore on stage to advertise her triumph and which all came to know as “The Tsar’s Necklace.”

Next. When Nicholas married the Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1894, rather than disappearing into the scenery of the Maryinsky Theater, Mathilde promptly took up with one of Nicholas’s cousins, the enormously wealthy Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich. This step guaranteed her continued access to the Romanovs—and to Nicholas. Sergei bought Mathilde a summer dacha on the Gulf of Finland to soothe her broken heart, and there she peddled her newly fashionable bicycle around the sandy roads, where she could accidently on purpose run into all the grand dukes who vacationed there, one of whom taught her, she recounts proudly, to execute a graceful figure eight with her two-wheeler.

Later. Sergei built a Nouveau Art style palace for Mathilde on trendy Petersburg Island. Her windows had a view of the Peter and Paul Fortress and beyond it, the Winter Palace and the Great Court. In her own palace, complete with wine cellar and conservatory, Mathilde created her own court and populated it with every man who had a title and every artist, singer, dancer, and musician of note in pre-revolutionary Russia. Thus, Mathilde made sure to occupy a starring role on the stage and off it, and everyone in Petersburg knew her name.
And. Not content to be the mistress of one grand duke, Mathilde soon snared another, this time the baby-faced Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirich, seven years her junior. When the Princess Radziwell asked Mathilde how it felt to have two grand dukes at her feet, Mathilda reportedly laughed and responded, “And why not? I have two feet.”

The Best Step of All. In the summer of 1902, Mathilde gave birth to a son. Bearing a child of uncertain paternity out of wedlock would ruin a lesser woman, but Mathilde had one of her grand dukes sign his name to her child’s birth certificate and the other one adopt the boy, though society whispered that Nicholas himself was the father. Her son attended Petersburg’s most elite lycee, was ennobled in 1911 by a secret decree of Nicholas II, and was being prepared for a career not at the theater, like the rest of the Kschessinskys, but for a career at court, like the rest of the Romanovs.

A Bit of a Scramble. After fleeing Russia following the collapse of the White Army at the end of the Civil War, Mathilde resettled in Paris. Sergei had been murdered along with many other Romanov men, including the Tsar, but Andrei had survived the upheaval, and his brother soon became the self-proclaimed Emperor in Exile. In this new world Mathilde promptly married her grand duke. The new emperor bestowed upon her the title of H.S.H, the Princess Romanovsky-Krassinsky and upon her son the title of the Prince Romanov, and the two of them were now grudgingly received by all the titled European heads of state who would have had nothing at all to do with them back in Russia.

The Last Step. Finally, in the 1950s, at age seventy-something, in an effort to rehabilitate her reputation, Mathilde wrote her memoirs, “Dancing in Petersburg,” which some critics have called an outrageous work of fiction. In it, she extols her virtues and erases her vices, muting her ambition, her connivances, and her rapacious spirit, all of which I revive in my novel “The True Memoirs of Little K.” The Tsar himself gave her the nickname, as she stood barely five feet high. But other than her size, there was nothing little about her. Nothing at all.

"Black Swan": Let Me Count the Horrors

Since the movie “Black Swan” hit the theaters, people have been asking me if the movie is based on my book “White Swan, Black Swan,” a collection of short stories about the ballet world. No, it is not, but I can see the similarities. No one stabs herself in the face with a steel nail file in my book nor does a dancer ram another into a mirror and then stab her in the abdomen with a shard of its glass nor do black feathers sprout from any of my dancers’ arms, but there are other horrors within the ballet world that “Black Swan” depicts quite accurately. Allow me to recount them.

One. The Bloody Feet. The soft ballet slippers a little girl wears to her first ballet lessons are not the stuff of which dreams are made. All little girls long to wear those pink satin toe shoes with the ribbons that criss-cross so prettily across the ankle—and most girls stick around the ballet studio long enough to earn their first pair. Imagine their shock when they stand up into the agonizing reality of them. Most quit dancing soon after. Those of us who remain at the barre endure the slow deformity of our feet, the sprouting of bunions, the eruption of bloody blisters. No matter how we tape our toes, spray them with New Skin, cover them with BandAids, or try to shield them from the rigidly starched boxes of the satin shoes with reams of lambs wool or foam pads, a dancer’s toes are marked, sometimes every single one of them at once, with bloody blisters. Ballerina Natalia Makarova could not be coaxed out of her then very recent retirement for a benefit performance because, she said, she could not stand to put those pointe shoes on one more time.

Two. The Weight. Some blame the great choreographer George Balanchine for the fact that at some point in the mid-twentieth century ballet dancers were suddenly expected to be thin. Very thin. And the movie does depict a very thin Natalie Portman afraid to eat even a finger of cake. And she should be afraid. At my ballet school, we were weighed every Monday morning on a scale in the director’s office. Sunday night was, therefore, for all of us, an orgy of purging that involved both vomiting and enemas. One Monday, when it was discovered I had gained a pound, the director took my hand in his and gave it a slap.

Three. The Self-Abuse. Portman scratches the skin of her back to raw patches in “Black Swan” and covers up the rake-like marks with her leotard. Young woman are prone to vicious acts of self-destruction when over stressed, and the competition at a ballet school especially lends itself to stress. A dancer at my school pulled her hair out in patches. My niece, currently a ballet girl, wrote herself a warning, which she then posted on her bedroom door: “While you’re sitting there resting, someone else is practicing and practicing and getting better than you.”

