Holywood

By Michael Hollister

Love, patriotism, moviemaking and the influence
of popular culture on religion during WWII.
Spirituality in Hollywoodstyle='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"'> when the stars were
bright. An idealistic farm girl from style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"'>Oregonstyle='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"'> follows her boyfriend
to Los
Angeles and copes with challenges of both family and
career when he goes to war. A young man
from Ohio loses his first love while rising from
gas pump attendant to movie director at the Fox studio through his
relationships with actresses, in particular star Bette Davis.style='mso-spacerun:yes'> His work includes
a comical biopic of theologian Jonathan Edwards and adaptations style='letter-spacing:-.45pt'>of classics--Wieland,
Modern Chivalry and "Rappaccini's Daughter."style='mso-spacerun:yes'> His adventures take him to a brothel
of imitation stars and to an orgy hosted by horror actor Lionel Atwill.style='mso-spacerun:yes'> Hollywoodstyle='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"'> parties reflect the
decadence of Europestyle='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"'> while American lives
converge to an inspirational ending.
Stars in uniform appear at a huge reception to honor troops as the
nation rallies after the sneak attack on style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"'>Pearl Harborstyle='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"'> and the horrific battle
of Tarawastyle='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"'>, evoking a spirit of
personal sacrifice, a time when Americans felt more united as a nation than at
any time since. First in a trilogy about
Hollywoodstyle='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"'> social history, to
include Follywood style='letter-spacing:-.55pt'>(2004) and Hollyworld (2005).

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 31, 2004
• ISBN: 9781414014043

Michael Hollister

Michael Hollister was born in Los Angeles, served in the U.S. Army, graduated from the University of Oregon and taught fiction writing at Stanford while earning a Ph.D.  As a boy, when his father worked in the movie business, his neighbors in the San Fernando Valley included Clark Gable, John Huston and Andy Devine.  Subsequently he worked as a sketch artist, intelligence agent and professor of American literature.  He is the father of three and lives with his wife Judy and two west highland terriers in Brookings, Oregon. He has published over thirty stories and articles in periodicals including Paris Transcontinental, The Gettysburg Review, North Atlantic Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, The Bloomsbury Review and Studies in the Novel.

Book preview

1

Sarah McCloud grew up suspicious of Hollywood.

On a dusty gravel road in Oregon she peered through the film on her windshield and steered her new 1936 Ford coupe with both hands, excited by the magnitude of possibility it gave her, the feeling that now she could go anywhere. She had not been allowed to see a movie until she turned eighteen and her mother, Abigail Stokes McCloud, formerly a schoolteacher, gave her another lecture on the dangers of popular entertainment these days and the immoralities of theatrical people. Her father bought her the car when she completed her first term of secretarial courses and she felt so much obliged, driving carefully and not too fast, stones clunking against the underside and tires churning up a billow of dust onto the blackberry vines along the road, she could not bear the thought of having an accident. Now that she had a job up the valley at the National Feed & Supply in Corvallis, she felt nearly on her own at last.

She drove on past the white clapboard Oakville church on the knoll with its steeple outreaching the huge sprawling oaks around it, a modest old meeting house founded by pioneers, softened from the severity of gothic by rounded instead of peaked arches to the windows. She slowed down past her old schoolhouse and then, over the blackberry tangle along the road, home appeared across a field among clustered trees, a white clapboard farmhouse lean and dignified and modestly revealed through foliage, its plain style evoking the westward spread of puritans from New England. Sarah turned into the driveway, climbed past the flower garden she maintained with her mother and eased on up into the shade of giant mossy overhanging maples. Along the railing of the white side porch, geraniums in pots burst red against the white and bees dipped at blossoms on the trellis. Her mother in a dark print dress with lace around the neckline stood on the porch holding Jojo the cat, her short dark hair in wriggly waves and her wire rim glasses catching reflections of leaves.

Burke Hanson called.

"Oh, mother—thank you! How long ago?"

About half an hour.

Sarah hurried on inside, letting her mother catch the screen door—a headstrong girl her parents liked to say.

Heavenly days, Sarah! Her mother pursued her inside and Jojo squirmed loose from her arms and jumped down with a thump. You don’t call a man, you let him call you!

Yes, Mother.

