Myron - Gore Vidal

 Myron is not as good as Myra Breckinridge for two reasons.   Firstly, it's more about Myra and her attempts from Myron, and secondly, the second joke is rarely better than the first, especially when your first sally is as good as Myra Breckinridge.   That said, Vidal upends expectations.  We assume Myron is a prequel but it is actually a sequel.   The original pre-Myra Myron was a cinema geek, an intellectual, whereas this Myron, following Myra's car crash and surgery is a dull-as-ditchwater middleclass Californian in the Chinese Food business.   Time, of course, has moved on and we find ourselves in 1973 at the height of the Watergate scandal.   Myron, meanwhile, finds himself (with a stroke of Swiftian brio) stuck on the set of the MGM movie Siren of Babylon in the summer of 1948.   Here, it is always the summer of 1948.  When the movie finishes shooting, they simply start shooting again.  Out-of-towners like Myron, who have somehow time-slipped here, stay at the Thalberg Hotel, largely unnoticed by the locals.   When they try and speak of their situation, it comes out as meaningless gibberish.

In these circumstances Myra, deeply and firmly supressed by Myron, starts to re-emerge.  Being herself a made-up character she registers better with the locals.   Among the out-of-towners at the Thalberg is Maude, a gay hairdressers with a sideline in drag, who helps Myra regain her looks.   Myra makes it her mission to save MGM, to make transgender eunuchs ubiquitous and thus prevent overpopulation and the various geopolitical crises which she knows will make the western world the ghastly place it is in 1973.

Chaos and further slippages ensue.   It is all great fun but cannot  quite equal the gobsmacking transgression that was Breckinridge. 

Drive - James Sallis

 Drive (2005) is the best known novel by James Sallis, mainly thanks to the 2011 movie, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, starring Ryan Gosling.   It's the story of the unnamed Driver who runs away to Hollywood as a teenager with dreams of being a stunt driver in the movies.   With the help of established stunt man Shannon, he gets a chance.  Driver himself develops a sideline as a getaway driver.   He doesn't want to know about the crime; he just drives.   One heist goes badly wrong.  Crime boss Nino refuses to pay Driver's fee.  Bad idea...

Drive  is contemporary US noir at its very best.  James Sallis is the best US writer of noir crime since James Ellroy.   Some of us would argue that he is as good as Ellroy in the early novels, a lot better than Ellroy this century.  Drive is short, taut, cleverly structured, and packs a terrific punch.

Myra Breckinridge - Gore Vidal

 Myra, the young and extremely nubile widow of the late Myron Breckinridge, pitches up in Hollywood, a girl with a plan.  Her plan is to claim her widow's mite - a half share in Buck Loner's acting academy.  Uncle Buck was the brother of Myron's equally deceased mother.  Gertrude and Buck inherited a then worthless orange grove from their father.  When his career in cowboy movies began to tail off, Buck decided to build an academy for Hollywood hopefuls.  Gertrude let him do so, without ever relinquishing her entitlement to half of the land.

While Buck does everything in his power to keep hold of his money, Myra starts teaching at the academy.  She is popular with the students and soon singles out a pair of likely stars, the mean and moody Rudy Godowski and the sweet as apple pie singer Mary Ann Pringle.  The trouble is, they are a couple.  Myra, "whom no man will ever possess", is only interested in Mary Ann - which means Rudy must be broken, dispatched, and otherwise got rid of.

In the end Rudy is gifted to Hollywood super agent Letitia Van Allen, who has an unquenchable taste for masochistic sex.  She turns Rudy into a star.  Myra and Letitia between them turn him into a promiscuous homosexual.

Meanwhile Buck Loner's legal team of Flagler and Flagler come up earn their fee.  Not only is there no trace of a marriage between Myra and Myron, but there is no evidence Myron is even dead.  There is a reason for that and, in the novel's most famous scene, Myra shows them.   Buck instantly hands over the cheque.  It looks like everything will turn out hunky dory, until----

Myra Breckinridge is an American classic and a great one, in its way every bit as reflective of its period (late Sixites) as The Great Gatsby was of its.  Vidal was a genius who could have his off-days (this wasn't one) but who was never ever dull.  My edition of Myra comes as a double bill with Myron.  I can't wait.

