Acting, The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and my love of the mystery genre are the major influences in creating these stories.
When I was twenty-one I was put under contract to Universal Studios. I was one of the last starlets; one of the last contract players. The times were changing and soon the entire studio system would be a free-for-all of lawyers, accountants, and independent production companies. This would be followed by the onslaught of conglomerates funded by such products as bottled water, soda, vodka, and computers, which gobbled up what was left of the great old studios. This is the new Hollywood that the actress Diana Poole knows.
The business of show business was always ugly and brutal. Today it is no different. As William Faulkner said, “Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.” Or as Marilyn Monroe put it so beautifully, “Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul…”
Also at twenty-one I married Bones Howe, who had three children. (Bones and I are still married, and the ‘children’ are thriving adults.) If marriage, instant motherhood, and a fledgling career in the movies wasn’t enough, I really wanted to be a writer. When I wasn’t acting, I would go to the UCLA Extension at night and take writing courses in fiction. It was there I began to learn the craft of the short story. I will never forget the first critique of my work from a male student who said, “How can you write with a body like that?” I retorted, “I don’t write with my body.”
So my love/hate relationship with Hollywood and my “movie star” looks were set, and now they fuel Diana Poole’s character along with hope and cynicism—and odd combination for sure, but not if you’re an actor. Or for that matter, a writer.
When I first read The Pat Hobby Stories I knew that I too wanted to write stories about Hollywood. Fitzgerald captured the desperation of an over-the-hill and out of work screenwriter who would do anything to get back on the studio lot to “take” a meeting. Any meeting. The demeaning extremes Pat Hobby was willing to go to are hilarious and sad.
Of course The Pat Hobby Stories were not driven by crime unless it’s the crime of the ego, and I wanted to keep both feet firmly planted in the genre I loved.
Throughout the sixties and the seventies I acted, raised our children, and tried to hone the craft of writing. It wasn’t until I was up for a role (I no longer remember what it was) when I walked into a room filled with blondes—all of us eerily similar, all vying for the same part—that I said to myself, “This is it. It’s time to stop. You want to be a writer, write.” I turned around and walked out and have never been in front of a camera again.
Setting myself up in an empty bedroom in our home, I began to write. Not an easy task for an actress who was always surrounded by wardrobe and make-up people, the other actors, the crew, the director, and the security of a script. But I somehow made the transition from all of that attention to the isolating loneliness of being a writer.
A few years later I was attending the Edgar Award Ceremony. My book, The Mother Shadow, had been nominated for Best First Novel. It was there that Marilyn Wallace came up to me and asked if I would like to write a short story for a Sisters in Crime 4 anthology.
I went back to Los Angeles, the dusty palm trees, the Technicolor sunsets created by the smog, and thought about acting, Pat Hobby, and crime. I wrote a short story titled, “Dirty Blonde.” And as they say in Hollywood a star is born. Well, at least an actress trying to get work while being thwarted by betrayal and murder, Diana Poole.
Melodie Johnson Howe
Santa Barbara, California