Sarah set her purse on the table and swept off her hat. The house smelled of vegetables cooking, the pots in the kitchen were perking and she felt a furry purring against her leg. The pretty tabby, sweet Meg. Then here came the other cats bounding, Beth and Amy. Sarah crouched on her heels and stroked each of them purring and arching their backs to her hand and then, spurred by the thought of Burke Hanson, she rose to stare at the wall telephone. With her ankles massaged by soft fur rubbing and purring, she waited to see if by concentrating, by hoping and praying even, since she felt like God meant them to be together, she could make Burke call her again—just then it jangled!

It startled her back and jangled again. Her mother came and lifted the receiver, standing close to the mouthpiece with her chin up and holding the bell to her ear.

Is it Burke? whispered Sarah.

Hello? Her mother turned somber, Yes. Yes, all right.

What’s wrong? Is it Burke?

Fire! she announced. I’ll get your father.

Sarah grabbed her purse and hurried up the staircase.

The upstairs felt cool and smelled of urine in the chamber pots. When her older sister Harriet got married to a rancher and her younger sister Rosemary went away to college and stayed through the summer, Sarah got the large front bedroom to herself with the bay window overlooking the front yard and through maple tree leaves to the barn. Quickly she changed into her gardening dress and old shoes and hurried back downstairs, where her mother stood holding open the side porch door. Sarah ran across the yard and scrambled into the pickup beside her father, Haven McCloud.

He took the road by the church on the knoll.

Great dark billows of smoke churned upward into the sky ahead like a mob of demons escaping from hell. Her father gripped the wheel firmly and peered through his wire rim glasses at the road with a strong chin and a kindly rounded face. Usually a slow driver, he accelerated now so fast it thrilled Sarah. She hung on at the next crossroads as he turned left raising dust and kept on going fast until over a rise they could see the line of flames licking up into smoke that darkened the sky.

The Hanson place.

One whole field lay black and smoking. The charred smell filled her nostrils as they pulled over to the side of the road and joined a row of parked vehicles that looked half a mile long.

More vehicles were approaching along the road ahead and behind them as her father grabbed burlap grain bags from the back of the pickup and they ran up the road toward the fire line where over a hundred neighbors and members of the church all ages were beating the flames with burlap bags and passing buckets and throwing water. Whole families had come.

They all helped, yelling over the roar. Burke’s sister Anna and his mother ran past carrying buckets. Haven and Sarah soaked their bags in a kettle and ran to join the others on the line. They ran into the heat and flying sparks and smoke and beat at the flames with their wet sacks, trying to turn the fire toward a road as a firebreak with long orange tresses of flame in a roar waving up into the sky and licking higher with sparks blowing crazy all over them. The heat drove her back. She held one arm over her face and flogged with her bag at the flames, moving again toward the front, beating out fires in the dry grain. They were fighting to protect an unburned field of wheat and the Hanson house and outbuildings against flames crackling higher than the house, flogging and stomping with smoke stinging her eyes as she fought beside her father, choking in smoke and beating at flames that jumped into the tinder all around.

They cornered it against the road.

Closing in, they flogged and stomped until the high roaring flames subsided to random islands of crackling orange and the smoke began to clear. They beat out the spot fires. Some of them fell down and lay gasping in the trampled grain, some drank from dippers and others gathered at the kettle and splashed themselves with water. Sarah dropped to her knees and sat bent forward, coughing and spitting out cinders, getting her breath.

Sarah, Burke called to her.

Burke Hanson came toward her shirtless, muscular and sweaty and blackened all over with soot, the whites of his eyes showing bright. She felt dirty and must look awful. She wiped her face with the hem of her skirt and tried to get up. Too weak from fatigue, her legs buckled under her. Burke grabbed her arm and helped her to stand upright, then he yanked off his gloves. She had never seen him half naked like this before. His sooty chest had black curly hair and his hands looked white from inside the gloves and it gave her a pleasant queasy feeling.

Are you all right? he asked her.

Dark hair spilled down his forehead in waves, his face as smooth as a carving in whalebone, with eyes deep-set under his brow, looking bold yet shy. Whenever she made eye contact he only held it for a second, then he looked down or away.

Yes. Yes, thank you.

The tractor sparked it, he gestured at the burn. Dad couldn’t put it out. We tried, but it happened too fast.

