I’ve been tossing about as much stardust as I can muster right now. That’s it, this novel is done. I think the podcast of the book runs a bit over 10 hours in its entirety.
Let me know if you’d like to hear another Hollywood novel podcast — remember it will take me some time to write it — if you think I should independently publish what you’ve heard, or, if you just want to chat the comments are open. I’d love to hear from you.
 
 
 

“Do you know the Mayo Clinic lists menopause under diseases and conditions? What do you think of that?”
“Well, I know it’s not contagious.” He sat down beside me. “Jesus, this is hard on my knees.”
“Sorry about that, old-timer. Cooper, I am not pissed off.”
“Then what’s with the face?”
“This old thing?” He laughed. “Did I ever tell you about when I was nineteen? When I was working for the Taylors?”
“You worked for them?”
“I was the nanny.”
“Classic.”
“Shut up!”
“I never knew you were their nanny.”
“I guess I never told you.”
“I was going to say we should go for a drive, catch up, and you could charge your phone in the car, but I don’t think I can get up for a while. Why don’t you tell me now?”
“God. It seems like a million years ago. I came out here from Boston and it was like I’d landed on an alien world. Everything was brighter, so much brighter, more dramatic. The Taylors made me feel like I was living on a movie set.”

There were heaps — accumulated reminders of a life — all around. Everything that served as an archival asset, or a teaching aid for future filmmakers, I boxed and hauled over to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Clothes, I donated. Books, I culled down to the essentials and gave the balance to the library. I avoided looking at my computer for days, ignored my constantly vibrating mobile, and I turned off the ringer on my landline. I played music at all hours, danced when I felt like it, and slept in any room where I had spent the day organizing. If I couldn’t quite see a plan to execute in my mind, I could in my house. And what about the house? It was so ridiculously big. A home should be filled, specifically with children. I pulled all the papers from my files (that I could find) to deed the property over to Jake, his future wife, and my (yet to be born) infant grandchildren.
When I texted Jake the good news he replied, “Thanks Mom. But don’t think I’ll be needing a screening room.” The issue of the house I put on hold.

All through life, instinctively or intellectually, we adapt to survive. Even insects have some boss strategies, for example, the formation of a chitinous exoskeleton, which is the somewhat see-through shell that encapsulates and protects a shrimp or a spider. I have a theory about directors who succeed in the movie industry; they have see-through shells. The shell can be the ability to tune 100 other people out and focus on what’s right in front of you. It can be a tough ego. It can be a calming chemical cocktail that allows all to think they have access to your attention, while your core remains protected. Or, it can be a producer that never leaves your side.
As this is the holiday season the comments are open, and, our story is drawing to a close — just a few more chapters.

Life is a series of metamorphoses. Some of them get more airtime than others. I remember once waiting in a gynecologist’s office to see the doctor. There was his desk, on the walls family pictures, on the shelves, some weighty texts. I was curious about hot flashes, so I pulled one of the volumes and flipped to the index. There was a single page referenced, and on the page one paragraph. It said, to paraphrase, that your internal thermostat might go haywire, the medical establishment wasn’t sure why, they hadn’t really studied it much, and the publication’s advice was: dress in layers or take supplements and don’t worry about it. Oh. And it (it, meaning menopause) can go on for ten years.
That’s a long time.
The comments are open…

For a few short days after Antoine’s crisis I was more aware of the rhythms and mechanisms of filmmaking and its twitchy straitlaced cousin finance than I had ever been. Much like how time can seem to slow when you fall, leaving you able to see everything around you with crystal clarity before you crash into the ground, I found myself hyperaware of all the moving pieces of movie creation, as inevitable and formidable as a heartbeat. A studio produces 10-15 films a year. In 9 years someone like me would have given 90-135 movies the green light. Personally, I had been responsible for bringing 145 projects to the screen. Stories were told and tens of thousands of people were employed, day after day after day.

Lethal stress can come at you no matter whether you’re onscreen or off. Actors in Hollywood have committed suicide by swallowing ant paste, Nembutal, or barbiturates. George Sanders (check out his performance in All About Eve) swallowed five bottles of pills in Barcelona and left two suicides notes. One in Spanish instructing the local authorities to notify his sister of his death, and the other went like this:
Dear World: I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool—good luck.
Directors generally shoot themselves, although some jump from bridges or top floors. What’s all this got to do with me, and the time Antoine decided to call instead of nicking his femoral artery?

