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Movie Stars and Moguls
A Good, Hard Slap is a historical Hollywood mystery about seven women determined to hide what they know about a movie star’s suspicious death. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve heard many stories over the years about how studios back in the Jazz Age were able to hide the bad behavior of their stars. There have also been some unsolved murders, which makes me wonder if they went unsolved due to studio interference. It’s a great subject for noir. I love noir, and now that I’ve finished the book, I see that I was keeping two noir tropes running through the plot of A Good, Hard Slap. The first is the story of basically decent people who devise a hair-brained plan to cover up a secret, and the second is the futility of trying to outsmart a powerful, corrupt system. My favorite example of the first is the film A Simple Plan (1998), based on the book of the same name by Scott Smith. That plot stayed with me for a long time, as did my favorite example of my second trope, Chinatown (1974), which is probably my favorite movie of all time. Chinatown influenced A Good, Hard Slap in many ways, including theme, plot, and the 1930s Los Angeles setting.
I was also influenced by Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, which famously begins with “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” It’s the aftermath of the crime (or death) that most intrigues me, so I proceeded from a moment that I could build upon, increasing the tension on the characters who knew what had happened. When I studied screenwriting many moons ago, this was called “the propitious moment.” The backstory can be filled in as needed.
How did the murder mystery emerge from the historical setting?
The movie business is, of course, famous for the abuse of women, both the sexual kind and the power-wielding kind, which continues right up to the present day. More than a few powerful people (mostly men) have, since the early days of the industry, taken advantage of their power, and it was routinely unreported or covered up until the #MeToo movement went viral a decade ago. I like to call the time before that the “NotMe” era. Women went to great lengths to appear virtuous, hiding abuse that they knew would besmirch their reputations more than the reputations of their abusers. And, as the industry grew, the studios themselves got into the business of hiding the abuses of their most valuable assets – movie stars and moguls. Add to that the sexual mores of the time, which were still semi-Victorian – even in the Jazz Age, most middle-class women still wanted to be thought of as virgins before marriage. I wanted to explore how the convergence of movie-business abuse with the morality standards of the time could lead to murder. It wasn’t hard to imagine.
What sources were especially valuable during your research?
I guess I should begin with my personal experience. I was a steno myself at MGM in the 1970s. I worked for a variety of writers and producers who came to the lot during that time. I imagined the steno office and quiet room at Kaplan Talking Pictures to be like the ones in the Thalberg Building on the MGM lot. The biggest difference between Kaplan and MGM is that at MGM, even though all the stenos were women, our supervisor was a man!
Among the books that provided fodder for A Good, Hard Slap were The Fixers by E.J. Fleming, Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince by Budd Schulberg, and Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. The Fixers was especially eye-opening about the magnitude of the outrageous behavior of some of the most revered stars of the past. It was clear that the studios were in complete control of their stars’ images.
There were several movies and actors of the Jazz Age (and recent depictions of the Jazz Age) that helped me visualize Gracie’s world. Here are some that have invaded and colonized my mind over the years: Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man series, Betty Compson in The Docks of New York, Liv Lisa Fries in Babylon Berlin, Greta Garbo in just about anything, John Gilbert in A Woman of Affairs, Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express, the inimitable Buster Keaton in any of his silent films, and Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
What do you hope readers understand about the women who worked behind Hollywood’s stars?
One thing I tried to portray in the women of Kaplan Talking Pictures is the toughness they had to find in themselves to survive in a man’s world. It took moxie to keep going in an atmosphere where they were seen only as helpers to the “creative types.” On top of that indignity, they were also expected to endure sexual harassment as if it were something that could not be helped.
But even more importantly, I tried to explore their reasons for keeping secrets from each other. Sisterhood, in those days, did not necessarily involve honesty. There was so much shame involved in even the slightest slip in the morality of the time (even as the victim of abuse) that women kept their lips sealed for fear of being ostracized.
