Crowned Heads by Thomas Tryon

I read The Other a few weeks ago, Tryon’s first novel about adolescent twin boys and a serious of bizarre deaths surrounding their family farmhouse in Connecticut one summer in 1935. I liked his writing well enough to read another and was intrigued by the premise of this novel consisting of four separate but interconnected novellas, each telling the story of a different type of Hollywood star.

I’m always interested in stories about or set in Los Angeles. Having just read and been disappointed by Myron Brinig’s The Flutter of an Eyelid, I was hoping that this novel would satisfy me, temporarily.

Knowing that Billy Wilder made a film version of Fedora in 1978, one of his last films, was a further inducement.

Each novella is titled with the name of the featured player.

Fedora comes first. Born Maria Katrin Fedorowich in eastern Europe. Discovered in Germany, she starts in silent pictures in the 1910s. Then she’s brought to Hollywood and continues making silent pictures through the twenties. Makes it big. Transitions to talkies and makes dozens of more movies through the 30s. In 1938 she makes her last picture in Hollywood and goes to Europe where she spends the war in Switzerland. Her career seems to be over until she suddenly appears again in 1955 in an uncredited cameo in a picture titled, The Miracle of Santa Cristi. Nearly twenty years have passed since her last picture but she doesn’t seem to have aged a day. She makes another dozen or so pictures until 1969 when she disappears again.

This novella, like the others, is set about 1975, a year before the book was published. Fedora has just died. Her story is told as a conversation between the host of a television morning show looking for a feature on Fedora and the man she comes to for information who has just finished writing a biography of the star. Over a long evening together, he shares, off the record, all of the secrets of Fedora he has discovered, most recently visiting her at her final home on Crete.

Lorna is next. This is Lorna Doone. She’s a B actress promoted as being an “All-American Girl” with enough sex-appeal to get cast and enough sense to know that’s she’s got no real talent. She finally gets a part in an A picture, The Miracle of Santa Cristi, but that’s the high point and the beginning of a swift descent. Her story is a downward trajectory following her failure in Hollywood, which was caused by and compounds her personal problems. She washes up at a remote Mexican beach resort escaping creditors and her own demons, trying to put her life back together through diet and meditation. But her demons come with her. While she waits for what she hopes will be one more in a long line of male saviors to arrive and rescue her (he’s coming by boat but is delayed) she entangles herself with the other resort guests and residents of the village in a series of bad scenes. It goes from worse to awful.

Bobbitt is third. Bobbitt was a character in a series of children’s fantasy novels made into movies starring a child-actor named Robin Ransome. After making his debut in The Miracle of Santa Cristi, he made ten Bobbitt movies in about five years, all very successful, but it came to an end when his voice changed. A final movie called Bobbitt in Love attempted to transition the character to an adult but it bombed. Now, fifteen years have passed and the thirty-something actor is making a little money performing for kids in Central Park. Happening on to one of his shows, a woman named Nellie, who was an actress playing one of the adult roles in the Bobbitt series, reconnects with Robin and they rekindle their friendship. Bobbitt proves to be the same delightful, imaginative character he was as a child actor. In fact, Bobbitt’s problem is that he never really stopped being that child-actor and still lives in his imagination, telling stories that Nellie eventually sees through. Angry, and feeling betrayed, she sends Bobbitt away, then misses him, finds him again, and helps Bobbitt, at the end of the novella, take a step toward claiming his adulthood.

