Laura Kalpakian's Blog, page 7

Happy Birthday, Virginia Woolf! 137 Years Young

How do I love thee, O Great Virginia? Let me count the ways. I love thee for A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse. These books changed my life. My multiple copies of each are stained with suntan lotion, with spilled wine, with tea, with tears.

From its opening paragraph, Part I of To the Lighthouse challenges the reader: Succumb, dear reader, to my prose style, or don’t. Like it or lump it. If you want neat little brick-lined paths and paragraphs, go read another book. Begone! When I first plunged into this novel as a fairly unsophisticated reader, I felt like scolding The Great Virginia for her careless forays into the characters’ minds and thoughts often several different people in the same paragraph. I found it especially annoying when she would turn her narrative attention to particularly unpleasant characters. (I’m looking at you, Charles Tansley.) But slowly I did succumb, and in doing so, each paragraph shone like a little gem full of sparkling facets

Having embraced Part I, Part II “Time Passes” was like no other reading experience in my life. I found myself frantically responding to the deaths chronicled there with a sense of visceral shock, as one does in real life. I return to this novel probably every other summer (you have to read it in summer) and so poignant is the presentation in Part II each read brings the same emotions afresh. Part III is, for me, less memorable, but perhaps it’s intended to be.

I have chronicled elsewhere, in a long memoir essay published in Eve Shellnut’s The Confidence Woman (1990) my experience reading A Room of One’s Own for the first time. In this small, perfect book, Virginia Woolf expresses clear, precise, beautifully articulated Outrage. Modulated, charming, but Outrage just the same. Reading it for the first time late one night and under less than ideal circumstances, I felt like The Great Virginia was throttling me, shaking my shoulders and shouting (not at all modulated, shouting!) DON’T YOU GET IT???? And having once, yes, thank you, Got It, you can never again look at literature in quite the same way.

A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse are filled with insights that have guided my reading and writing life. I am not alone in this. Two years ago a dozen women writers, celebrated her birthday with a party at my house. One of them made a delicious boeuf en daube, the very dish served in To the Lighthouse. I was in charge of dessert, and I assure you it was NOT prunes and custard. (Avocado sorbet and/or Coeur ala Creme.) We each read a short passage from her books that had mattered to us as writers, and toasted her special day.

I also created the playlist to play in the background. No easy task. Quite apart from the musical changes between 1882 and 1941, it was further complicated because I could not imagine Virginia’s life in music. Did she have one?

Happy Birthday Virginia Woolf Playlists










Apple Music





Spotify

I could not imagine her father, be-whiskered, eminent, intellectual Leslie Stephen, escorting his children to anything so mundane as Christmas pantomimes, or frothy Gilbert and Sullivan productions. I also cannot imagine Virginia and her Bloomsbury compatriots as young people trooping off to the Edwardian music hall for a raucous evening of songs like “I’m a Suffragee,” the lament of a Suffragette’s husband. (Though I feel certain they would have enjoyed the male impersonator, cross-dressing Vesta Tilley who made famous “Piccadilly John with His Little Glass Eye.”) I also cannot imagine the Great Virginia and her friends (now middle-aged) swanning about in swank London night clubs while any of the jazz greats like Duke Ellington played. Cannot imagine them going to a Fred and Ginger movie in the 1930’s. No matter. Into the playlist pool went Victorian standards, jazz and music hall, 227 in all.

This is not to say I can’t imagine Virginia and her friends in pleasurable pursuits. They certainly had mad love affairs. They were all wonderfully witty, and clever—like the time Lytton Strachey reduced his comrades to helpless laughter by saying the word “semen” out loud, and in mixed company. Virginia later hallowed that evening describing it with words to the effect of “On or about December, 1910, the world changed.”

Once at a dinner party in England in the 1980’s, I met the son of Vita Sackville-West, a man who knew Virginia Woolf in his childhood. (I’m sure he thought I was an American twit, and he was probably right.) But I surprised myself with how proprietary I felt about her, realizing only later that any great writer who makes their way into your heart and mind, that writer does belong to the reader. Happy Birthday O Great Virginia from me and all the other readers whose lives you have forever touched.

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Music for Movies

If only life were like the movies! If only, when you met your True Love some sweet melody assured you, Yes! This Is The One! If only, in a deeply romantic moment a crash of cymbals indicates experience you will never forget! If only, before you are about to make a hugely significant mis-step, if only the music would swell to a deafening roar indicating danger!