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Gracie Perkins and six other stenographers at Kaplan Talking Pictures know the film company’s most popular star has been murdered, something the moviegoing public will never know. The studio will tell the district attorney what to believe, and the district attorney will tell the LAPD and the newspapers what to believe. That’s the way it works. As the official story about the “unexpected” death comes out, the seven women don’t know if the studio has any idea what really happened, they only know they have to protect one of their own. They have a plan. But plans have a way of unraveling.
The plan is simple, and it seems to be working at first because Gracie can lie as believably as the studio’s publicity department. She hasn’t been honest about anything for a long time―she can’t be if she wants to keep her pals in the steno pool. They’re the only friends she has in this hard-luck life. She knows from experience that the truth can get you into a world of trouble. But Gracie’s talent for deception doesn’t fly with Detective Nick Zingarelli, who not only gets the real story out of the conflicted Miss Perkins, but eventually opens her eyes to the truth about love.
“A Good, Hard Slap” dives deep into the complicated relationships among the women of Kaplan Talking Pictures as they navigate the stormy seas of their hidden pasts and thwarted ambitions.
A Good, Hard Slap
A Good, Hard Slap, by Catherine Bator, drops readers into 1930 Hollywood at exactly the right moment for trouble. Talking pictures are changing the industry, studio publicity departments are manufacturing reality, and movie star Garland Westover is dead. Seven women connected to the studio stenography pool know more about his death than anyone should, and they’re determined to keep that knowledge buried. At the center is Gracie Perkins, a sharp, ambitious stenographer who wants to write movies and has a much more complicated relationship with Garland than her friends realize. Bator uses that setup to create an engaging blend of historical fiction, mystery, and early Hollywood fiction, with suspense driven by secrets, loyalty, and the frightening ease with which a powerful studio can decide what the public will believe.
Gracie and her supervisor, Madeleine Singer, give the novel its emotional backbone. Both women are intelligent and capable, but they’ve learned different ways to survive a workplace where men hold nearly all the authority. Madeleine has spent years teaching her stenographers to remain professional, make no waves, and deliver a “good, hard slap” when a man crosses the line. Gracie, meanwhile, prides herself on being modern, independent, and harder to fool than everyone around her. Watching those beliefs unravel gives this women’s historical fiction story much of its force. As buried experiences finally get talked about, Gracie begins reconsidering what she thought she knew about Garland, while Madeleine confronts the cost of treating silence as protection. The book handles those realizations gradually, allowing the characters to recognize uncomfortable truths at the same pace the reader sees the larger pattern taking shape.
The Hollywood setting is also a major pleasure. Bator fills the story with studio lots, stenography offices, costume departments, publicity schemes, Prohibition-era restaurants, jazz clubs, movie premieres, temperamental writers, ambitious actresses, and the chaotic shift from silent pictures to talkies. The details make Kaplan Talking Pictures feel like an actual workplace. There’s plenty of humor in the daily absurdities, particularly when Gracie finds herself doing much of the real writing while highly paid men argue over who deserves the credit. That wit keeps the darker material from flattening the novel into a single mood. The early Hollywood historical mystery elements are strongest because they’re rooted in this working world, where a murder cover-up feels disturbingly compatible with an industry already accustomed to transforming scandals into carefully polished publicity stories.
What stayed with me most about A Good, Hard Slap is its interest in the stories people tell, both publicly and privately, and what happens when those stories stop being believable. Gracie’s dream of becoming a writer turns out to be especially fitting because she spends much of the novel sorting through competing versions of her own past before she’s ready to write one for herself. Her relationship with Detective Nick Zingarelli adds warmth and provides another way for her to reconsider ideas she’s treated as settled facts, while the final chapters give her choices about work, love, honesty, and ambition room to feel earned. As historical fiction set in Old Hollywood, the novel has glamour, crime, studio intrigue, and period detail, but its strongest current comes from the women behind the stars, the ones typing the scripts, keeping the secrets, and eventually deciding which stories deserve to be told.
Pages: 281 | ASIN : B0H7T3BNQ6