Lastly is Willie. This is Willie Marsh. Born in Alabama, his stage mother Beatrice reinvents Willie as a charming, cultured, tuxedo-ed, dandy. He makes it big in Hollywood. He was in The Miracle of Santa Cristi, too, as well as all the Bobbitt films. But by 1975 his star has faded. He’s “semi-retired” from acting. His story takes place at his home at the end of a cul-de-sac at the top of a canyon in the Hollywood Hills on a single night. Bee has died. Willie is alone and lonely. It’s the housekeeper-cook’s night off. Then there’s a knock at the door and suddenly there’s a young man and a woman in his house. The man is someone Willie had met casually. Willie had invited him for drinks and to bring a date, but he’s come on the wrong night. They stay. Later they’re joined by a third. They stay all night. Lonely Willie shows them the house and tells them his life story. They drink. The young people swim naked in his pool. They drop acid. The scene gets weirder and more uncomfortable. Eventually the young folks reveal that they’ve come to rob Willie of a particularly valuable hand mirror that Willie keeps in a safe. But Willie, his career over, finally released from his domineering mother, refuses to tell them where the safe is hidden. They find it anyway, but only after Willie has succumbed to their violence.

The four novellas are followed by a short story titled “Salad Days” picking up several of the threads that had been running through the novellas. Barry, the biographer from the Fedora novella, has come out to Hollywood to cover a party being thrown to celebrate the release of a Bobbitt picture. The party takes place at Willie and Bee’s house in the Hollywood Hills and is attended by all of Hollywood royalty. The next day, Barry meets Willie and Bee at the Beverly Hills hotel for lunch and an interview. Willie then tells Barry a story of he and Fedora back after she made her last Hollywood picture, before she left for Europe. He picked her up at her home in the Palisades. They drove down to Santa Monica and bought sandwiches from a deli (deli owners who show up in the Mexican resort in Lorna’s story). They’re eating their sandwiches on the beach when they hear a marching band and walking up to see the band go by they see a cheerleader throwing her baton in the air and looking like an all-American girl. It’s Lorna Doone. Fedora says, “You know – she really ought to be in the movies.”

The writing is excellent. The stories are extremely well plotted. Especially in the Fedora novella you could see once the mystery is revealed how carefully Tryon has arranged his story so that every objection a reader might have to the solution has been answered in an earlier detail. He fooled me. The four actors are not fictionalized versions of known real actors. Nor are they clearly “types.” Rather, each is built up from bits of several recognizable actors: but with their own full characters and fully realized worlds. It’s very impressive. And it’s fun.

Fun, that is, in the writing, but very dark. It’s not horror, like The Other, but the theme is actually very similar: questions of identity. Niles, in The Other, doesn’t know who he is. He can’t separate himself from his twin brother and eventually loses himself. Fedora is about an aging actress who resurrects herself by presenting her daughter as herself, while Fedora pretends to be yet a different, dead, woman. Lorna has no sense of herself except as a sexual being for men, and being a blank, both runs after men to ground her and is victimized by them. Bobbitt the man, can’t disassociate himself from the character he played as a boy and thus is stuck in permanent childhood. Willie lived a life invented by his mother, and prevented by her from being the man he actual was. It’s no wonder that three of the four novellas end badly, and Niles Holland, for his part, ends in a mental institution. Tryon himself was an actor used to playing roles, a writer inventing characters, and a gay man living a hidden life, so, write what you know.

I enjoyed the book but thought that every novella was too long by half. Once you realize in the Fedora novella that something’s not right and there’s a mystery to be solved, it takes seemingly forever for the solution to be shared. In Lorna, the whole story is just a straight slope downward, and seeing the inevitable, I was waiting for her to hit bottom already, like waiting for Wile E. Coyote to finally hit the desert floor and send up a puff of dust. Likewise with Willie; we already know (because it was revealed in the Bobbitt novella) that Willie is murdered that night, so once the intruders show up we’re just waiting with excruciating dread for it to happen. And with Bobbitt, too, it’s very clear very early that Bobbitt’s stories are not to be believed but it takes Nellie forever to realize it. Then, the big point of the story is that having sent him away she misses him, but instead of quickly reuniting the two and resolving the story, the searching takes forever. Instead of novellas of eighty pages each, I would have preferred all four of them as snappy, get-to-the-point short stories of forty or so.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.