Clara Bow wasn’t the only one who found Hollywood depressing.
On a chilly, unusually clouded over, February afternoon in 2009 when I was 48, after the fourth week of shooting on the revived franchise, I received a call. It was Antoine. He told me he couldn’t make it to set on Monday. One could say that was unusual to the nth degree. Directors never miss work unless they’re stricken, for example, by a heart attack or family tragedy. I asked Antoine what the matter was. He was politely evasive, and almost robotic. Further, he was tampering with film protocol making his first call to me, a studio head, instead of his producer (who would, in the normal course of events, alert the studio and arrange either a temporary work stoppage or a fill-in). However, we were on the phone. I was his friend. There was something so alarming about the intonation of his voice, and the nature of the call that it was as if I heard in my ears a cloud of invisible bees, miles away, swarming, buzzing, dangerous, and on their way to sting.

Gifted with a glib tongue he moved quickly from never-featured actor, to production assistant, to assistant director, and rapidly ascended the dating scale (as he saw it) from the cute craft service gal who brought cucumber sushi snacks to camera at four in the afternoon, to the daughter of a producer. Everything was meteoric with Antoine — his love life, his career, his quick adaptation to style and circumstance.
Where do I insinuate myself firmly into Antoine’s story? I think right about here.
We were friends for some unfathomable reason, well, that’s not exactly candid of me. We were close friends because my ascent in films intrigued him, my quiet on set demeanor had impressed him, and he was perfectly clear, when the time came, that my position as newly minted studio head made me all the more worthy of devotion. Does that sound callous? I suppose it does. It doesn’t mean I didn’t care for him, or Antoine me. Yet, in large part, I think our early fascination with each other had to do with the novelty the other presented. It meant he could tell me stories when we met of waking up on location somewhere across the Pacific with two bedmates he didn’t recognize and I would gasp and say I hoped he had used a condom. He would recount evenings on hallucinogens speaking to ancient spirit guides and I would ask what they were wearing. “Toga? Buckskins? What?”

In the words of Dorothy Gale, there’s no place like home. The light here is what made filmmakers move to California. It shines here most of the time, and there are certain places, certain times of year that take your breath away with sheer wonder. It’s a crying shame that with generations of talent based here so much production is going elsewhere, and I went with it. The migration had to do with tax incentives in some places, and preposterous salaries in others. I think it’s time I told you about when I went on location in Mongolia. The average film worker there makes $40 a day—and that’s considered generous.

The streets of Beverly Hills, unlike the streets of the Hollywood Hills, were nearly empty. One morning I saw a woman of about seventy, with the poise and stance of a dancer, shining long silver hair side-parted like Veronica Lake — probably just as it had been when she was a teenager in the forties — wearing surfing jams, Vans, and a moth eaten angora sweater; walking her very large, very shaggy, dogs. It was an hour later when I started seeing more humans, as opposed to, say, squirrels.

These humans were mostly getting into cars, looking distracted, toting insulated cups to balance in the console of their upscale autos. I infinitely preferred the stately solitary walker with her dogs. The more I walked, the more I became aware of the scents of an inhabited morning; frying bacon, the whiff of the first cigarette of the day, brewing coffee. The more I walked the more I noticed a rhythm of greeting after the first nearly silent hour. There was the elderly Iranian gentleman who spoke no English out for a constitutional who touched his cap, the joggers, faces slick with perspiration who would smile and nod, the people meandering after their sniffing dogs who would say a surprised hello at seeing me (as if I had stumbled into their living room, instead of come across them moseying down the sidewalk). Especially notable were the beaming bottle blondes in their fifties, sporting pastel tracksuits and full makeup singing out, “Good morning!” a legion of peppy Doris Days. I began to feel more a part of the city, my street, my neighborhood, and started putting together faces and houses. Fifteen years in Los Angeles and what made me feel connected here, finally, wasn’t my job, or my family, or even my friends — what made me feel connected were strangers, happy to be alive and outside on another sunny California day, just like generations before them, and generations to come.
And then I left. I got on a plane one night at LAX with Darla and we arrived at Heathrow in London sometime after lunch.

I loved recording this chapter, it’s got Hollywood history, everlasting friendship, and of course some very strange goings-on…

There we sat, the mogul’s daughter turned academic, the copywriter turned designer, the semi-profane raconteur turned show runner, the pragmatist turned legal advocate, and me; the nanny turned studio executive. It was late, the conversation was flowing, the scent of night-blooming vines hung in the air. There were altogether too many candles glowing on the coffee table amid bowls of almonds and dusky purple grapes. Darla, having had four glasses of wine already, raised her glass and said, “I love you all, lads. I really do.” Agreement all around and eyes shining, Darla continued. “You know, a long time ago this place was so much, so much more, more,” she struggled for the word, “informal. The big money hadn’t moved in, or the big bosses. The silent era, to have been here then— Ya know, Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart? She was a fecking pioneer. Women wrote most of the movies, the biggest director around was a woman. Everyone chipped in and helped each other. Frances Marion, the woman who came up with the narrative screenplay, wrote over 300 of ‘em, won two Oscars, she came out here to be an actress. But instead she started writing scenarios, little outlines for that director I was tellin’ you about, Lois Weber. She met Mary Pickford on set in 1914, they couldn’t have been much older than twenty, and watch out, friends for life. They changed how movies were made — how stories were told. Yeah. Most of the writers were women, all the editors were women, they produced, they directed. I ask ya, what the hell happened? That was 80-81 years ago, what the hell happened?”