The crowd of neighbors began to disperse, sooty figures bent by fatigue moving slowly to their vehicles parked along the road. Anna carried a water bucket around to the weary, dipping up drinks for them. Mr. Hanson looked the weariest of them all, limping around on his crippled leg, thanking people and shaking hands.

Burke walked beside Sarah along the fence line.

This may be the last straw, losing this much of the crop. Dad’s about ready to quit.

Oh no, really? You mean, sell out?

They stopped and looked at each other, suddenly closer than before. Burke looked down and nudged a clod with his boot.

If anybody would buy it.

But then you’d move away.

Well, I’m not really a farmer, Sarah.

He shrugged and they continued walking down the fence line toward the vehicles parked along the road.

All week Sarah thought about what he had said.

On Saturday evening he arrived at the McCloud farm in his family’s old Lincoln. Usually, as on this occasion, Burke and Sarah went to the moving picture show in Corvallis. Her parents disapproved of her seeing any movie with Marion Davies, because she was somebody’s mistress, though that made her more interesting to Sarah. Now that she had come of age with a job and her own car, she did not intend to let her parents make decisions for her. Of course, she did not want to displease them either.

This week the feature was The Oregon Trail with a young cowboy in it named John Wayne, who reminded Sarah a little of Burke in the shy way he hesitated when he talked to a woman, except that Burke was shorter and more gentle than the cowboy. The story of the wagon train made her feel grateful to the pioneers who suffered and died and finally made it here to the Willamette Valley so that she could sit in a movie theater eating popped corn like she made the trip herself in less than two hours. Movies made everything look so easy. This time, finally, Burke put his arm around the back of her seat. When he drove her home, he parked in front of the house for a few minutes and they speculated vaguely about the future.

The next morning, the church bell tolled.

Sarah heard it in her bedroom, ringing across the fields. Her father drove them, her mother and herself, the three of them formal in their Sunday hats. The old church on the knoll had tall arched windows along both sides of the white interior, with the huge gnarled oak trees showing in the windows and the sky through the branches clear, like Sarah’s future seemed to her before the fire. McClouds had always sat in the left hand section about halfway down, though Haven McCloud was a deacon and for that reason it had seemed to two of his daughters, Harriet and Rosemary, that the McClouds should sit closer to the front. To the contrary, Sarah revered the tradition. Some families, including her own, had occupied the same pews since 1852. Her heart beat faster. She glanced around at Burke, who sat in the usual pew with his family in the center section toward the back, the Hanson parents and their children, Burke the oldest. The Hansons emigrated from Norway to North Dakota and then moved here and settled on a lowland farm abandoned during the first years of the Depression. Burke looked handsome to Sarah in his blue suit and high white collar and necktie, his forehead high and his thick dark wavy hair combed straight back. He was a strong shy boy with a quiet depth like a fiord.

After the service, worshipers stood around outside the church under the big oak trees and socialized. Burke waited for Sarah in the vestibule near the hanging bell rope. Their eyes met and he looked down. Her heart sank and she felt a tension emanating from him as they walked outside. He took her arm and drew her aside under one of the big oak trees with a view of surrounding fields.

We had a talk last night, he said. The family and all. We stayed up late talking it over.

She could read the decision in his face.

Oh, Burke—

As soon as the crop is in and we sell everything, we’re moving to California. At least the weather’s good there. We can get factory jobs, Dad and me. We can get on our feet again.

He bent his head.

Burke, she touched his arm. It wasn’t your fault. Nobody’s ever been able to make a decent living on that farm.

I’m just not a farmer.

His family was leaving and he had to go.

After the wheat harvest, the Hansons held an auction. They sold their cows and hogs and farming equipment and furniture and other possessions displayed under the huge maple tree in their yard. A traveling auctioneer, Henry Colfax, a beanpole of a man in a black hat with a flat brim, did the calling in a nasal monotone. Neighbors felt sorry to bid so low, but the times were hard. The Hansons gave away what did not sell, then packed up what they could take, stuffed into their Lincoln and piled high in their truck. Sarah helped Anna load her things. They were close friends and Sarah had never lost anyone she cared about before. They hugged and cried, then Burke took her hand. She felt so miserable. They stood there under the big maple tree and tried to say goodbye.

