ONE WAY TO START

After TLIH was published, I had about 10 wonderful years during which I wrote two other novels and had started a third when I needed to find a paying job. Wonderful until the third one, like the second, did not sell.

Unlike a lot of writers, I actually liked doing it. I loved visiting my imaginary world, letting my characters loose.  But I can’t figure out how to do it now, how to sustain it.  I feel I’ve gotten so far away from writing, that I don’t know how to get back. 

Not writing is one of the things I chastise myself for when I wake up at 3 in the am. The other morning, trying to calm down enough to fall back asleep, I remembered how I started writing TLIH., how it was kind of a last ditch effort and how I did it to help myself through a difficult time.

It was 1980-something in New York City and I was a clerk in a junior sportswear buying office at Saks Fifth Avenue. This was in a closet that had been converted – sort of – into an office. There was just room for the three of us, the buyer, assistant buyer and me. There were no computers.

I know. Hard to imagine.  There were three telephones, but no keyboards not even a type-writer but we had pads of yellow paper.

The two buyers were young women, both stylish and ambitious and very good to me. But they were usually out of the office down in the garment district or out on the floor.  I was left alone in our closet with work, as I remember, didn’t demand much from me.

Being married didn’t help. My actor husband was on tour that lasted about three months.

I remember feeling that I was forgetting how to talk, that my brain was turning to mush, that I was going crazy.

One morning, I thought of the story that had been rattling around in my head for a couple of years, of the SS guy weeping on the Ambassador Dodd’s sofa. The ambassador had a daughter and I knew she was in love with the guy. I told myself I should write it down, though I had no idea how to do that. But these scenes played out in my head and all I had to do was write them down. I’d write them using present tense. I’d write it like a script. I was an actor. I was comfortable with a script.

I pulled one of the pads of yellow paper over and started.

One thing led to another and about five years later, I had 1000 pages and a couple years after that, a book.  

Imagine that.

JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER

What a time we live in.  Who would have thought being a Nazi, neo or whatever, would be something people would be proud of? Being rebellious and angry is one thing, but appropriating a symbol without knowing what it really stands for is just stupid.

Of course, symbols are complex things, aren’t they?  

The swastika itself was an ancient design from Asia that the National Socialists appropriated because of their belief in the Aryan origins of the Teutonic race. I imagine they would be in furious denial to know how DNA research has traced all of us back to Africa!

But now even when you see a swastika on a Tibetan pot or a Navaho blanket, it gives you a jolt.  Even oriented in a different direction than the Nazis liked, it is a nasty little spider – and here I’m giving spiders a bad name. 

 

So putting swastikas on the cover of my book was not a light decision – and now I’m not sure I like it. I found the photograph of a National Socialist rally and thought the light and color were effective and suggest the dire events of the novel.

I loved the first cover, the blue one, designed by St. Martin’s.  For one thing there was no swastika, the Third Reich being suggested by the background eagle and of course by the uniform of the man embracing the woman. But the cover definitely told you this was a love story and the new one just tells you the book is about Nazis.

At the East Bay Book Fest, I watched people respond to the cover. I saw a couple of young women shy away and a young man come straight to it. He bought a copy, thank you very much, and I wonder if he was disappointed to find a love story front and center. 

BOOKCASES FULL OF THE THIRD REICH

I’ve realized something in the re-publishing of my novel: I don’t want to spend time in Nazi Germany. Well, does anyone? But when you write a novel, you spend a whole lot of time in the world of your book.  I had been reading about the period for years. In those days, you had to do research from books and I had collected a large library of histories, biographies and picture books on the subject.  My bookcases were all red and black with swastikas dotted around like nasty butterflies.

Of course, I had made up my story so what happened to my characters was my doing. But, I remember sitting at my mammoth desk-top p.c. doing the last of the edits recommended by my agents before they started flogging it around.  I remember how relieved I was that I wouldn’t have to stay in the world much longer. I actually visualized myself swimming up a long dark tunnel towards the light.

Of course, once the novel was sold to St. Martin’s, I worked with their editor, but it was more technical. I could stay on the surface.  I even did a couple of readings and that was ok too, more like an acting exercise.

Then, oh, my, the house I was living in burned down in the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm.  The fire

actually happened on the day before my official publication date.  When my boyfriend at the time and I hurried through the house choosing what to take or leave, I had looked at my books.  I took my yearbooks and a couple of photo albums and my father’s Complete Works of Shakespeare.  All the rest, scores of books, were turned into ash.

Months later, an old friend wondered, half-joking, half-serious, if I had considered that maybe the fire had been attracted to all that nastiness caught between those red-and-black covers.  And he wondered if it was something of a relief to have lost all those books.

I just knew I was relieved I had given Sally a positive and hopefully safe future, which she truly deserved and neither of us had to go back to 1934.