 
We are all the lead character in our personal narrative yet this bothered me. Behind the scenes was my forté, I wasn’t ready for a starring role, never had been. Why was that? And why couldn’t I stop thinking about myself in relation to Cooper? What also bothered me was that I was including him in a category usually known (at least in risk assessment circles) as an act of God, an unforeseen and unavoidable force of nature, and in that instant I decided to stay put, remembering a movie line that justified my resolve.
Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.
This sentence was pronounced through rigidly smiling lips by Katharine Hepburn (who played missionary Rose Sayer) as she poured out tugboat captain Mr. Allnut’s (Humphrey Bogart’s) liquor into the Ulanga River in The African Queen. The film was directed by John Huston and the screenplay was by — well there were four writers however, the one on location in Africa was Peter Viertel. I also remembered an anecdote about the whole crew of the movie and all the actors suffering dysentery on location, with the notable exception of Bogart and Huston, who, it was rumored, never drank anything but alcohol. That, my angels, is the myth of drunken genius writ bold. Wouldn’t their livers have turned to mush? Such is Hollywood. It believes its own hype and prefers to print the legend.

Chapter 20, in which Billie travels to Vegas and comes to a seismic realization.
I tended to think of sleep as something healing, freshening, and cleansing. I traced this somewhat peculiar notion to parental influence. I distinctly remembered – though I couldn’t have been more than four at the time — waddling after my mother one golden Saturday morning as Mom carefully demonstrated how to achieve “hospital corners,” the precise folding of sheet around mattress, the hands that most often held a sheaf of inky smelling mimeographs or art supplies smoothing the linens taut.

Merle Oberon said that thing about Hollywood and one night stands. We’ll talk about her joy ride with David Niven later. Now we’re back to the story of Billie and chapter 19 —
A film set is a constantly shifting sea. It’s usually crowded concentrated controlled chaos — until it’s not. The not, those lulls, are very deceptive. You might see a large number of crew members at the craft service table, the lead actor sitting down for a game of chess with the prop man, or the grips and electricians standing idle, always an indication of trouble. Every second of a shooting day costs money. Every second that isn’t accounted for or active can grow exponentially, slow production, accrue costs and fees and union penalties. If you see the First A.D., the oft-harried drill instructor of the studio floor, with nothing to do, no actors to coral, no P.A.s to bark at, no throngs of technicians to hush — kicking back, feet up, inking in a crossword puzzle, you can pretty much guess your stately ship of cinema-craft is about to slam into an iceberg.

Chapter 18 begins with a quote from Bette Davis:

I’d marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he’d be dead within a year.
On a Saturday following the first week of shooting, I woke, and for a few brief moments didn’t know how old I was, what house I was in, where my parents were, if I was married, or had a child; I was just Billie, waking. Light was streaming into the windows, and I felt buoyant, rising, free. I stretched. I filled my lungs and splayed my fingers, watching the wavering silhouette of a branch on the illuminated bright white weave of the curtains — just beyond my reach — and then with a tangible rush and cognitive snap I was anchored again in my body, three decades of life accounted for, and a son asleep across the hall. Film hours can do odd things to your brain.
Comments?

 
There’s nothing a man can do, that I can’t do better and in heels.
So said Ginger Rogers, and thus begins chapter 17.

There are so many myths on which the reality of Hollywood is based. Some are funny and fun, some are sad, and some are desperate. I knew that success, no matter how it came, was the one thing everyone remembered. Consider this, around the time I had become a producer so had a young fellow that happened to have a way with finicky animals. Titans of the industry relied on him to run errands and walk their dogs, and as luck would have it he was nearing completion on a film that featured whales, dinosaurs, or comic book heroes — it’s hard to remember the particulars. Two years earlier another up-and-comer had answered phones for a he-man actor who had a production deal at one of the majors with offices off the lot. This amiable youngster was biddable, sweet, and built. The actor had a penchant for youths of that nature, and when he discovered the dulcet voiced Adonis was sleeping in his car he invited him to take up residence in his offices — a couch became his bed; he showered at the gym, and within six months he-man and Adonis were in production on a best-selling book turned sizzling screenplay turned box office dynamo.
And the comments are open.
 
 

I’m feeling celebratory, so there will be three chapters of Hollywood & Mine going up this weekend. This is episode 18 (chapter 16, for those of you keeping track) and it starts with a quote from good old Greta Garbo:
If only those who dream about Hollywood knew how difficult it all is.

