Deb McCaskey

OK, to be totally honest, I didn’t know I appreciated Angela Lansbury until she died yesterday, at the age of 96.

Like so many of her generation, my parents’ generation, she was just always … there. There would be plenty of time to catch her. She would always be in another TV show or movie. Just like our parents would be home when we decided to visit. They were always there. Until they weren’t. 

Sometimes you miss them more, remembering them years after they pass, than you did right at the beginning. Maybe immediately afterward, the loss is too new to process, or they were in pain or kidnapped by dementia and it was a relief, or maybe the relationship was so complicated you don’t know how to feel for a long time.

That’s with close-by loved ones, anyway. With entertainers, if we liked them, there may be nothing but great memories. We’re sad to lose them, but really, when they’re approaching 100 … maybe it’s more the passing of the era they represented that we feel sad about. 

And she was around longer than many others, in a career that lasted seven decades. She is not one of those I’ve researched because she was actually too young to be part of the world in the stories (I swear there will be a second one, at least) I want to tell. Born in 1925, she was only about 10 at the time of Stardusted.

When I think of Lansbury I first think of Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast – no one sang “Tale as Old As Time” better. I get teary every time I hear her slightly cracked, world-weary but beautiful voice singing it.

In NPR’s story , she hints why: “ ‘I’m not really a singer,’ she admitted. ‘I have a serviceable voice, but how I use it — it’s the emotion under the note that sells the song.’

And boy, could she sell it. I never saw her in Mame, but I can only imagine she sold all those songs, too. 

I hadn’t remembered she was in Gaslight, as a maid, until I saw it recently. (Pretty heady stuff, being directed by George Cukor in your very first role! She earned an Oscar nomination for it, too.) And I can still hear her saying, “Chadwick, give mama some sugar” as Elvis Presley’s Southern belle mom in Blue Hawaii.

Like a relative you like when you see them once in a while at a family gathering but don’t really think of the rest of the time, she always added value to the occasion. Always welcome, always charming–she was even evilly charming as the mother in The Manchurian Candidate.

But one role I never saw her in, not once, was that of Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. Which is funny, I guess. If you’re trying to write mysteries, you might think you would want to watch shows about people who write them–even if they are far more prolific and successful than you are–for inspiration. 

But I have not seen even one episode of Murder, She Wrote. When I’m trying to write my own stuff–with life getting in the way in a new way every single damn day–the last thing I want is to watch someone gaily, effortlessly doing the thing that I can’t seem to get done. 

Nor do I want to unconsciously pick up and copy a scene, a plot twist, or dialogue from a show without realizing it. 

But now that I think about other times I’ve been happy to see Lansbury, maybe–after I’ve gotten a first draft done and have put it away for the recommended few weeks before starting to edit–I’ll finally pay her a visit in Cabot Cove.

In the days of the silents, filmmaking was still, as this NPR piece notes, a cottage industry, and the number of women who were important writers, directors, editors and producers was much larger than most of today’s moviegoers realize. Once movies became a big, lucrative industry, women were pushed out of most roles other than that of actress. It would be decades before women once more had the chance to tell the stories they want to tell in those prominent behind-the-camera positions.

Most of the films themselves are long gone, the film stock itself deteriorated or the reels lost to fire or other events, but thanks to collector Dwight Cleveland, we can get a glimpse of them in the lobby cards and scene cards–“static trailers,” as the exhibit curator calls them–on display through Oct. 9 at Poster House in New York. Cleveland noticed and then started concentrating on, the contributions of women to early cinema, and this exhibit gives a glimpse into a vanished world. If you happen to be in or live in the area, Experimental Marriage: Women in Early Hollywood looks like it would be well worth any movie-lover’s time.

The rest of us can read or give a listen to the story, first broadcast today (Aug. 29) on NPR.

If you’ve visited this page recently, you might have taken a look at the date of the most recent posts (before this) and thought, hm, okay, dead website. 

And while it’s true that I don’t post terribly often, the reports of the site’s death (if anyone thought it worth reporting), would be greatly exaggerated.

There are reasons. Maybe you’ll find them boring, maybe not, but there are reasons.

Reason 1: Every time I’ve thought I should write a post for the page, the little editor inside me looks over her reading glasses at me and says, “Dear, if you’re going to write, shouldn’t it be writing the next book?” And since I always listen to editors–even imaginary, inside-my-head editors–I took that to heart. Trouble is, the writing has been … um … slow. 

Reason 2: Lockdown. We had–have–a pandemic going on. You’d think the 2020 lockdown would give one tons of time to write. And it did. But I didn’t. Much. Otherwise I’d be telling you all about the next book, obviously. And now I guess the coronavirus and its variants are endemic, but still we’re all going out again and feel like there’s a lot of catching up to do. And that brings us to …

Reason 3: Life. Yeah, all that catching up to do. Anyone who needs to get work done that’s solitary–music, art, writing–has discovered the socializing and creating don’t mix so well.

So I’ve been catching up with friends, having lunches, even taking on a temporary, part-time, remote (gluten-free, low-fat, nondairy) job, mostly because an old colleague asked me to.

And you know what nearly all those friends are asking? “When’s the next book coming out?”

My answer in my head is something like, “You tell me and we’ll both know.” Which would be pretty smartass of me.

