I experienced a weird and probably inappropriate childhood. From the tender age of five, I was regularly exposed to the uncensored lewdness of Shakespeare at the summer festival in Ashland, Oregon, and I distinctly remember watching Don Giovanni (“Daddy, what’s a mistress?”) at the Seattle Opera when I was seven years old. The orchestra was on strike, and a pair of pianos accompanied the singers. When I was eight, a bomb threat interrupted a perfectly good performance of Lucia di Lammermoor.
It was all downhill from there, really—social ostracism, a humiliating memory of enacting Desdemona’s death scene on the living room sofa for the amusement of dinner guests. If a torrent of sexual passion runs through all my books, you can just blame my parents for that Live from the Met broadcast of Manon Lescaut in which a young and exceptionally hot Placido Domingo topples into bed with Renata Scotto. Imprinting starts early, folks.
You can blame them for this book, too. I don’t know exactly when it occurred to me that Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier might work as a novel set in 1920s Manhattan, but the idea took root and refused to wither. In my defense, there’s some logic attached. First performed in 1911, the opera enacts a struggle between old and new—old money and new money, physical maturity and youth—in lyric, bittersweet music that itself clashed with the dissonant modernism then in fashion. Audiences ate up the eighteenth century Viennese setting, the sensual opening scene in the Marschallin’s luxurious boudoir, the angsty rivalry between a beautiful young ingénue and a lady of a certain age.
And if the Roaring Twenties were about anything, it was the conflict between youth and age, between tradition and modernism, between old and new.
Of course, I soon realized that Strauss’s opera hasn’t got enough plot to support a modern full-length novel—the good old Scheming Servants storyline doesn’t pack the same punch as it did a hundred years ago—so I had to invent a murder mystery to drive the action along. Purists, I hope, will forgive me for the embroidery.
No need, however, to embroider the wonderful wit of Helen Rowland, a journalist and humorist who—a century ago—wrote a popular column called “Reflections of a Bachelor Girl” for the old New York World newspaper. As usually happens, I stumbled across Helen’s ironic wisdom while researching something else, and not only did I adore her turn of phrase, I felt as if I’d discovered a clear and sharp-edged window into changing social customs in the early decades of the twentieth century . . . and, for that matter, an insight into how much has remained the same! I have a feeling Helen would find plenty to say about the contemporary state of love and marriage.
As for the horse race that brings Theresa and Octavian together, you can blame my horse-mad daughter, who insisted I write the legendary Man o’ War into a novel set at the beginning of the 1920s. I was happy to oblige. The 1920 Dwyer Stakes was one of the great races of the age, and the eighth pole at the old Aqueduct was preserved and dedicated to Man o’ War when the new track opened in 1959.
It still stands there today.