He - John Connolly

 'He' is never once named in the novel but there is never a moment's doubt who he is: Stan Laurel.  He is he because he was really Arthur Stanley Jefferson, son of a theatrical promoter in Northern England.  He is the idiot partner of Norville 'Babe' Hardy but he is really the brains and driving force in the partnership.  Babe married three times, Stan married anywhere between five and nine times, although he woman who he spent much of his early life with and who came up with the new name was never his wife.  In reality, the great love of his life was Babe.  Babe, in return, loved many people, though he probably loved Stan most of all.

Loads of Connolly's story is familiar or even well known - but then so are Laurel and Hardy's movies; it doesn't stop us loving them.  There are also things I didn't know (and it so happens I know quite a lot about the silent cinema).  I didn't know about Babe's brother.  I didn't know much about James Finlayson.  And I never had such insight into the mysterious death of Thelma Todd.

That said, the bit I enjoyed best was the filming of 'The Trail of the Lonesome Pine' number from Way Out West.  A beautiful scene, beautifully done by Connolly.

An accidental find and a real treat.

The City and the Pillar - Gore Vidal

 The City and the Pillar is both a roman a clef and perhaps the first American homosexual novel, certainly the first one to break through from underground genre to mainstream.  Considering it came out in 1948, when the author was only 22, I find Vidal surprisingly frank and yet mature enough to know that his readers know perfectly well what he is talking about.

It is not in any sense a novel for gay readers only.  Jim Willard is another ordinary middle class youth in Virginia, living with his parents and siblings, who happens to be good at tennis and not much else.  His best friend is Bob Ford (great choice of name, by the way), who dreams of running off to sea.  Immediately before Bob makes his escape, the boys spend a night out in the woods where one thing leads to another.  Bob becomes Jim's epitome of manhood and love - but Bob is away at sea.  Ultimately Jim follows, without much direction but always in search of Bob.  He joins the merchant marine too but after an embarrassing foursome in Alaska he jumps ship and ends up teaching tennis in Hollywood and living with the clandestinely gay movie star Ronald Shaw.  Then he travels with the failed novelist and scriptwriter Paul Sullivan, who introduces Jim to a older woman, Maria Verlaine, the sort of woman he can love but not physically, which is what she wants and needs from him.

Then comes the war.  Jim enlists but never makes it overseas.  He falls ill and is discharged with rheumatoid arthritis, the result of an infection that nearly killed him.  He naturally re-evaluates his life.  He gets in touch with all the people he has let down and spends the rest of the book catching up and resolving issues as far as he can.  Finally he makes it home to Virginia, and faces up to the last remaining issue,,,

I've previously read only Vidal's vast historical series Narrative of Empire, written at the other end of his distinguished career.  The City and the Pillar is slight by comparison, yet it is deeply felt and extraordinarily vivid.  It captures the fragmentation of lives torn between public and private.  It celebrates the lonely ones who search for their dream, be it Shaw's desire to be a proper stage actor, Sullivan's ache for success as well as reputation, or Maria and Jim's simple search for the one who will love them back.  It is enlivened by comic moments - the gay set clinging to one another because nobody else wants them, camping it up and gossiping cattily.

It's a tremendous achievement by a great writer.

The Pictures - Guy Bolton

"In Hollywood, no one is innocent." So runs the blurb. But in Hollywood, in 1939, no one called the movies 'pictures.' Yes, it's quite a clever pun pointing to the solution of the mystery, but if it's that good, and that important, Bolton should have set the novel in the British film industry.

Title apart, it's an impressive fiction debut. Jonathan Craine is an LAPD detective who has a special relationship with MGM.  He was married to one of their lesser stars until she committed suicide. Now he's back after compassionate leave and finds himself summoned to another movie suicide - a producer married to another MGM star whose latest movie is about to hit the screens. I instantly thought Jean Harlow, especially when the fictional studio puts out the same 'closet homosexual' cover story the real MGM used when Harlow's husband Paul Bern shot himself in 1932. Fortunately, The Pictures is not a version of the Harlow story - nor, unfortunately, is the bereaved star Gale Goodwin remotely like Jean Harlow. Instead, it's mainly the story of a studio on the verge of collapse that has staked everything on the upcoming Wizard of Oz and will do absolutely anything to maintain it's family-friendly image.

Craine is an excellent protagonist, conflicted in so many ways but always fundamentally straight. His second-in-command,Patrick O'Neill, starts off annoying but ends up a hero. Gale Goodwin is also well drawn, as are all the Hollywood bigwigs. I would have liked a cameo or two from other movie stars of the period to flesh out the illusion of actuality, but I don't want to nitpick. The plot is cunning, and The Pictures has that often overlooked element in modern thrillers, that is to say genuine thrills. There is a car chase through the Hollywood Hills that had me spellbound and a shootout at the station very nearly as good. Guy Bolton is definitely a name to look out for.