Why is it then that characters in films about to encounter awful risk, why do they not heed the swelling strings that you and I, the audience, recognize is crying out: DON’T DO IT!

That’s the magic of music in film: we know the characters can’t hear it, but disbelief suspends beautifully, and the fact that we are audibly alerted to the situation, the emotions, brings us more vividly into their experience. Music tells the audience (if not the characters) what they are supposed to feel.

It’s up to the composer to understand what the film needs, and what the director wants (not always the same thing) and to create music, literally to underscore the emotions that are visually portrayed. (I’ve watched this process up close now for the fifteen years or so that my son Bear McCreary has been a film and TV composer,  I have witnessed as he has recorded with 100 piece orchestras in teak-lined recording stages, or in  tiny little studios recording a single fiddle, or a flute.)

As I began to work on The Great Pretenders I realized that not until the 1950’s did producers make any attempt to put their movie music into the airwaves, to be heard on the radio, quite apart from the film. In the 50’s film music began to be a separate, meaningful cultural artifact.

In fact, the 1955 #1 Billboard hit song “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets was so successful that the song was the basis the film Rock Around the Clock, 1956 (the first film where black and white musicians play together onscreen) Then, there are the anomalies like Gene Pitney’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” that reached #4 on Billboard’s Top Ten in 1962, and never once appeared in the film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, John Ford’s last great Western, 1962.

While writing the 1955 gala party Roxanne attends to celebrate the opening of the fictional Banner Headline, I played much of the same music that the chamber orchestra plays Researching these proved entertaining.

The song, “The Last Time I Saw Paris” provided the title for the 1954 film of that name, and the song won an Oscar. But really, the song had been written in the early 1940’s, lyrics by Jerome Kern, music by Oscar Hammerstein. The film, The Last Time I Saw Paris was a retelling of Fitzgerald’s story “Babylon Revisited,” but the song, to this day stands alone, quite aparat from, and actually superior to the film.

The theme from the steamy 1955 film, Picnic, got renamed “Moonglow” and reached #1 on the charts in 1956. The song “Que Sera Sera” was crucial to the plot of the James Stewart/Doris Day 1955 thriller, The Man Who Knew Too Much. “Que Sera Sera” reached #2 on the charts in 1956. (I personally can’t abide this song.)

At this 1955 party, populated by literally the High and the Mighty (a 1954 John Wayne picture) all the film people there are annoyed, and a little undone when the chamber orchestra breaks into the “Ballad of Davy Crockett” (in the top five for seventeen weeks in 1955!) Disney and television were changing the entertainment landscape forever–and everyone there knew it.

But by far the film that most totally permeates my novel is Casablanca with its famous song “As Time Goes By.” Early on I considered this for a title, but another novelist used it while I was writing. Originally written in 1931 “As Time Goes By” has proved itself the most durable of all pop tunes for the last eighty plus years. Perhaps it’s the somehow comforting assurance that “the world will always welcome lovers….” Though I did not allude to this song or these lyrics, I hoped that line would echo at the end of my book.

Listen to a Playlist of Movie Music










Apple Music





Spotify

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Central Avenue – A Playlist for The Great Pretenders

For each book I have written, I have created soundtracks, music that I play continually early in the writing process. Sometimes this is thematic, allied to a mood or a certain chapter, sometimes evoking an era. For The Great Pretenders, I was introduced to a whole new musical world, West Coast Cool, thanks to a book that was crucial to my novel.

A Playlist for The Great Pretenders










Listen on Apple Music





Listen on Spotify

Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 1998) is a series of transcripts, interviews recorded during the UCLA Oral History Program, a book I can only describe as wonderfully “noisy.” Long time jazz men and women who grew up and flourished in early-to-mid-20th century Central Avenue milieu tell their tales, unfiltered, on the page. Their voices and stories create a tapestry of backgrounds and incidents, about coming of age in Los Angeles in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Threads of that tapestry allowed me to create backgrounds for my characters Terrence (b. 1927) and Booker Dexter (b. 1929)

Both would have gone to Jefferson High School. They would have met, studied under the remarkable Dr. Samuel Browne. Dr. Browne looms large in the pages of Central Avenue Sounds, a mighty figure, shaping the lives and talents of a generation of musicians. Jefferson High produced more outstanding jazz players and composers than any other school, probably ever, including some of the legends, Dexter Gordon, Chico Hamilton, Buddy Collette. Not all of these musicians remained in Los Angeles; many made their mark elsewhere, but they all had the same roots.