Four. The Ballet Mother. All studios are haunted by them and all ballet teachers exploit them. These are the mothers who help sew the costumes, ferry the girls around to classes and rehearsals, usher at the recitals, supervise the girls in the dressing rooms, host the post-performance parties. Without this volunteer force, the ballet school could not function. Colleen and Patricia Neary—both ballerinas with New York City Ballet—famously had such a mother, Elinor, who sewed extra jewels onto costumes, shortened skirts, and threw parties at which dance celebrities and movie stars ate her roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. But the ballet mothers also serve as Greek chorus—monitoring the progress of their own daughters, measuring that progress against the progress of others, intensifying the competition between the girls, and deifying the most talented at the expense of the lesser. Even if the lesser is one’s own. Neary’s mother once told her daughter Colleen exactly what she was doing wrong when she performed her cabrioles—and damn if she wasn’t right.

Five. The Injuries. The bane of every dancer—the shard of glass Portman’s character shoves into the waistline of her rival effectively removes Mila Kunis’s character from the competition for the leading role. Injuries haunt the theater, stealing coveted roles from one dancer and awarding them to another. In bad ballet novels, rivals fill each other’s pointe shoes with ground glass. The Russian ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, the subject of my latest novel, sabotages a rival’s performance by opening the latch of a chicken coop and loosing the squawking birds onto the stage. (The imperial theaters were famous for the verisimilitude of their sets and props.) But most injuries are inflicted by the absurdly difficult demands of the art—a broken foot bone, a ripped tendon, knee problems. Baryshnikov describes having to crawl across the floor from the bed to his shower in the morning. The Royal ballet dancer Christopher Gable had to retire early because of vocationally-induced arthritis. Balanchine’s last ballerina, Darci Kistler has had a career marked as much by injury as by unforgettable performances. Suzanne Farrell, famous for her 180 degree extension in arabesque, underwent a midcareer hip replacement.

Six. The Tunnel Vision. Girls who want to be ballet dancers live like nuns. Portman said in an interview that training for the film had her living an almost monastic life. When I interviewed New York City Ballet dancer Jennie Somogyi for a magazine article, she told me during a ballet season she never saw the light of day. Company class was followed by an afternoon of rehearsals and then by a race across Lincoln Center plaza from the Rose Building to the theater, where she performed at night. A ballet girl’s life is but a miniature version of that—by the time I was ten years old I was on full scholarship, taking class six days a week. By the time I was in tenth grade, I attended high school for exactly three hours a day and spent the rest of my time, seven days a week, at my dance studio. The twenty-eight year old ballerina Alexandra Ansanelli, most recently of the Royal Ballet in London, just announced her retirement. She had no time, she said, for anything else in life, including her family.

Seven. The Sexually Predatory Ballet Master. In “Black Swan,” the ballet master and choreographer played by Vincent Cassel seduces the women who star in his ballets, both the characters played by Winona Ryder and by Natalie Portman—and ballet lore is filled with men who did exactly that. Sergei Diaghilev fell possessively in love with both Vaslav Nijinsky and Sergei Lifar, who then became world famous stars of Les Ballets Russes. But Diaghilev died at fifty-seven. George Balanchine, who lived until seventy-nine, was able to out love him, marrying four times and falling in love more times than that—always with dancers. The ballerinas Tamara Geva, Alexandra Danilova, Diana Adams, Maria Tallchief, Tanaquil LeClerq, Suzanne Farrell were objects of his affection and muses for his creations—even if that attention was a source of pain. Farrell confesses in the documentary “Elusive Muse” that she once considered suicide as a way to free herself from Balanchine’s obsessive grip.

Eight. The Fear of Aging. Every dancer has a just a very few years in which to perfect her craft and to display that perfection upon the stage. She starts lessons at six years of age in America and by sixteen or seventeen, eighteen at most, she is taken into the corps de ballet of a company. By twenty, she’s already considered too old. I arrived in New York as a trainee for Harkness Ballet when I was seventeen. I never told anyone when I turned eighteen because eighteen was too old, way too old. This wasn’t just my opinion. I was told so at the School of American Ballet, where I auditioned for a scholarship. Girls my age were already dancing in the corps de ballet. And the girls there will find themselves, if they aren’t soon enough promoted to soloist or principal dancer, out of a job. Dancers are called girls and boys for a reason.

Nine. The Short Season. A dancer’s career is very short. By thirty, most dancers have retired. If a girl is very talented, she may dance until forty, at which time she will be forced to retire by the diminished capacity of her body. Gwen Verdon once said all dancers die two deaths, the first suffered when she retires. The aging Winona Ryder’s character is so desperate at having been booted out of her dressing room and from there out of the company that she haunts the perimeters of the theater, making scenes, and finally, attempting suicide. When Mikhail Baryshnikov described a dancer’s life as “a beautiful tragedy,” its brevity is what he was talking about.

Ten. The Worst. Worse than Retirement. The Interruption. Barbara Hershey brilliantly portrays Natalie Portman’s mother, the woman cheated out of her career, she says, by her unplanned pregnancy, at twenty-eight, a statement at which Portman scoffs. “What career,” Portman mutters under her breath at her mother, “You were twenty-eight and in the corps de ballet.” Translation: You were nothing. You were never going to be a ballerina. But Hershey, never having had the chance to fully determine the extent of or the limits of her talent, is haunted by the interruption, and lives vicariously, creepily, through her daughter. I too was a ballet girl, interrupted, and I understand how Hershey is haunted by what could have been, might have been. But my daughter isn’t interested in the ballet. So I’ve had to write books about it. Three of them.