James Whale - Mark Gatiss

This biography of the Hollywood director behind Show Boat and Frankenstein was written in 1995, about the time Gatiss started with The League of  Gentlemen. Whale is fascinating. He seemed to be the archetypal English gent but in fact he rose from considerable poverty in the industrial West Midlands. He was almost 40 when he took to directing at all, and hit the jackpot first time when his production of R C Sheriff's Journey's End went from pro-am to the West End, then Broadway, then for most of those involved, Hollywood.

Whale enjoyed a decade of spectacular screen successes before abruptly falling from sight. By the time America entered World War II he was more or less unwillingly retired. He took to painting and then drowned himself in his pool aged 68.

Whale's problem, of course, was that he was homosexual, not overtly but certainly not covertly. Everyone knew but not everybody had a problem. But when Whale became a problem in other areas of activity, too demanding on set, not sufficiently deferential to the new studio owners, his homosexuality was used as an excuse to get rid of him. They stopped him working but in many ways Whale had the last laugh. He always seemed to know his time in the spotlight was limited. He looked after his money when he was as highly paid as any director in town. After almost twenty years living off his savings in considerable style, he still managed to leave an estate worth over half a million dollars.

Gatiss, we all know, is a gifted writer who does his research, The book is sheer joy to read, from start to finish.

Tales From Hollywood - Christopher Hampton

This 1983 play is about the emigre German writers who found refuge from the Nazis in Hollywood: Brecht, for example, but mainly the Mann brothers, Thomas and Heinrich. Heinrich was the elder brother and was famous for his novels before Thomas but who was then eclipsed by his more conservative, deeper thinking sibling. By the time war breaks out both are in Hollywood but only Heinrich is reliant on Hollywood. Thomas tours universities and is tipped for the Nobel prize; Heinrich is spendthrift, bibulous and has a younger, lower-class wife, Nelly.

Our guide to this inversion of the Hollywood Dream is the Hungarian playwright Odon von Horvath, who is himself a dream in this story, given that he was killed by a falling tree in the Champs d'Elysees in 1938. But here he befriends Heinrich, pays reverence to Thomas, and responds a little too readily to Nelly's drunken flirting. The play ends badly for Nelly but not for Horvath, because he is already dead and finally, symbolically, realises it.

Hampton is one of the best writers of plays in English of the later Twentieth Century. In the Eighties it was basically between him and Stoppard, and after 1990 neither of them has written anywhere near enough. Both wear their book-learning as a badge of authority and neither has reflected deeply enough on the human condition, having both been successful from an early age. That does rather show in Tales From Hollywood.

What is it about? Displacement? Thomas Mann was permanently displaced; he wrote the bulk of his work outside Germany. Brecht wrote masterpieces like Galileo in exile and Heinrich's fame had already faded by 1940. Hovath, the child of an empire that had vanished during his lifetime, was a resident of nowhere - literally, in the context of the play. The only real displacement here is Nelly, who caught the roving eye of the man who thought up The Blue Angel and rose above her station. Tales of Hollywood is not about the writers who have no tales to tell about Hollywood, but about Nelly, who came to Hollywood with no dreams left and already out of place.

The famous writers are slightly two-dimensional, apart from our narrator, Hovath. He is a fantastic character and the best actors must yearn to play him: witty, self-deprecating, omniscient, playful, charming. And Nelly... a dream part, surely, for an actress just entering middle age. At the National Theatre in 1983 she was played by Billie Whitelaw. Casting that says it all.

West of Eden - Jean Stein

The subtitle is "An American Place". The place is Hollywood. Stein - herself a Hollywood child as the daughter of Jules Stein, founder of MCA - gives us five chunks of multi-voiced narrative from the earliest times - the arrival of the Doheny family, a decade or so before the movie makers - to round about the Millennium and the final crumbling of the Hollywood Dream.

The Doheny family was into oil. One way or another, the first Ed Doheny was probably the richest man on earth at one time. The story seems to be that he lost a lot when the degree of corruption beneath was revealed, but he still managed to keep enough for all his descendants to pass untroubled by the need to work. Coincidentally, I came across the story of his son, Ned Junior, on the internet the other week. The scandal seems to be that he and his male lover committed suicide together. Oddly, Stein doesn't explore that in any detail. The style she set herself may have prevented it. She has gone for quoting dozens of connected people with no explanatory sections whatsoever. In other words, if the family doesn't want to talk about it, nobody else will either.