The musicians interviewed for Central Avenue Sounds leap off the page, lively, laughing, thoughtful, genuine, generous, occasionally pissed off, but always with great anecdotes, and a sense of nostalgia for what had already been lost.

From their stories I learned that until the 1950’s black and white musicians could not perform together on the same stage. Even if this rule was not formally codified, it was certainly observed. Anyone could jam informally after hours, but paying gigs? No. The lucrative film and TV music sessions were run by musicians’ unions. The unions were segregated. Thus, Los Angeles black musicians could not get any studio work unless everyone playing in the set was black which did not happen. Not until 1954 in the film “Rock Around the Clock” did black and white musicians appear together on stage and on the screen, a shock to many.

For years black musicians, among them, sax man, Buddy Collette, lobbied to merge the two unions. When in 1953 the unions integrated into one, there was considerable financial gain for black musicians, but there were losses as well. Again and again in Central Avenue Sounds you read nostalgic descriptions of the old union halls that functioned like clubs, a place to hang out, to commiserate, to shoot the shit, to be yourself. When whites joined them, it was never quite the same.

You can catch some of this great tradition at the Central Avenue Jazz Festival in Los Angeles, July 27 and 28, 2019.

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The ARC of the Novel

“Writing a book, seeing it published, why that must be the most wonderful feeling in the whole world. To hold it in your hand, a book that began just as an idea in your imagination!”

So says a character in a novel of mine that is still under construction. It’s not an autobiographical novel, but I can attest to the experience she describes. I have published some twenty books in the US and the UK (not all under my own name) but I have never become so jaded that I fail to thrill to hold that book—the real thing—in my hands. Even before the actual book, the Advanced Reading Copy, the ARC that goes out to reviewers well before publication. This week there arrived for me, the ARC of The Great Pretenders. I wasn’t expecting it, so it was both a surprise and a delight.

To open the box and see its lush, California cover in shades of pale blue, green, and a brilliant gash of yellow! Wow! To fan through the pages and smell the fresh print! Wonderful! To see my name at the top of each alternating page! To read the dedication shared by my youngest grand-daughter and my mother, thrilling! To open any page at random and see dialogue I had slaved over, looking glossy and effortless on the page! To feel the actual heft of the object! It was longer than I’d thought it would be, 372 pages in print (398 pages as a Word Doc).

I felt like opening a bottle of champagne and toasting the book in my hand that had begun in my imagination. I didn’t, but I was too elated to go back to work. I called my mom. I emailed my sons and my closest friends. Then I took the ARC in the other room to read.

I had already done my part of the proofreading on galley pages some weeks before, so there was no obligation to read, but I thrummed through the pages, stopping here and there to linger. I loved seeing my prose on the page, but I hated the internal writerly instincts that whispered, nagged I could have made that better. I should have struck that line, or connected these sentences, or ……

Once a person has graduated from enthusiastic reader to writer (enthusiastic or not) one begins to read differently. One must. Come across something admirable in someone else’s book, and the first thought is: How did he do that? Take a deep breath at a scene masterfully rendered, and one wonders: How did she do that? How did she make that work. Do this for decades and the questions become reflex. I have been writing for so many years that the urge to revise, alas, does not stop with the manuscript or the computer. It extends to the printed page.

When I was writing and revising The Great Pretenders, no page, no paragraph, no sentence escaped my merciless scrutiny. I made changes over and over. I made that book as good as it could possibly be. And now was its moment of truth because here’s what I know for sure after all these years of publishing:

Once the ARC is in the author’s hands, the book is out of the author’s hands. No more changes. Soon the book will be in readers’ hands. (April 2019, pre-orders available now.)

Yes, like the character quoted above, I was delighted to touch a book that was once a mere flicker of my imagination. But I had to ask myself: can I just read it and bask in its being on the page? Can I read it without wishing to revise?

As they say on the Rachel Maddow Show, watch this space.

