Inspiration Information: “Lucky Us”

Photograph courtesy of the author.
Photograph courtesy of the author.

The sixth in a series of posts in which we ask writers about cultural influences on their work.

History, Lies, and Research

“Lucky Us” is a book about two teen-age girls—sisters and near-strangers—who leave their home town, in Ohio, and stumble into notable fame and spectacular failure as they make their unreliable way in Hollywood, Brooklyn, and London’s West End. It’s about a family cobbled together by liars, cons, grifters, impersonators, and protagonists whose family loyalty and personal integrity is matched—and sometimes beaten to a pulp—by their extreme flexibility with the truth. (The book is set in the nineteen-forties, otherwise some of those characters would be regularly putting the word “facts” in air quotes.) The process of reinvention, the wholesale dumping of the past in favor of something more useful, the rocky journey of making your way from one world to another, shedding skins without losing yourself—is the story I kept finding in photo albums.

“Lucky us” ends with a description of a photograph of the novel’s fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums. Six young men—my grandmother’s brothers—appear in a Russian fantasy of the Wild West (fur chaps, sombreros, gingham shirts) in a photo and were never seen again. My paternal grandparents, whom I’d never seen in the same room, walk down the aisle together, equally elegant, equally grim.

My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn’t have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments. (“The organ recital,” my mother called it. “Whiners,” my father said.) On the other hand, they never told me anything about my mother’s career as a syndicated gossip columnist, or about my father’s, as a spy. They never mentioned the spurned billionaire who courted my mother for forty years, or my father’s lucky run as a messenger for Murder, Inc.

My mother’s favorite photograph was one of herself, at twenty-four years old, unbearably beautiful, utterly glamorous, in a black-straw cartwheel hat, dark-red lipstick, and a smart black suit, her notepad on a cocktail table. I know nothing about that woman. My father’s favorite photograph was one of three swarthy men with menacing black fedoras, Ray-Bans, black trenchcoats, and thick cigars. They are laughing and have their arms around one another. The man on the left is a famous forger. The man on the right, an equally famous thief. It looks like an unusually happy family reunion, and I know nothing about the man standing in the middle, my father.

The Playlist

I grew up passionate about music in a household in which my father armchair-conducted Beethoven’s Ninth and my mother sang her own daft versions of the songs of her girlhood (“Bicycle Built for Two,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “Come on in My Kitchen”) with the same tuneless verve that my sister and I possess.

Music marked, shaped, and saved my life. The only thing that stopped me from weeping around the clock during my divorce was Jackie Wilson’s cheerful, insistent, multi-octave numbers (“Mr. Excitement!”) and Aretha telling me, What it is, what it is. As my best friend was dying, I sat at the foot of his bed and played music for him, everything from Gregorian chants (not my choice) to Sarah Vaughan (my choice) and “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball,” which he had belted out daily while crossing the Alps with his squadron.

The music of the thirties and forties—swing, the rise of pure jazz, even honky-tonk—was glorious. We can’t wipe out Bing Crosby’s cloying croon, but the rise of Hank Williams, Sr., makes up for Bing. The creators of “Orange Is the New Black” knew what they were doing when they included “I Saw the Light.” It moves all listeners, regardless of belief or lack thereof. The joy and genius of Fats Waller, the growl of Big Joe Turner, the irresistible combination of Billie Holiday and Count Basie (and of Billie Holiday and Artie Shaw) are ornaments on a period of exceptional music, and diving into it was one of the great pleasures of my listening, and writing, life. These songs, these voices, and the great instrumentals still resonate with me, and that’s why each chapter title is a song from that period.

I would like to have been there.

Glamour and Dirty Butter

Most of what I know about the movement and machinations of Old Hollywood I learned from Jeanine Basinger’s exceptional, insightful books “A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, Silent Stars” and “The Star Machine.” I’d managed to get most of my research into old movies done years before I even thought of writing this book, spending my girlhood on the floor of the living room, watching black-and-white Jean Arthur and Coop and Bogart and Bacall and Garbo and Dietrich and Harlow and Hepburn and Grant and all the others, until I fell asleep.

Despite everything that the studios did to pour each actor into the narrowest possible vessel (good girl, Latin spitfire, cowboy, best friend), I found the faces of the forties to be great, grand, irresistible faces. (Cue “Sunset Boulevard” ’s excessive nostalgia.) In real life, I was surrounded by Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, and the Stones, but I lusted after that lush forties makeup, those smooth hairstyles, and the emphasis on a certain sexy, competent adulthood. (Even the bombshells were not fools. Especially not the bombshells.) Those were grown-ass people; not a single adult man dressed like a toddler, no thirty-year-old woman standing knock-kneed, finger in her mouth, hoping to be mistaken for sixteen or for six.

What I hadn’t known about were the so-called sewing circles. In the nineteen-forties, gay women of the stage and screen did live their lives—but not out loud. (With a few exceptions: “Father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.” Thank you, Tallulah Bankhead). When you see photos of Dietrich and Garbo together (itself enough to put heterosexuality out of business), of Mary Martin, Barbara Stanwyck, Janet Gaynor, Laurette Taylor, Eva Le Gallienne (who gave her name to my young heroine, Evie), of Agnes Moorehead and other women, forgotten and fabulous, you wonder what it would have been like if there had been twenty-foot-high moving images of those beautifully dressed, alluring women locking lips. Instead, they had private Hollywood parties (“sewing circles”) with chorus girls and grandes dames, with women who’d left their husbands at home and women who’d never bothered to get a husband, with Gladys Bentley in a white tux and a high-hat, with a starlet on each arm, with enough music and food and disinhibiting elements to make the parties and the partygoers famously “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

I would like to have been there, then.

Lucky Us” will be published next week.