She also makes it about the houses these people lived in. Home for the Dohenys was Greystone, the mansion where Chandler set The Big Sleep. Doheny's story is also behind Upton Sinclair's Oil!, now better known as the movie There Will Be Blood.


Angelo Drive was home to Jack Warner, most outré and obnoxious of the Brothers. At the studio he was a god, at home a willing doormat for his domineering wife Ann. Their daughter Barbara was the apple of Jack's eye, so much so that he was willing to exclude Jack Junior from his life. It's a sad and squalid story but nowhere near so sad as that of Jane Garland (Part Three) or Jennifer Jones (Part Four).


The latter hinge on another theme of the book - psychiatry and the ludicrous quacks who practised it in the Sunshine State. Jane Garland was the daughter of a railroad pioneer and Miss Cleveland 1912. There was a considerable difference in age. The old man died when Jane was very young and Mrs G put her daughter in psychiatric hospital. It's not really clear if Jane was mad when she went in. She certainly was when this segment is set - the late Forties. The idea was for the pubescent girl to live at home in the company of civilised young men who would take her out and also act as in-house nurses. Needless to say it didn't work and Jane went back to the hospital. The story has a surprising twist at the end: one of the former nurses believes he saw her out and about in the Seventies. If that's not true, she may well be still in hospital yet. Nobody knows or cares.


Jane was given to standing on her head and revealing her lack of panties. Jennifer Jones was equally opposed to undergarments. Otherwise her story begins as an absolute fairytale. She wanted to be an actress and married the actor Robert Walker when they were both teenagers. Both went to Hollywood. Robert Walker is still famous from movies like Strangers on a Train and The Clock, but he drank himself to death at 32. He was divorced from Jennifer by this time (and two other wives) and she had married the legendary David O Selznick of Gone with the Wind fame. She had also starred in Song of Bernadette and won the Best Actress Oscar on her twenty-fifth birthday.


Jones continued to make movies through the Fifties, all big budget star vehicles. Selznick died in 1965 and Jones married the hugely wealthy businessman and art collector Norton Simon. She retired from movies and pretty much from life. She became a recluse and virtually the prisoner of various unscrupulous head doctors. She said she was in therapy from her early twenties - and she lived to be ninety. Walker had suffered mental problems and her younger son by him, Michael, never recovered from the Sixties and lived an alternative life. Her daughter by Selznick, Mary Jennifer, threw herself off a twenty-two storey building.


And finally we have the Stein family story. The Steins lived at Misty Mountain, apparently sold to Rupert Murdoch, no less, at the time this book came out in 2016. This is the story of the eye-doctor who became an agent, the agency that became a studio, and how the whole thing was sold to the Japanese. It's not the most interesting story but it has its attractions and it has to be there to round out the picture. We have the pre-movie money, the studio era, the independent and the rise of the agents, all united by failure in the end and damage to subsequent generations.


It's a book I don't like the style of, which I never felt really grabbed me - and yet look how long this review is! I guess that says something in itself.

The Black Echo - Michael Connolly

I remember reading the early Connolly novels back in the 90s.  I loved The Last Coyote  and Blood Work and Trunk Music and can't remember why I stopped buying or borrowing them.  I read The Lincoln Lawyer a couple of years ago and thought it mediocre.  Presumably I read something else earlier and thought the same.  Anyway, The Black Echo is not only an early Connolly, it's the very first, published in 1992.  It features Harry Bosch, which is another plus.

It is more than a crime novel - and Connolly's best always rise above genre.  In many ways it's a Vietnam novel.  Harry and the murder victim, Billy Meadows, were tunnel rats back in 'Nam - they went blind into the network of tunnels the Viet Cong had spent decades digging, and there they encountered the Black Echo.

I liked this a lot.  I liked the way Harry already has a back story, an earlier case which led to him being reassigned to Hollywood and which incurred the undying hatred of Internal Affairs.  He's already therefore a rogue, an outsider - 'not one of the police family'.  And his alienation gets deeper with every chapter.  Connolly's style is effective, the dialogue has the tang of authenticity without being overwrought or over-simple, and his descriptions are frequently skewed from the norm.  I guess the solution to my Connolly problem is to start again at the beginning - or, this being the beginning, continue in time order - and see what happens.  So it's The Black Ice next, then!