September 15, 2019
1930s Hollywood was a wonderful, awful place. This fictionalized account of a secretary's observations of the movie business and her powerful studio boss (a fictionalized David O. Selznick) was first published in 1938. It was a tell-all sensation at the time, but when studios failed to option it for movie rights, it faded into obscurity. Now resurrected, the novel follows secretary Madge Lawrence's viewpoint, through fictional telegrams, inter-office memos, and letters, which center around trying to secure Clark Cable and an actress (based on Marlene Dietrich) for the leads in an upcoming movie. Readers will note that some players in the story retain their "real" names while others are changed. Half the fun is teasing out the fictionalized roles. The author is a pseudonym for two women, Silvia Schulman Lardner and Jane Shore, who co-wrote the book. Schulman Lardner's work as a secretary to Selznick fueled the book's plot; an introduction by J.E. Smyth situates this work in its historical context. Old-movie buffs and lovers of Hollywood gossip will geek out on this fun, satirical read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
Starred review from September 1, 2019
This delicious satire of old Hollywood, originally published in 1938 and largely unknown even by cinephiles, gets a welcome reissue. The hijinks start early in this screwball sendup, since, as one Hollywood veteran tells a newbie writer, "We not only preoccupy ourselves with sex at the box office but feel we must live life as we see it on the screen for twenty-four hours a day." Sidney Brand, the powerful Hollywood producer standing in for legendary real-life producer David O. Selznick (Gone With the Wind; Rebecca), gets the job done but, god, he's a monster to work for. He's narcissistic, needy, chauvinist, and a big ole liar, though he does work really hard, to give him a little credit. Allen dishes on the cupidities and venality of daily life in the big studio system of 1930s Hollywood through her protagonist Madge Lawrence's letters home as well as interoffice memos, telegrams, journal entries, and gossip columns. Madge is new to Hollywood, hunting for a studio job; Brand hires her as his secretary. He's desperate for a big commercial success but wants it to come off as a prestige number, so he counts on Viennese import Sarya Tarn (a double for Marlene Dietrich) to bring the quality, but she only brings a healthy dose of divadom. Brand's frenemy at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a rival studio, won't loan him Clark Gable to play opposite Tarn, so the producer has to rely on Broadway success Bruce Anders, who makes Madge's heart flutter; meanwhile, the studio's publicity whiz, Jim Palmer, wittily, mordantly pursues her. This novel is the product of two writers, Silvia Schulman Lardner, who was Selznick's secretary (and was married to writer Ring Lardner Jr.), and screenwriter Jane Shore. The characters and plot are so thinly veiled that the authors decided a single pseudonym was the wisest path to publication, as film scholar J.E. Smyth explains in her thoughtful introduction. This novel is a hell of a lot of fun.
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