June 1959
Hollywood again - this time the setting for an expert novel dealing with the 2-D life of a young film star, Kit McClaren - the dimensions being his Career and his wife. Both the star and his wife feel that getting to the top is everything: they also feel that Kit has got what it takes to get there, and one feels from the start that they ought to know, as she is a successful studio publicity girl, and he thinks about himself with the single-minded devotion given to few men on any subject. He makes it, and almost at once his wife leaves him. She is a fiery, foul-mouthed little thing, but she is the only other person who takes him as seriously as he does himself, and he misses her as he proceeds to a life of gruelling, monotonous luxury enlivened by the most awful evenings with a classically neurotic film star who lives in a rented home with a female parasite to rub her back, and who is learning to focalise her depressions by being articulate about them. Television is looming over the film industry, and Kit’s career is slipping. After vicissitudes such as a miserable trip to London and Paris and a studio-contrived marriage, both frightful and funny, Kit ends up with what he wants.
This is all written by a very capable author who clearly knows his Hollywood, and one gets strong impressions of glaring concrete, dusty palms and shabby, sweaty little men with ulcers trying to grab power and avoid responsibility; a world of mechanised invention, where people are properties, life is a bad dream which one can act one’s way through or in some way drug one’s way out of, and the Public is a kind of composite and barbaric god - unpredictable, implacable and avid.