At the end, he waved to her out the truck window. Sarah had never felt so alone in her life, so confused and upset. If God meant her to be with Burke, why had this happened? She drove home in a quandary that continued in the days that followed, even after Burke mailed her an address in Los Angeles, then finally answered one of her letters. Now her secretarial position in Corvallis felt like a little job in a little town in a little corner of the world far away from Los Angeles. She showed her mother Burke’s letter. The Hansons had rented a house and were subletting two of the rooms. Mr. Hanson had not found work yet because of the leg he crippled when his tractor rolled on it, Mrs. Hanson managed the rentals and otherwise Burke was supporting the family. He said there were lots of Okies picking fruit and taking any kind of work and he was lucky to get a job in a tool factory.

Sarah checked out books from the library in Corvallis in addition to the novels she liked to read and began to learn everything she could about Los Angeles so that she could better imagine Burke in that environment and what it must be like to live there. Every workday afternoon she called to ask her mother if a letter from Burke had come in the mail. When he finally wrote back for the second time, mentioning that one of their renters had given notice, it felt like an answer to her prayers. Surely there were a lot more secretarial jobs in Los Angeles than in Corvallis, and this way, given the possibility of living with the Hansons, she would have a better chance of persuading her father to give his blessing.

Will you, Mother? she pleaded.

They were sitting in the front room armchairs.

Oh please! Will you write to Mrs. Hanson? Just ask her if I could rent the room. Then I’ll talk to Daddy about it.

Her mother shook her head.

I won’t go behind his back.

Then you talk to him first.

Abigail frowned like she bit down on a kernel. Sarah had always been the most impulsive of her daughters. Now she wanted to run off to Los Angeles after a boy. They were just children, Abigail thought. Of course, she reminded herself, she was about eighteen when Haven courted her. It pleased her too, that one of her daughters had such gumption, like one of the pioneers. And she trusted the Hansons. Burke was reliable and Sarah wanted this so much. Her mouth turned up its corners in a little smile that grew until her whole face seemed to twinkle in an elfish way, her eyes behind her glasses merry.

Oh, all right, she giggled into laughter.

Sarah jumped up and kissed her mother in such an unusual display for their family that Abigail blushed.

When the reply from Mrs. Hanson arrived in the mailbox down at the road and Sarah read the good news, her father was out in the fields. She wanted to run out and ask him. He just had to say yes. Then her mother cautioned her and suggested an alternative plan. At milking time that evening, Sarah went along with her father to the barn as she used to do almost every day. They followed the old path. He pushed the squeaky old wheelbarrow of milk cans clanking and she smelled the yellow mustard weed sprouting up everywhere around. Swallows went darting to and from their mud nests under the high eaves, diving and soaring, while in the cupola on top of the barn, pigeons were cooing.

Haven pushed the wheelbarrow into the dim interior of creaky floors with cobwebs on the windows. The barn smelled of animals and old straw. He pulled open the pasture door for the cows waiting outside. They came plodding in to their stanchions. He turned on the portable radio on a shelf as he did every evening for the news by Gabriel Heater, who made everything sound so dramatic that Haven kept the volume down low so as not to alarm the cows. He attached the milking machines to the first two cows in the row of twelve, then he went around and pitched hay into their feeding troughs, rust brown Jersey cows preferred for the quality of their butterfat. After the news on the radio, the cows got to listen to a classical music station. The intricately ordered polyphonics calmed them down and increased their production of milk. As she had done since the age of four, Sarah took the brush off a dusty windowsill and stroked the side of the first cow in the row. Eve shivered all over when a fly lit, shaking it off. Sarah held her cheek to the great warm swell of belly as warm as a mother’s breast.

That evening after dinner she played a game of Chinese checkers with her father in the parlor, moving the marbles while they listened to The Lone Ranger on the radio. She waited until the masked man rode into the sunset and her father went into the dim front room to his favorite armchair and began to read the newspaper in the light of the floor lamp with the tasseled shade where he sat every night before they all went to bed and read aloud a passage from the Bible and they prayed. He wore a clean blue work shirt and kept his thick brown hair cut short in back and above his ears, a man inherently tidy and conditioned to amenities by years of living in a household of women. He read with bifocals perched on his nose, first the prices for milk and grain in the business columns, then the front page and finally the sports section.