EAST BAY BOOK FEST

The East Bay Book Fest is situated in downtown Berkeley, tucked into a park behind municipal buildings.  This year it took place Saturday and Sunday, June 2 & 3.  Sand Hill Review Press had a table. 


I was planning on being there on Saturday but early that morning, Tory Hartman, our publisher, texted me that she had left behind the box of my books.  Change of plans: I'd attend Sunday.


I did and I had a good time.  Not only did we sell some books but I got to talk to a couple of the other Sand Hill writers.  It was fascinating to me to watch potential customers see the cover of THE LAST INNOCENT HOUR and pick it up - or not.  Buy it - or not.


But perhaps the best part of the day, to me personally, as that one-half of my old agents, Pomada-Larsen, suddenly materialized on the other side of the table.  Michael Larsen in an extraordinary yellow shirt was deep in conversation with several friends.  Then his eyes focused on my book and he looked up and saw me.  Couldn't have staged it better. 


Now if only my hair had cooperated as well.

HISTORICAL NOVELS & THE INTERNET

When I wrote this novel, there were two fairly important obstacles.  First, there was no internet and second, historical novels had been out of fashion for years.  Not until "The Other Boleyn Girl" was published in  2002 did they become popular again.


Re-reading "The Last Innocent Hour" to get it ready to be re-published, I remember how difficult it was to find certain things.  I had a library of books about the Third Reich and used libraries where ever I lived.  (After all, the first idea of the story had come to me in a library!)


I think the thing that was most difficult for me was not having pictures.  I am very visual and there just weren't pictures I needed.  For instance, the American Embassy in Berlin.  See below, thank you internet, although why there are swastikas hanging in front, I don't know.  It must after German declared war on the U.S.

But the most thing I needed the most and could not find, was a 1933 map of Berlin.  I finally found a guide book from the 1920's, and was pleased to find that.

Here's only one of the maps I found recently on the Internet.



This is the latest version of the cover of my soon-to-be republished historical novel.

THE LIFE OF MY BOOK: THE LAST INNOCENT HOUR

Covers for hardback (l) and the paperback (r)

In 1991, I was directing a production of "Hansel and Gretel" for Berkeley Opera when I got the news that my agents were about to sell my first novel, "The Last Innocent Hour" to St. Martin's.  It was $500,000 for a two-book contract and was that ok with me?

The phone was just outside the rehearsal room and I remember I sat on the floor while I listened to the fantastic news.  It was fantastic - as in fantasy, as in un-real, a dream.  But it really happened and the book was published in hardback then about four years later in soft cover.  It was also published in  England and was translated into several languages.

I did some book fairs and a few interviews.  Did some readings - which I love doing - I am and always have been an actor!  The novel received decent reviews and sold well, although it never became a best-seller.  I heard that there were nibbles from Hollywood but nothing came of that.

In the late morning of October 20, I stood in my little office of the house in the Berkeley Hills and was glad the book was safe.  It was published and the firestorm that was heading for the house could not destroy it.  The fire and the subsequent general upheaval that resulted distracted me from that second book for a time.

But eventually, I found a place to live and wrote a book about Shakespeare's theatre; St. Martin's passed. So I wrote a book about the Bozeman Trail forts. Nobody wanted that one either.  I started a fourth book about Virginia City during the Bonanza but quit after a couple of chapters.  I had had a good run but I had to go to work.

These are the brownshirts, the SA.

The Last Innocent Hour, my first and only published novel, has had quite an interesting life.  As I wrote in the author’s notes, I was fascinated by Martha Dodd’s autobiography when I read it back in the late-1960’s at Cal.  She described the young SS officer crying on the sofa in her family’s sitting room sometime during the week-end of June 30, 1934, which came to be called the Night of the Long Knives. The Nazi party purged the leadership of the Sturmabteilung, the brownshirts and many other inconvenient opponents to the regime.  The officer had made friends with her father, the American ambassador to the new Third Reich, and needed to talk about what was going on.

As Lenin wrote: every revolution devours its children, which was certainly true that week-end. But the image of that young man stuck in my head.  The SS, the Schutzstaffel, began as Hitler’s bodyguards and grew under with the ambitions of Heinrich Himmler to control the police, including the Gestapo and the concentration camps. They recruited middle and upper-class, college-educated men, they were the elite, the Nazis Praetorian Guards.  So how did a young man go from being someone I’d probably know to Dr. Mengele or Reinhard Heydrich who engineered the Final Solution?

Lena & Reinhard Heydrich in 1931

Certainly anyone who knows anything about the rise of the National Socialists must question how they came about.  I would guess anyone who took a Western Civ class at some point had an essay question on the subject.

What I did was write a story about it.