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Women in Hollywood

In 1948 women made up some 25% of the writers in Hollywood. By 1974 that number had fallen to 14%.

late the imbalance of women to men in creative Hollywood has focused public and industry attention on a problem as old as the picture business itself: what is a woman to do? While women now have executive positions, they still have to prove themselves in ways that men do not. As someone once said of Ginger Rogers and her partner Fred Astaire: she did everything he did, but backwards and in high heels.

A recent lively book by J. E. Smyth, Nobody’s Girl Friday: the Women Who Ran Hollywood (2018) lists some twenty women agents who worked over the course of three decades. Most of these were agents repping acting talent. Roxanne’s little boutique agency in The Great Pretenders confines itself to writers.  As a novelist I was interested in the drama of a woman agent finding fronts for the work of disgraced, blacklisted writers.  If I had opened up Roxanne’s business to a broader talent agency, the narrative would have strayed from its central imaginative premise, and I would have been obliged to develop many more characters in a book already crowded.

Nobody’s Girl Friday charts the lives and careers of publicists and editors, costumers, columnists (and yes, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons loom large in Smyth’s pages) as well as actresses, and of course, writers. Women in Hollywood, like women on assembly lines, benefitted when World War II took the men off to serve in various capacities. These gains of women’s employed in the film business did not last. Smyth notes that in 1948 women made up some 25% of the writers in Hollywood. By 1974 that number had fallen to 14%. Smyth’s well written and  beautifully produced book (Oxford University Press) is required reading for anyone interested in the lives of working women in Hollywood. Because it covers such a swath of time and endeavor, one has the feeling that deeper stories lurk just beneath the prose.

One of those stories, the friendship of screenwriter Frances Marion and actress Mary Pickford, has been rendered into a novel by Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture. Mary Pickford has been enshrined in superstar legend.  Frances Marion is hardly known at all, though her screen credits begin in 1912 and end nearly thirty years later.  She won two Oscars.  The Girls in the Picture captures these ambitious women and the milieu in which they lived and worked and loved.

Unlike The Girls in the Picture the central characters in The Great Pretenders are fictional. However, I endowed Roxanne Granville with my own admiration for Ida Lupino (1918–1995). Lupino asserted herself in Hollywood as few women did, as a beautiful actress, yes, but beyond that, producing, directing all sorts of films and television productions. Perhaps she was better able to navigate the shit she undoubtedly had to put up with since she came from generations of theatrical  people. She was the first woman to direct a noir picture (with, please note, an all male cast) the very scary Hitch Hiker in 1953.

If  Roxanne Granville had been a real person,  she would have surely  have made it into Nobody’s Girl Friday. Roxanne won’t let men make all the rules, not even her own grandfather. She has spirit, and by the end of the book, she even has some wisdom.  These qualities, as Ida Lupino proved, can carry a woman through an interesting, achieving life.

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Montgomery Bus Boycott

 “Their shoes are wearing out, but not their spirits.”

Some moments in American history are embedded forever in the national imagination, our collective memory. Paul Revere’s ride. A stunned Jackie Kennedy standing beside Lyndon Johnson as he takes the oath of office. Rosa Parks on the bus, refusing to give up her seat to a white man.

When I began research on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, I had in my head that standard, static picture, the woman on the bus. The more I read, the more impressed I was at how, and how quickly, the resulting movement gained moral and physical momentum in what became the first big step toward civil rights since Reconstruction. Mrs. Parks was the secretary of the local NAACP. She knew exactly what she was doing, and why.

Mrs. Parks was arrested on Thursday, December 1 1955. Activists posted flyers all over the city that asked the black population to stay off the buses on Monday. Monday became a week. A week became a month. The Montgomery Improvement Association was swiftly created under the leadership of the young preacher at the Dexter Avenue church, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Relying on the churches, black businesses, the NAACP and a collective sense of mission, the MIA was able to keep the faith and keep the boycott going. The city felt the economic bite; the Montgomery bus system was primarily funded by black passengers who owned fewer cars than white people. Montgomery’s African American population stayed off the buses for more than a year. They didn’t even relent when the Supreme Court resolved the issue. No, they waited until Montgomery City fathers acknowledged that decision, and put a resolution into the city code of laws, late December 1956.