She sat down on the ottoman at his feet. He lowered the newspaper and looked at her over the tops of his glasses.

I know Mama has talked to you, she began.

Oh?

About my visiting the Hansons in Los Angeles.

Um, he frowned. What do you know about Los Angeles?

I’ve been studying up.

Do you think you can know it by reading books?

Some of it. The Hansons will look after me. They go to a Lutheran church there. Mother said that was all right.

Haven raised his eyebrows at her theology.

Oh, she did.

I’d still be a Presbyterian, I’d just be visiting. And then when I get on my own I’d find a Presbyterian church.

What about your car?

Well, you know I love it. But I guess I’d have to give it back to you. I can ride the bus there and save money.

Well, hmm, he set aside the paper, scowling over his bifocals.

I’ll be safe with the Hansons, Daddy.

What about you and Burke?

What do you mean?

Haven looked down and rubbed his hands together, big hands rough from labor that caressed each other while he searched for words, making sounds preparing for speech. It might not, uh, be the best idea right now for the two of you to be under the same roof.

Oh, Daddy. Mrs. Hanson will be there all the time.

You’ll be upstairs?

I’ll be a renter.

Hmm, well–

I can lock the door. Daddy, Burke is not like that. He hasn’t even tried to kiss me. Not even once.

Haven rubbed his hands in vexation.

It’s a big city, Sarah. What’s the neighborhood like?

On the west side, not far from the ocean.

Um hm.

I can get experience in Los Angeles.

Yes, well—

Oh thank you, Daddy!

She threw her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek and he patted her back and laughed at himself for being overcome.

At the train station in Corvallis weeks later, Sarah climbed aboard a Pullman car with a cardboard suitcase, a shoulder bag and a sack of fruit, sandwiches and other food her mother had prepared. She had never been on a train before, she had never even left home. She picked out a seat on the right side among plenty of empty ones, sat down and looked out the window. She waved at her parents waving back, her mother happy, her father worried behind his glasses, the two suddenly poignant figures to Sarah as she looked down on them through the window. She had never been separated from them before and now she did not know when she would see them again. The train began to move. They waved again as the train slid away and she wiped her eyes. They got smaller back there, still waving.

Soon absorbed by scenery, clacking along from valley farmland up into the mountains and high forests, she felt the expansion carry her beyond herself, making all she saw a wonder. The fields in central California were so much larger than the farms in Oregon, they looked as wide as the valley, almond trees row after row in rhythm with the clackety clack of the train, mile after mile of lettuce fields, then by twilight olive trees, just like in Palestine. With all the stops, it took all night. She slept with her coat as a pillow, thinking of Burke in the rhythm of the train on the rails and waking now and then, once to see the long smooth curve of train cars ahead in a pink radiance so lovely she felt she must be dreaming of salvation, a light more divine than she ever felt before, a soft pink glow of anticipation, until she fell asleep again and awoke in a valley of orchards dotted with oranges like millions of suns glowing brighter with the dawn.

Gliding into Los Angeles, she felt reborn.

Even so early in the morning, outside the railway station it felt as balmy as she imagined the Holy Land. She gazed around at a city of sun glare on white buildings with no skyscrapers. The wide streets looked new and clean, many lined on both sides with palm trees, and she could smell a sweetness in the air, of flowers and tropical fruit. She caught a bus and took a window seat and looked for the sights along Sunset Boulevard, the art deco buildings and white stucco and tall royal palms with frame houses converted to shops and restaurants, nightclubs and dumpy office buildings, a hodgepodge of development cluttered by signs and billboards in vacant lots for sale. A man in an apron stood hosing off the sidewalk of the Star Cafe below a hill where letters spelled out HOLLYWOODLAND. She looked all over, but could see no holly and no woodland.

The bus passed the ruins of an old movie set representing ancient Babylon, then a castle appeared, The Chateau Marmont hotel rising above a cluster of apartment bungalows called The Garden of Allah. Sarah had never seen such luxury before. She felt both attracted and repulsed. The boulevard curved toward the ocean like the train in pink dawn light, then the bus sighed to a stop beside a Shell gas station where a suntanned attendant with a trim mustache and white uniform looked up from pumping. The early sun gave his face a golden Apollo glow that revived the excitement of her new life, for she