You can’t make this stuff up

Marlo Faulkner has had a long and rather illustrious career, and all it has had to do with well-chosen words.

For 33 years, she taught English, history and film at the high school level. One exercise, exploring how both music and black-and-white versus color affect the way we perceive a film, started with an interpretation of “Blazing Saddles,” followed by “Schindler’s List,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Victor Victoria,” among others.

Faulkner – no relation, although it helps – became a feature journalist, penning a weekly column in the San Mateo Times for 13 years about textiles and fibers. When asked what she could possibly write about to sustain an audience, she said, “The way Bob Mackie designed for Cher, how General Motors makes upholstery designs, the unicorn tapestries at The Met.” For starters.

Faulkner never missed a week, researching and writing enough “material” for 676 columns.

Aware that The Times had a long history of covering The Shakespeare Festival, Faulkner also had observed that the writer doing so was easily bored. So, she commandeered the assignment to become the critic for the festival, a gig she covered for 28 years.

“I never took for granted that I had comp tickets to the festival,” she said. “It was a fabulous opportunity.”

Then she wrote a book.

Leaning into London

Faulkner, on an article assignment, visited Jack London’s widow Charmian London’s “House of Happy Walls” in Glen Ellen, which had a secret compartment on the second floor. She pushed her hand against a rock on the wall, a door opened, and she entered a darkened stairway that went up eight steps and turned sharply to the right.

“I put my hand against a wall to brace myself and felt something there,” said Faulkner, but it offered almost no tactile sense, like running my hand over chinchilla. Turns out it was a red hunting jacket, made of newborn lambskin, which had belonged to London’s second wife, Charmian Kittredge.”

Realizing she had discovered Kittredge’s closet, still housing her clothes, her undergarments, her life via her intimate belongings, Faulker wrote a story about her, kind of a “characterization by clothing.”

She considered developing it into a screenplay until a writing coach said, “Do the book first, then the screenplay.”

Following a saga of considerable research and writing, on April 23, Luminare Press released “The Second Mrs. London: Charmian Kittredge shares her life with Jack London.”

Building the Back Story

Faulkner met a woman by the water fountain at the opera, who happened to be on the Board at the Huntington Museum in Santa Monica, which houses the Jack London Collection. This led to a meeting with London’s grandnephew, Irving Shepard, who gave her written permission to access the collection, which she studied for six years before completing her novel.

“While the storyline is, therefore, accurate,” she said, “I have presented it as historical fiction because I introduced dialogue. If it were a biography, it would have none.”

While Faulkner’s book focuses on Kittredge, this isn’t the first biography that characterizes London’s story.

“When (London) died,” she said, “(Kittredge) needed money. So, she worked with Irving Stone (think “Agony and the Ecstasy” about Michelangelo), who took London’s own title and gave it to his biography about the author. In his account, he claimed London committed suicide, which he did not and described his wife as a ‘buxom broad with an overbite,’ also not accurate.”

What is accurate, said Faulkner, is that London met his first wife, Elizabeth (Bessie) Maddern at Cal Berkeley, where she tutored him during his single semester on campus. He went on to marry her, Faulker said, because he thought she would anchor him, give him a foundation that enabled him to write.

“London, who wanted sons, described Bessie as ‘having great hips,’ so she could easily birth children, hopefully sons,” Faulkner said. “She had two daughters, and the family came to Carmel. Jack was a great swimmer, which was important to him. But Maddern couldn’t swim. He wanted a life partner and realized she wasn’t going to be that.”

Kittredge, “The Second Mrs. London,” felt guilty that her relationship with London began before the divorce, said Faulkner. Maddern felt horrified he was leaving her – a scene Faulkner portrays in her book – and became very bitter.

And this is just the crest of the wave. Dive into all 460 pages of “The Second Mrs. London” to see how it plays out.

“My first draft had 1,500 pages,” Faulkner said. “There is enough to the story to warrant that but, as Australian author Thomas Keneally said, ‘Do it in three books.’ Perhaps.”

This first edition follows the tradition of Paula McLain’s “The Paris Wife” and Therese Anne Fowler’s “Z,” a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, said Faulkner. “The Second Mrs. London” combines “first-person insights with intimate and emotional revelations by an unheard historical figure at the center of a great romance with a major American writer.”

Faulkner, who holds membership in the Historical Novel Society of America, Women Writers of the West and the Central Coast branch of the California Writers Club, will formally launch her book on June 3 at 7 p.m. in the Auditorium at Canterbury Woods in Pacific Grove.