Most astonishing to me was the modesty of their MIA’s original demands. As Roxanne notes to Thelma in the novel, reading from the Challenger, “Here’s what the Montgomery Improvement Association is asking from the city. Can you believe this? This is all they want, and they’re being denied? Is it really too much to ask that the drivers should be courteous? Is that revolutionary? That they should hire black drivers for black neighborhoods and that the buses should stop at every block in the black neighborhoods like they do in the white neighborhoods? That seating on the bus should be first come first served? Is that so outrageous?”

When my character in The Great Pretenders, Terrence Dexter, first went to Montgomery he went as a reporter. Once there, Terrence became far more than a pen-in-hand witness, he became an actor in this drama. Moses Shaw is entirely fictional, but Terrence’s recognition of both Shaw’s heroism, and his limitations is crucial for Terrence personally: he fathoms something of his own roots. On his return to California Roxanne has no idea how fundamentally changed Terrence is. She can’t make the leap, to understand the connections Terrence has unearthed and what they mean to him.

The 1950’s are a decade often nostalgically celebrated for tidy homes and tidy lives, Americans’ cheerfully shared expectations. The truth is much more nuanced, even corrugated. Consider, for instance, the landmark 1954 case Brown vs. the Board of Education which eviscerated the doctrine of separate but equal. That was a court case (real integration took decades). The Bus Boycott was action. The Bus Boycott called attention to a great swath of civic heroism, not just leaders who offered stirring rhetoric, but the men and women who daily watched the bus go by, and kept walking. “Their shoes are wearing out, but not their spirit.”

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The Blacklist Era

“Now all that youthful fervor for social justice, on behalf of labor’s right to organize, including the right to strike if need be…that has condemned me. Condemned us.”

Despite a longstanding love of film and the darkened theatre, I had never given much thought to the Hollywood blacklist until the 1999 Oscars when the Academy gave a special award to Elia Kazan, the legendary director. Outside of the event that night cameras caught sight of lots of people carrying signs protesting the honor to Kazan. Inside, cameras circuited throughout, and you could see, sense the palpable tensions rise as some of the celebrity-laden audience remained stoic, arms folded, refusing to rise or applaud. Others gave Mr. Kazan a standing ovation. No one contested that Kazan had contributed to the arts with On the Waterfront (1954), and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).These vivid conflicting reactions were based on his actions, his testimony nearly fifty years before.

In 1952 he was a cooperating witness to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). When questioned by the Committee about his membership, connection with the Communist party, Kazan and many others “named names” of their former comrades. These people were themselves subpoenaed.

People hauled up before the Committee were being asked to answer for their activities twenty years earlier. In the 1930’s there were consequential labor struggles, efforts to unionize, all sorts of workers, including writers, actors, people who worked at the studios. (Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, depicts this union struggle as a sub-plot.)

As Max Leslie tells Roxanne in the novel, “Now all that youthful fervor for social justice, on behalf of labor’s right to organize, including the right to strike if need be—oh yeah, there were heads and hearts broken over that twenty years ago too—that has condemned me. Condemned us.”

In this same era the Communists were the only ones fighting the Fascists in Germany, Italy and Spain. When, in 1939 Stalin made a pact with the Nazis, many Communists quit in disgust. And then, of course came the Second World War. Stalin was our ally. In support of the war effort many Hollywood types made propaganda pictures lauding the Soviets. These efforts would cost them dearly when HUAC got hold of them in the 1950’s.

Writers, actors, directors, producers, and lesser folk who refused the Committee’s request to name their old Commie compatriots were immediately fired. In 1947 all the major studio heads signed what became known as the Waldorf Agreement, vowing not to keep on anyone with the least Communist tinge. Once blacklisted, the men and women who defied Congress, could not work anywhere.

The blacklist era (1947–1960) is a complex, difficult subject with tangled roots and ramifications.

In 1947, the celebrated Hollywood Ten, a group of well-paid screenwriters, including Dalton Trumbo, refused to cooperate with HUAC, basing their refusal on their First Amendment rights. They were found in contempt of congress, and appealed. The courts found against them, time and again, until finally in 1950 their appeal was brought before the Supreme Court–who refused to hear their case. (To a modern eye this refusal seems inconceivable.) These men went to Federal prison for years. After that, HUAC steamrolled through the film community unchecked. Clearly, the First Amendment was no protection to people who were subpoenaed. Some took the Fifth. Some fled the country. For a time the government was revoking passports. Careers were ruined, lives wrecked, marriages crumbled, friendships and lucrative creative partnerships were destroyed forever. Fear ruled.

