The Last Embrace (38 page)

A
s an L.A. native who grew up in the shadow of Hollywood, I’ve long been fascinated by classic noir literature. Authors like Raymond Chandler and James Cain were my touchstones, and I dreamed of escaping into their dark and alluring worlds. But if you really want to know why I wrote this book, well, it started with a dress.

I was eighteen when I bought it for five dollars at a vintage clothing store, a glamorous frock of black crepe that clung and draped with such panache that the girl who looked back in the mirror might have stepped out of the Cocoanut Grove Nightclub, circa 1949.

Back then, I had no idea that the designer of my dress had worked as a costumer for the studios, leaving in the late 1940s to launch her own line. All I knew was that the elegant label in cursive writing—
Dorothy O’Hara, California
—had a tantalizing, noiry magic all its own.

But those were the punk years, and the nightclubs I frequented were a far cry from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Eventually spilled beer, perspiration, and fraying seams took their toll on my lovely frock.

By then, the dress and the world it evoked had become part of my inner landscape. Driving around L.A., I saw ghosts on every street corner, heard snatches of big band music on the wind, sipped bourbon in oak-paneled bars on foggy, neon-lit nights.

Eventually I became a reporter, then a novelist. My books filtered Chandler’s Los Angeles through a twenty-first-century lens.

But somewhere in my head, a 1940s soundtrack kept playing. I pictured a girl in her twenties, bantering with gangsters and crooked cops and Hollywood special effects whizzes, living in a rooming house with aspiring starlets, crisscrossing the city by trolley, and slipping into a Dorothy O’Hara cocktail frock for a night of dancing at the Mocambo.

In my imagination that girl already existed, I just didn’t know her story yet. Then one day while researching Hollywood’s Golden Age, I ran across an
L.A. Times
story by Cecilia Rasmussen about Jean Spangler, a Hollywood starlet who vanished without a trace in October 1949.

Jean disappeared two years following the Black Dahlia murder after telling her mother that she was going out on a night shoot. When I examined the characters that swirled around her, I knew I had found the inspiration for my next novel.

Jean had a violent ex-husband and was fighting a custody battle for their only child. She’d partied in Palm Springs with two associates of L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen, men who also disappeared mysteriously that fall. Her purse eventually turned up in L.A.’s Griffith Park, bearing a cryptic note to a mysterious “Kirk” that suggested she might have been pregnant and was seeking an abortion.

It soon emerged that Jean had just filmed a movie with Kirk Douglas. The handsome star said he only knew the actress casually, they hadn’t been having an affair, and he knew nothing about her disappearance. After interviewing him, the police agreed.

As I read, I realized that Jean Spangler’s very desires and dreams had made her vulnerable. She symbolized every modern girl who yearned for independence at a time when society was lurching back toward more traditional roles. And she disappeared into thin air, creating the perfect mystery template.

Jean’s body was never found and the puzzle was never solved, but almost sixty years later, I had no interest in recounting the real story. I wanted to write a novel with new characters that would bring the world of 1949 Hollywood to life in all its brawling, contradictory glory.

It was a fascinating and transitional time—just after World War II, at the beginning of the Atomic Age and the Cold War, just before the conservative 1950s. Los Angeles was teeming with intrigue and crime: a mob war raged between Mickey Cohen and Jack Dragna for control of L.A.’s turf and there were shoot-outs on the Sunset Strip. The police were notoriously corrupt. (Both the LAPD chief and his deputy were indicted that summer.) It was the waning days of the studio star system, the dawn of television. We had the Hollywood blacklist, the rise of lurid tabloids like
Confidential,
closeted gay actors, and the explosion of suburbia.

It was also the golden era of movie special effects.

I’ve always been intrigued by the inner workings of the Dream Factory, the technician magicians who create the illusion of reality up on the big screen. I also realized I needed to infuse my 1940s world with fresh, ahem, blood and find a new window into a Hollywood world that people already knew so well.

So I decided to create a character who was a special effects wizard. Through him, I could explore the world of movie animation long before Steven Spielberg and George Lucas made CGI geeks hip and trendy.

I had the great good fortune around this time to meet the legendary Ray Harryhausen. With his mentor, Willis O’Brien, Harryhausen pioneered stop-motion animation. Harryhausen was eighty-six and hale and hearty when I interviewed him at Dark Delicacies Bookstore in Burbank and learned what the special effects world was like in 1949, the year
Mighty Joe Young
came out. (Harryhausen did most of the animation on
Joe;
O’Brien had animated
King Kong.
)

Thanks to the generosity of Chiodo Brothers Productions, especially Stephen Chiodo, I also toured an animation studio and watched stop motion in progress and was greatly impressed by the painstaking detail, dedication, and artistry involved. In addition, I read several books and watched documentaries and the DVD of the original
Mighty Joe Young,
in which Harryhausen describes how he filmed each scene.

In reading oral histories, I was also struck by what a small town Hollywood was, even fifty years ago, and how movie stars were just part of the landscape. You’d see Marlon Brando shopping with his wife at the Hollywood Ranch Market or Montgomery Clift studying his lines at the local coffee shop. You could sit in on Steve Allen’s midnight radio shows, watch Frank Sinatra record at Capitol Records. The access was amazing.