All I can tell you is, it’s coming along. It has Frankie, of course, and Max, Clay and Sam, Mr. and Mrs. Monty, Mr. Noguchi and Kit Noguchi, Mr. Wiseman, and a few new characters. And, of course, Frankie’s self-satisfied Persian cat, Major Bowes, and her gallant Thoroughbred mare, Rocket.  And I’m pretty sure this one will be called Starcrossed. 

I’ll say it’s coming out by the end of the year. But don’t hold me to that.

Meanwhile, my loyal sidekick and husband, Ralph, and I did a quick research trip to visit some of Frankie’s haunts in Hollywood. Here are some pictures!

“My home, way up in these hills, just off Beachwood Drive, felt worlds away from the strange community in which I worked …”

On New Year’s Eve, I had a brief discussion with a friend about silent movies and how he doesn’t enjoy them so much — not because you have to read on title cards whatever dialogue the actors are saying, but because the acting was so “stagey.”

That’s what I thought, too, for years. But recently I’ve seen a few silents that struck me for the subtle expressiveness many performers were able to get across on camera, performances in which actors knew they were not projecting to a theater balcony. If all you know of silents are slapstick chases and stunts, and you love films, there are some overlooked gems out there if you know where to look.

One of these for me was a 1929 feature, actually known as a transitional sound film, called Redskin. It was shot partially in Technicolor, and featured a synchronized score and sound effects.

By the title and the era it comes from, you might be expecting this to be a film full of racial stereotypes and other insensitivity. But you would be surprised. Redskin actually is a sympathetic and relatively nuanced tale of a young Navajo boy, a fast runner named Wingfoot, taken from his family and sent to an Indian boarding school. The cruelty and tragedy of this era comes through in a few deft scenes. Despite adversity, though, Wingfoot excels, and goes to college, where he encounters more racism, but excels again, only to find upon his return that he is no longer fits in with his traditional family.

Director Victor Schertzinger avoids the most glaring stereotypes in this picture. It would have been great if Native actors had been found for the lead roles, but that’s probably asking too much, considering the times. With Richard Dix in the role of Wingfoot, the film invites you to see these characters as people, remarkably complex, not cardboard heroes and villains. The scenes in the Navajo and Pueblo villages are particularly affecting, shot on location partially in Canyon de Chelly and Acoma Pueblo.

We discovered this picture on a DVD, Treasures II: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934, a feature-length film amid a collection of obscure short films from a variety of sources including businesses and advocacy groups, produced by the National Film Preservation Foundation. It’s worth seeking out. (We found it on Netflix.)

A note on the director: 

Sometimes it seems as though people long ago used to be able to stuff many more accomplishments into a life — even a short one — than we do now, despite all our technological toys. 

Pennsylvania-born Victor Schertzinger was much more than the director of this one remarkable film. He directed 89 films, in fact, including two of the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby “Road” movies. But he was also a concert violinist and symphony conductor, and a pioneering film composer who won best musical score and sound recording Oscars in 1934 for One Night of Love. 

And if that’s not enough, he also composed two standards that you’ll hear today on jazz stations and in cabaret shows, I Remember You and Tangerine.

Schertzinger died in 1941, at the age of 53.

Trying to get historical fiction right is a challenge, but also a joy. One of the reasons I was intrigued by the Golden Age of Hollywood as a setting for a story was that I knew it would be fun to research. I’ve always been as fascinated by the behind-the-scenes stories in the entertainment world as by what ends up onscreen. And the most fascinating of these stories to me are not the ones about who fell in love with whom or who was not the wholesome innocent people saw on the screen. No, I’ve always found the making of movies an absorbing world to peer into.

How did the director find that location? Why did that costume designer always put that actress in big, fluffy sleeves? What horse is that that keeps showing up in different movies with different riders? In some cases, I’d be satisfied just by having that knowledge to add to what I already knew. But there’s something about using that research to inform a story about fictional characters that makes the research even more fun.

My favorite kinds of books for research are memoirs, biographies, and books with lots of photos — not so much the glamorous movie-star portraits (though I love those), but the ones that show the guys behind the camera, doing their best to catch the moments being created in front of the camera. I love “hearing” the actual voice of a performer or director, finding out how they were feeling about that role or this scene, that co-star or this location.

Some sources I’ve loved while writing Stardusted include:

Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, edited by George Stevens, Jr. Absorbing interviews from the American Film Institute featuring directing icons such as Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Frank Capra and others.

The Moon’s a Balloon, by David Niven. Goodreads notes that this is one of the bestselling memoirs of all time, and it’s well deserved. Niven was there, beginning his long career in the 1930s, and he was every bit as astute an observer and sensitive writer as he was a suave, polished English gentleman, the kind of role he often played in pictures. He went everywhere and knew everyone, went away to help defend Great Britain in World War II, came back a hero, and went back to work.

Hollywood Hoofbeats: Trails Blazed Across the Silver Screen, by Petrine Day Mitchum, Audrey Pavia. You cannot escape the fact, if you read Stardusted, that the author is a dyed-in-the-wool, googly-eyed, unapologetic horse nut. I already knew, from bits and pieces I’d read in various magazines, something about a number of movie and TV horses, but to find them all in one book — from Trigger to Hidalgo — was horse heaven for me.

I love to work the research I’ve done into a story, but I also love to share things that I find amazing, surprising or just weird, and I’ll do more of that here.

September 25, 2019