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Sex and Scandal

Sex and scandal are at the heart of any Hollywood novel. How could they not be?

As I was writing The Great Pretenders in the fall of 2016, the Harvey Weinstein scandal unspooled, followed by the #MeToo movement, shining a harsh light on the relationships of women to men in power. My novel takes place in the 1950’s when the film industry rewarded little more than a woman’s physical beauty.

Throughout the novel, the central character, Roxanne Granville, watches the fate of a brazen, charismatic actress, Diana Jordan. For Diana sex is both casual and causal, a form of currency. Her agent expects sex in exchange for finding roles for her, and she obliges. Finally fed up, Diana defiantly fires the agent who takes his revenge. Diana will pay an awful price for her bravado, both personally and professionally. And in the end, she will be back on her knees. No metaphor.

Roxanne Granville is the spoiled, over-indulged grand-daughter of a Hollywood mogul. At age twenty-two she begins her career as an apprentice agent in the prestigious firm of Rakoff/Holtz. Roxanne fetches coffee for the name partner and his important clients. (Something her male counterparts are spared.) One morning, Irv’s office door closed, his compliant secretary sitting outside, Irv makes a move on Roxanne—assuming that she will succumb, or at least allow his advances. This is the first big shock of her adult life: she is vulnerable. The Golden Girl aura that has always surrounded and protected her is torn away, and her confidence is shattered.

Moreover, Roxanne quickly learns (not figures out herself, mind you, but someone more savvy than she points out) that her famous name, far from protecting her at Rakoff/Holtz, is being used to humiliate her. This shocking revelation combined with Irv’s pawing leaves her weeping, but it also rouses her to anger. In a dramatic, defiant fashion, she dumps the scripts she was supposed to deliver into the LA River, quits Rakoff/Holtz, and goes independent. She sets up her own agency, taking on young, hungry writers for her clients.

The story picks up two years later, in 1955, her brave little agency struggling along. Dangling the prospect of buying one of her scripts, Return of the Cat People, before her, a Poverty Row producer, feels up her thigh for starters. Roxanne is upset, but not undone. “I am no longer the girl I was two years ago. No longer speechless as Irv Rakoff pressed up against my butt. I very definitely remove Larry’s hairy hand from my thigh. But if I am honest with myself, I wonder if I’m acting on principle or because Larry Sanford is small potatoes, and his orange couch is really appalling. If it were Jack Warner…..?”

Sex and scandal are at the heart of any Hollywood novel. How could they not be? Roxanne Granville must navigate her way through an industry where men’s “easy assumptions that women, any woman, could be had because men had the power, and we did not.” Roxanne, though more circumspect than Diana Jordan chooses a professional path fraught with danger, and subterfuge, and chooses a lover who challenges her in every way. In short, she courts disaster.

 “Hollywood is like a huge hothouse, steamy and enclosed. Everyone’s lives and loves, their fortunes, their so-called sacred honor, their sins, their failings, their bad judgments, their bad breath, their bad debts are like the steam that rises on the hothouse walls, dripping with what everyone—actors, writers, agents, producers, directors, the press, the critics, the musicians and the gaffer, the sound man—knows. To live here is to know that fame, money, reputation, friendship, even love and marriage are conditional, flimsy and often for effect. No one is invincible. The film business is like the house of straw where everything can be blown away with one foul gust.”

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Television

“Television, gentlemen, is the great, roaring beast in the basement of the entertainment industry. You just kept throwing chunks of meat at it, and it roars the louder, and wants more.”

In 1949 my father, mother and I, a pre-schooler, moved to Great Falls, Montana where my father had got a job in public health. My mother, who had lived in LA all her life, was miserable and suffered terribly from the cold.Luckily, the job did not last very long, and in December 1950, we drove back to California via Arizona. My mother has a vivid recollection of that trip.Rolling down the window as they crossed into California, and as the warm air was pouring through the car, she turned to my father and asked, “What are all those things sticking up from roofs of houses?”

Television antennas. There was no television in Montana. They didn’t recognize the TV antenna for the ubiquitous thing it had become in a year and a half.

