Finding the Woman Who Designed the Creature from the Black Lagoon
This week, the Literary Disco trio talked with Mallory O’Meara about her new book, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Millicent Patrick, the true story of Disney’s first female animators and the only woman in history to create one of Hollywood’s classic movie monsters. Bonus conversation about Kill the Next One by Federico Axat, O’Meara’s pick for our book club discussion. . . Let the arguments begin!
Rider Strong: Lady from the Black Lagoon is built around a really cool fact that I don’t think a lot of people know, which is that perhaps the most famous holiday creature of all time—the creature from the Black Lagoon—was designed by a woman. How did you find out about Millicent and when did you start writing this book?
Mallory O’Meara: When I was a teenager—I was the only one in my family who likes monster stuff—so I had to teach myself. I had to give myself my own education. I watched Frankenstein, Wolf Man, and all those movies, by myself. And then I finally got to Creature from the Black Lagoon. I loved it, and in my nerdy teenage ways I had to know everything about this movie because that’s what you do when you’re a nerdy teenager. I went online and was looking all the behind-the-scenes stuff and trivia, and I saw a picture of a woman working on the creature suit. I had never seen a woman working behind the scenes in a movie—especially a monster movie. It had little caption: Millicent Patrick, designer and artist. And I was like, who is that? She became my hero, and years later when I became a horror filmmaker myself she was always my talisman.
I ended up getting a tattoo of her, and I love telling this story on a podcast because you can’t see it. When you get a tattoo of someone, you sort of become a kiosk, but nobody knew what happened to her? People would ask me, “Millicent Patrick, she designed the creature. What do you know about her?” And I would answer, that’s it. I was having a conversation with a literary agent friend of mine and he said I should really look into this story and write that book, and I am a dummy, and spent all that savings and years of my life doing it. I ended up finding everything that happened to her, and I poured my life into solving this mystery, which was quite a ride.
Tod Goldberg: The thing about the book is you could have written a dry history of this woman’s life and it would have been great because she had a fascinating life, and all the ancillary characters you run into in the Hollywood horror world of the 1940s and 1950s are all either assholes or characters themselves, but you have such granular detail of every single sentence of this book. I’m amazed by the amount of research you had to do in this book, so strictly from a craft perspective I need to know how you didn’t just sit down and cry when you were trying to figure out how to put it all together?
MO: I’m really proud that you think I didn’t. I really thought the acknowledgement section of this book should have gone to ibuprofen and bourbon and that’s it. [laughs] There were a lot of obstacles writing this book because there are still people who don’t believe that she designed the Creature because she was a woman and didn’t do anything, and these were historians saying these things to me. She didn’t do anything, she must have been somebody’s girlfriend, she was only there because she was hot . . . because a lot of the sexism, it was depressing, so I really wanted to tell it in a way that was more accessible, more fun, and I am snarky and sarcastic myself so that’s my voice, so once I abandoned the idea of being a respectable nonfiction author and started making dick jokes and calling everybody assholes it started to flow better because that’s how I talk. Also, as I was hearing feedback from my editor and agent, they were like, “Mallory, this makes it connect people to you and it makes people connect to her, and it makes people actually want to read it.” So it sort of came together.
Julia Pistell: I love that you wrote a history borne of your teenage interests and discovering your real voice. It feels so authentic to the project of feminism right now and not buying into somebody’s idea of what a history work could be.
MO: It’s great to hear because we got rejected by 40 to 50 publishers because of that reason, because they wanted a dry biography until I got into a conversation with my current editor, Peter Joseph, at Hanover Square Press, and we clicked right away and he got it. He was all in, and it’s funny because we have this big launch but so many people thought it was a terrible idea . . . Peter asked me to be more snarky, made my dick jokes funnier, he really got it. I am so grateful to him. If you’re out there and you have a project that people think is stupid, there is somebody out there who is going to get it. You just have to keep going.