Emerging from the dreamworld of my writing, I’d grow melancholy at how much of historic Los Angeles was gone. We all yearn for authenticity, we’re nostalgic for the past, yet we systematically destroy what made us unique throughout the world.

On most days, it’s difficult to envision how the city must have looked in 1949. But cock your head and squint and it falls into focus, in the bas-relief façade of a downtown hotel, the deco tile of an old bar, the scattered oil derricks that still pump in L.A.’s forgotten quadrants, and in thrift stores where forlorn frocks drape on hangers like bashful starlets, waiting to be discovered once more. And hopefully, in the pages of this book.

—Denise Hamilton
January 2008

When Lily Kessler, a spy for the OSS, returns from Europe to the United States she learns that her late fiancé’s younger sister, Kitty, has gone missing from her Hollywood boardinghouse. Lily heads to L.A. to put her investigative skills to good use. When Kitty’s corpse turns up under the Hollywood sign, Lily sets out to unravel the mystery of the young starlet’s disappearance and brutal murder.

Along the way Lily will meet Kitty’s former friends and housemates, her admirers and coworkers, along with gangsters and members of L.A.’s seedy underbelly. Teaming up with a well-meaning news photographer and a handsome detective, Lily slowly uncovers the details of Kitty’s life leading up to her tragic, untimely death in her adopted city of angels.

D
ISCUSSION
Q
UESTIONS FOR
T
HE
L
AST
E
MBRACE

1. Throughout the course of the book Lily, Harry, and Pico each take a serious interest in finding Kitty’s killer and bringing him to justice. What motivates each character in his or her quest? What do each of these characters have riding on the investigation? Who is depending on them?
   
2. Though Kitty is the character whose life and death propels the action in the story, she is only actually a character in the first few moments of the narrative. By what means do we, along with Lily, fill in the blanks of Kitty’s life in Hollywood? How did you, as a reader, decide which sources were trustworthy, and which warranted closer inspection?
   
3. How did actual, historical events and figures referred to in the novel help you relate to the characters and contextualize the story?
   
4. For many women, World War II opened doors professionally and personally that had only been open to men before the war; for many the barriers went back up when the war ended. Of this Lily says, “We’re not helpless simpering creatures that have to be protected. We’ve held down jobs, traveled the world. Seen people die. Nobody’s innocent anymore”. In what ways has Lily’s gender role been affected by the time she spent in Europe? Do any of the other female characters in the book strike you as feminist? How do you think they were affected by the war experience?
   
5. The narrator often refers to smells to help describe scenes and characters in the novel. The killer smells of black rubber; Kitty’s room smelled like “newsprint, cigarettes, talc, and stale perfume”. Why do you think Denise Hamilton took pains to include such vivid descriptions of scent? How is scent tied to memory?
   
6. Though the narrator throughout the book remains third person, the point of view shifts among many of the characters, and the narrator is never completely omniscient. How did this affect your reading of the story? Did you think this lent the narrative further mystery? Was it helpful to see the story from several viewpoints?
   
7. Like every good mystery writer, Hamilton sets up circumstances that would support the reader being suspicious of just about anyone. Which leads did you find most compelling? Who did you think had the most motivation to kill Kitty? How did your suspicions change when more girls turned up dead under the Hollywood sign?
   
8. On chapter 19, Pico thinks of Lily as, “Feminine. And yet so hard. Like a steel blade wrapped in crushed velvet.” How is this metaphor suited to Lily? How does she use her OSS skills to help solve Kitty’s murder? Can you think of an apt metaphor for any other characters in the story?
   
9. When Pico and Lily are first getting to know one another he says, “Maybe home’s not a physical place, but something we make in our heart and carry around with us”. Do you think that this applies to Lily? What becomes “home” for others in the novel? In what ways do Pico and Lily come to represent home for each other?
   
10. Hamilton takes us behind the scenes of Hollywood’s Golden Age, exploring the secretive world of stop-motion animation and its technical whizzes. How did Max Vranizan’s obsessions and eccentricities make him both a genius and a legitimate suspect in Kitty Hayden’s murder? What did you learn about Hollywood special effects and its practitioners?
    

1. This is your first novel outside of the Eve Diamond series. What made you want to branch out and try your hand at Lily Kessler?

I loved the idea of taking a female OSS spy and setting her down in postwar Hollywood. After surviving World War II, Lily Kessler thinks finding a missing starlet in L.A. is going to be a cakewalk. She quickly finds out that the city and its denizens are every bit as treacherous as the world she left behind. But the sun is shining and the birds-of-paradise and bougainvillea are blooming and everyone’s well-dressed so it doesn’t
look
dangerous. So that’s one thing. Second, as an L.A. native, I’ve always been fascinated by the huge shadow cast by Hollywood and I’m also an absolute sucker for the 1940s—music, fashion, art, design, political crosscurrents, and the criminal underworld that thrived hand in hand with the police. Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong era. When I learned about the real-life 1949 disappearance of a young starlet that was never solved, I knew I had the creative inspiration for my fictional tale.