During the era in which I was climbing the greasy pole there were no smartphones, email was a few years in the future, and executives carried fat, expensively bound, loose-leaf notebooks in which they memorialized and organized day-to-day events. As noted previously, I liked to write things down, and my $300 Day Runner® was a lot more elegant looking than a pile of yellow legal pads. My notebook came with a key, just like an old fashioned diary, but it was open on the desk and this is what I had scrawled across the entry for Monday:
Hi Bloviating Lazy Head of Production,
Great conversation five minutes ago! Just to be clear: you want me to include seven new scenes on this opus without any increase in budget/personnel/schedule?
That is fabulous! I admire how you shot down my tedious list of facts and figures with gaseous platitudes. Just hearing them has elevated and inspired me! “Think outside the box. Just make it work. I don’t care about your problems, I’m late for my Pilates/lunch/massage.”
Wow! I’m on it boss! What leadership!
I shut the notebook and thought of the head of production, James Ellis. According to my old friend, Patsy Morris, he had been a notorious, vaguely musical, lothario in the 1970s. He had wooed the unwary with cocktails at Yamashiro’s, an old bar in the Hollywood Hills with killer views that was walking distance to his once glitzy home. The house itself was kind of famous, having been the aerie of a silent film star — before his appendix exploded — and then had passed through two generations more of male offspring: from movie star, to the movie star’s son, to the head of production (who was then answering phones for the higher and mightier, and sleeping on a futon in a room half chewed away by termites).
Hello again. I’m in such a good mood the comments are open. It’s a fiddly new format I’ve adopted to accommodate the podcast, my apologies, and I will try to remember to open them more frequently if you’d like to chat or ask me questions about the book.
Cheers to you lovely readers and listeners!

 
 
And thus, Anne Brown and her roommate, Tatiana Schneider were dispatched to a TV star’s mountain top domicile. They felt charged with responsibility and a certain kind of contempt for their elders’ unmanageable peccadilloes, “God, how gross,” was a phrase they bandied about between them. The star’s property was gated. Anne drove her tiny blue Civic up winding, endless, Mulholland to the gate and keyed the intercom as I had instructed her. It was two in the afternoon. The hot sun was dappled and filtered through a canopy of trees. A dozy male voice responded to the call, “Yep, give me a minute.” It was more like ten. The girls were out of the car and staring through the gate, down a ravine, at a one-story house surrounded by huge dusty California oaks when a tall lean handsome man sauntered out of the house barefoot and wearing a not too well secured white terry cloth robe. Anne and Tatiana unconsciously drew together.
The star beamed at them via a wide white smile and sparkling eyes and drew his hand through his pillow sculpted hair and drawled, “Hi-there, girls.” He strode up to the gate and said, “Come on in.” As he stepped back and the gate rolled open his robe gapped even more revealing his well-muscled chest and as Anne’s eyes dropped she noticed the star wasn’t wearing any underwear. He was in that elevated state some men achieve on waking. He was nearly naked and didn’t seem to care; actually he seemed to be enjoying, really enjoying, the sun on his bare skin.

“I recorded that section about the riots of ’92 one week before the May-June protests in 2020. Pandemic, economic collapse, police brutality… Three horsemen of the apocalypse are quite enough, thank you.”
***
That’s a quote from the novel I’m podcasting, you can listen at the end of post. Lena Horne’s quote is the chapter heading. Ms. Horne had plenty to be angry about. Her father took a powder when she was three. Her suffragette mother disapproved of her and left her in the care of her grandparents. She started performing at the Cotton Club in the early 1930s, and chafed against misogyny and racism all her life.

Once in Hollywood she was groomed for stardom at MGM and in mainstream films she was shunted off into scenes where she was portrayed as an entertainer, not even a secondary character, so the footage could be cut in the South without disrupting the plot. She didn’t act. She sang. It wasn’t until 1969 that she appeared in a dramatic role in which her race was inconsequential.

As for the love… She performed for the troops during WWII. She worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to enact anti-lynching laws. She marched for civil rights in the 1960s.
She was born in 1917, the same year the word activist entered our lexicon, thank god for the word and the woman.


activist
noun











ac·​tiv·​ist | \ ˈak-ti-vist


\


plural activists




Definition of activist




: one who advocates or practices activism : a person who uses or supports strong actions (such as public protests) in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue



(Thank you, Merriam Webster!)
Take action, vote. Make it a landslide. From here until Tuesday either vote in person or put your mail-in ballot in an official election drop box. Vote, vote in numbers so big our voices will ring throughout history.
If you have questions check out I WILL VOTE.
Look out for one another, and thank you for setting us on course for the biggest voter turnout since 1908.
Here’s the short chapter I was talking about.