Television did not spring full-blown in the early 1950’s like Venus on the half-shell. My mother has another memory: as a thirteen year old in 1935 going with a friend to where the friend’s dad worked to see some remarkable new invention. She can’t recall what the father did, or where they went (somewhere in LA) but does she does vividly remember men in suits staring at a tiny little box, awed by what we would later call “snow.”

Television is an important part of my novel, The Great Pretenders. Doing the research,I was astonished to find that the first talkie of Cyrano de Bergerac was actually made for British television in 1938. War in Europe began in ‘39, and development of the new medium had to wait till that conflagration came to a close. However, by1947, certainly in America, television had already wrought change. By the time my novel opens–1953–television was a force that the picture business had to reckon with.

To meet this challenge many of the biggest studios developed new camera and projection techniques. Panavision! VistaVision! Cinerama! Todd-AO! all gave audiences a theatrical experience they couldn’t possibly have sitting on their couches at home in front of a box. Studios also went in for vast spectacle movies, often biblical motifs, culminating in 1959’s The Ten Commandments with the parting of the Red Sea on film. (Or, if you prefer, culminating with Cleopatra in 1963 that almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox.)

None of this was sufficient to fend off television’s tsunami assault on the entertainment business. Television enlisted a not always certain alliance of technology, corporate shock, even some creativity, and perhaps most importantly audience. Television brought about a new kind of audience:consumers. Corporate advertisers now had a huge stake in entertainment.

None of the studios surpassed Disney in learning to use television to their advantage. In creating Walt Disney’s Disneyland for television, Disney Studios effectively connected their theme park, films, and TV specials under a single umbrella. Sunday nights audiences lined up on their couches to be, as it were, spoon fed. As part of the generation raised on all that fare, I too, had my Davy Crockett coonskin cap. I too still remember the theme song. In fact, I can still sing the theme song for (long-vanished) Ipana toothpaste who sponsored the Mickey Mouse Club. The magic kingdom prevailed.

In The Great Pretenders, two studio execs at 1955 gala party have this exchange:

“I hate it, when my kids go around singing Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier,” Gordon grumbled, “Who would have ever dreamed some old frontier tale would make that much money? Look at what Disney’s done just in coonskin caps! Three million annually!”

“Pity the fucking raccoons,” said Carleton.

Roxanne Granville, a young, independent agent representing writers, responds, “My perspective is different. I quite love television.Sure, the pay is poor, the prestige is nil and the hours brutal, but on behalf of my young, ambitious writers, I am grateful to television. Television, gentlemen, is the great, roaring beast in the basement of the entertainment industry. You just kept throwing chunks of meat at it, and it roars the louder, and wants more.”

In some ways the entertainment industry faces this same challenge today with the advent of Netflix, Amazon, You Tube, Hulu, and now Apple creating original content for film and streaming. These entities have changed the means of entertainment distribution, and in doing so, changed the nature of how and what we imbibe as entertainment.Oddly, Marshall McLuhan said it best in 1968: “The medium is the message.” Emphasis mine.

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The Power and Peril of the Past

“The novelist is one on whom nothing is lost.”

~Henry James

Crescendo began its life as tale told to me one evening by a man in his sixties or seventies, a friend of a friend.   Urbane, sophisticated, well-traveled, he had the distinguished last name of a wealthy California family. His childhood was luxurious, but as a young man he had had  to make his own way in the world after being disinherited.   His grandfather  had founded the family fortune in shipping, but after he was widowed, he remarried a scheming, shrewd grasping woman very much younger than he, and certain to outlive him.  The second Mrs. ______ alienated the Founder from his children, and the rest of the family, and made sure they were disinherited. The person telling me the story remembered tremendous family rows with people being thrown out on the street.

Clearly, all this was promising grist for a complex family tale.

Crescendo originally had a different title tied to a place. But when time came to publish, the musical resonance fit perfectly. This was the first novel where I used music as a writing tool to help me create the central character, a classically trained pianist. As I worked on the book  I played Beethoven’s Eleventh Piano Sonata, one of his lesser known piano works, over and over and over.  Ambitiously, I set out to learn to play the Eleventh Sonata on the piano. This took longer than it took to write the novel.

Crescendo, like Beggars and Choosers, These Latter Days, Caveat and other fictions of mine, explores the power and peril of the past.   My characters are always ambivalent about the past, haunted, many of them, often lonely, the more isolated since they live in California which recognizes few pasts and reveres none.

 

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