In many ways, 1940s Hollywood wasn’t so different than today—the same desperate longing for success existed, the cravings for power, sex, riches, and influence. There was corruption and moral decay. People were not who they seemed. There was artifice and scheming. There were just fewer people and buildings, and more natural landscapes. I also think, oddly enough it was a hopeful time, this era of transition between World War II and the 1950s. That flies in the face of traditional noir, but then so does my book.

2. There is an underlying feminist message in
The Last Embrace
. What do you hope some female readers will gain from “meeting” Lily Kessler?

I think Lily was emblematic of her time, as are many of the other female characters in this book. They’ve tasted freedom and independence during the war, it’s given them self-confidence, and now they’re trying to navigate through an increasingly conservative postwar era that would like them to give up much of the freedoms they’ve learned to enjoy. I wanted to dramatize that conflict. I also love the dramatic possibilities inherent in a group of young women all living under one roof and trying to make it as Hollywood actresses. They’re vying for stardom, for boyfriends, they’re silky and competitive as cats yet they also take the time to help one another. It’s a very conflicted kind of friendship, but it seems very real to me, not sugar-coated.

Noir has traditionally been an overwhelmingly male genre where female characters are portrayed as sexpots and femme fatales. In
The Last Embrace,
I’ve tried to reimagine that macho male noir territory with a variety of female characters—starting with Lily Kessler—who are every bit as capable as the men, but without the swagger. Even though they’re plunged into a very dark swirl of intrigue, there’s a basic life-affirming optimism that prevails, a ray of light that pierces the cynicism and fatality that would triumph in traditional noir.

3. In
The Last Embrace
the narrative point of view shifts among many of the characters. Why did you choose to tell the story this way?

My Eve Diamond series is narrated in first person and I wanted to try something new after five books. I also felt that multiple points of view suited this story better as this type of narration is more cinematic, which is how I envisioned the action in my head as I was writing the book. The story unfolds kaleidoscopically, and everyone perceives a different reality. It’s only at the end that all the characters and strands come together.

4. How did your years as a journalist help you prepare to write mystery fiction? Is Vile Violet based on anyone you really came into contact with while you were a reporter?

Journalism taught me how to write in a fluid, narrative style, meet deadlines, and sidestep writer’s block (you acknowledge you have no idea what happens next, then put one word in front of another until you have a sentence, then another, and somehow it all catches fire again after a few pages). Journalism honed my sense of wonder about stories and people, it helped me listen for accents and marvel at the way people speak. It brought me into contact with criminals and cops and victims and survivors and con men and saints and everybody in between. Violet McCree is entirely fictional, and yet her personality weaves bits and pieces of many people I have known, not all of them journalists.

5. As a Los Angeles native you are in a unique position to imagine your hometown sixty years ago. What parts of the backdrop of the novel come from your own experiences in California, and what is the product of research?

So much of old Los Angeles is gone now, razed to build high-rises and shopping malls, but you can still catch glimpses of an older, more genteel city in certain streets and alleys, in some residential neighborhoods, in hotels and watering holes where old ghosts still hide out. As a journalist I interviewed a lot of people on the fringes of old Hollywood. They’re still around, but they dwindle with each passing year. To research the era, I read lots of oral histories of people who grew up in Hollywood, plus biographies, memoirs, and histories. When I’d meet someone who remembered that era firsthand, I’d badger them for details and recollections. My own mother came to Hollywood (from France) in 1949 and told me stories about riding the Red Car home at night and studying English at Hollywood High. It was a smaller, more friendly place, and you’d run into movie stars doing their grocery shopping or walking down the street. People talked about hearing Steve Allen perform his radio monologues, watching Sinatra record, helping Montgomery Clift learn his lines at a coffee shop. I tried to convey that small-town feel, the serendipity, but the book is really a mélange of all my experiences and research; it’s hard to separate it out.

6. You dedicate your book to Ray Harryhausen. Did he act as inspiration for the Max Vranizan character in any way other than his career choices? What was your reasoning behind the dedication to him?

I knew from early on that I wanted to have a character who could epitomize the Hollywood “back lot,” the magic that goes on behind the scenes to create the illusions that we all love about the movies. The more I learned about Harryhausen and his mentor Willis O’Brien, the more I realized that it was basically these two guys and their brilliant obsession that created the entire industry. So they were towering giants to me. I hadn’t seen this part of Hollywood examined in fiction, but I thought it was perfect for this novel. A very different twist on the tortured eccentric artist.

7. What can your devoted readers expect from you next? Are you working on anything currently?

I hope to revisit Eve Diamond soon, and I’m also working on another stand-alone, a thriller set in contemporary Los Angeles.

E
NHANCE
Y
OUR
B
OOK
C
LUB
E
XPERIENCE

1. Research some of the historical figures that Denise Hamilton refers to in
The Last Embrace
:

2.
The Last Embrace
recalls noir films popular in the 1930s and ’40s. If you enjoyed this novel, why not watch a DVD of a noir classic?

Some noir favorites include:

A site where you can explore film noir is www.filmnoirfoundation.org.

3. Listen to some of the music that was popular during 1949, the year when
The Last Embrace
is set.