Coast to Coast: A Family Romance

by Nora Johnson

Nora Johnson was a young child when her parents' marriage collapsed. Her father, Nunnally Johnson, the writer, producer, or director of many acclaimed movies, such as The Grapes of Wrath and The Dirty Dozen, remained in California, where he would continue to be a major Hollywood presence for more than three decades. Nora's mother, Marion, a beautiful but unsettled woman, took her to New York to start a new life -- one surrounded by her mother's lovers and eccentric literary friends instead of movie stars and studio heads. Coast to Coast is Nora's account of a childhood spent shuttling between Manhattan and Hollywood. What emerges is a marvelous portrait of American life in the 1940s and 1950s -- from the movie lots of California to the cocktail parties of the Upper East Side -- and also a touching story of a shrewd, observant girl who would grow up far too fast. Nora shares the colorful details of a childhood spent in privilege, but also captures the painful loneliness of changing schools, four-day train trips from one coast to the other, and never being quite sure of where she belonged. She also brings to life her droll, charming, talented father -- a Thurberesque character in Hollywood -- and her beautiful and erratic mother, a woman who fled the Los Angeles movie colony life but was unable to forget the husband who took her there. Coast to Coast is a wonderfully written portrait of a fascinating era and a child who came of age in it, who had everything she wanted -- except a place to call home.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published August 3, 2004

About the author

Nora Johnson was the daughter of film writer, director and producer Nunnally Johnson, pivotal in such acclaimed films as 'The Grapes of Wrath'. She attended the Brearley School in New York City and in 1954 graduated from Smith College.

Her first and most well-known novel, The World of Henry Orient (1956), was based on her experiences at the Brearley School. In 1964 it was made into a movie produced and co-scripted by her father, Nunnally Johnson, and starring Peter Sellers. In 1957 The Atlantic Monthly published her influential article "Sex and the College Girl", which culled her experiences at Smith to discuss then-current attitudes towards sex on American campuses.

Reviews

[da AL · Rating 5 out of 5]

An honest glimpse into what it's like to be the daughter of a celebrity writer in the 1950s. Wish she wrote a sequel about what happened later.

[Maia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nora Johnson is the daughter of Nunnaly Johnson, a well-known and well-established 1930s, 40s and 50s screenwriter and then producer. Her mother, a journalist for a time, was her father's second wife (he had another, much older daughter with his first wife) and Johnson's parents divorced when she was six years old. Her mother left LA with her and returned to NYC so for the rest of her growing up, Johnson found herself between two 'coasts': the more bohemian urban one of her mother, who found happiness with a second husband much later in life, and the almost mythical sunshine of Southern California, where her father inhabited a very movielike like filled by movielike myths, including all the famous stars whose films we grew up on and a gorgeous ex movie starlet wife. In the memoir, Nora Johnson finds herself so severely placed between these two coasts that she inhabit neither one of them.

This is a good, if light, memoir. My strongest impressions were twofold: Johnson's adoration of her famous, successful father, an adoration bordering on an Eureka-complex obsession (so that it is no surprise to learn that none of Johnson's consequent relationships with men worked out) and her experiences at the all-girls very 1950s Smith College, where uppercrust and sometimes brilliant girls were given brilliant educations with which to do nothing other than attract the 'right' man. There was something really sad about this last experience, and Johnson conveys it well. Also, Johnson's own first marriage (online you can learn that she later divorced, remarried, and divorced again) is reminiscent of The Graduate's last scene, and it was sad, pitiful, painful. It is clear that Nora Johnson the girl was marrying the wrong man for all the wrong reasons simply because she had been brainwashed to beleive that this was the 'right' time to marry. And you sense the compassion felt by Nora Johnson the woman, years later, for herself as a young girl.

Similarly, her descriptions of Sylvia Plath, who was in her same year, jump off the page though I did feel, nonetheless, a certain reluctant envy for Plath, whose career as a writer, though tragic, took her so much farther than did Johnson's own.

My other sense is that, overall, Nora Johnson would have benefited greatly from intense psychotherapy! There are scenes in the memoir that deal with her father, her mother, her stepmother and her own relations to all three that don't dwell deep enough and despite her father's affection for and interest in her, you get the sense that for most of her life Johnson felt herself neglected, a little like an ugly duckling.

[False · Rating 2 out of 5]

Daughter of film director and screenwriter, Nunally Johnson, this is Nora's memoir about growing up on both coasts, produced by divorced parents--spending most of her time with her mother in Manhattan and with her father in Los Angeles. I suppose it would be difficult to not grow up spoiled when exposed to a Hollywood lifestyle. Tyrone Power playing croquet in your backyard. One of the most interesting sections for me was her remembrance of her period at Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts. She was a classmate of Sylvia Plath, and since I'm reading a current biography of Ted Hughes, it was interesting to get another previously untapped perspective. Certain details were wrong. Plath's eyes were brown, not blue.

I wanted to share a passage: "Take the girl in Lawrence, the scholarship house next door. Striding up the hill in her polo coat, curled up in a burning ball in Lyon Reading Room, waving her arm in the front row of English classes...you couldn't miss Sylvia Plath. Always bigger than life, she was a visual commercial for Smith in the days before people thought in such terms: fat bouncing blond pageboy (the kind that required metal rollers) big, smart blue (brown) eyes, thich eyelashes, big Chiclet teeth, pink cheeks. She just missed being beautiful and by doing so, also missed being pretty. But she had star quality. When Sylvia was around you knew you were in the presence of something extraordinary.

Her hand waving in the front row presssaged scholarly insights that left the rest of us a mile behind. Here teaches know what they had on their hands and tactfully kindly held her back so that the rest of us could make our paler contributions. There was a collaboration between them. It would be wrong--and impossible--to keep the lid on her. She was a rocket on the launching pad.

At the same time certain flaws I'd noticed became more striking. Her camel's hair coat was threadbare--not from honorable hard wear, but from poor quality. She wore a dorky charm bracelet, her socks were too thin and short, she had pennies in her loafers, which most of us had given up on in high school. She held back her lush blond pageboy with little plastic barrettes. She was outside."

"The news about Sylvia's suicide attempt had traveled the campus with lightning speed. I thought she had buckled under the strain of being poor, of having to sell her stories to help pay Smith's tuition of two thousand a year."

She was on a scholarship. She didn't sell her stories to stay in school. She wanted to be in print, as anyone would, starting as an author. I thought all of the catty detail about her clothing went beyond the pale. I was a "hold back" student, and at times I resented it. Professors didn't check me. I checked myself, but I refused to produce lesser quality research and work to fit into the norm. It's the little cats like ugly Nora (and she calls Sylvia "not beautiful?")

She looks like her father, and that's NOT a compliment. Poor dead Sylvia. A cheating husband and a catty classmate.