The Hollywood Backlash Moon

By Carolyn Summer Quinn

What's a nice down-to-earth girl from Brooklyn doing in a place like Hollywood?

It's 1964, and Katie Hathaway, almost but not quite twenty-one, has been living in sunny Southern California with her television star aunt and uncle, and their various children and staff, since her parents died ten years earlier.  Her uncle is decent, but his wife, the aunt, is a vainglorious pain in the rump.  Jealous Aunt Floriana picks a fight with her daughter Clover and causes the girl to flee the house in a hysterical huff.  When Clover doesn't return, Katie fears the worst.  A day later Clover is found murdered in a crime that doesn't make any initial sense.

On top of all else, Katie works as an assistant to costume designer Eva Zeitoune at Grand Manor Studios.  Eva, late of Berlin, left Germany with three colleagues right before the start of the Second World War.  As Katie tries to figure out Clover's murder, Eva recognizes the notorious Nazi who tormented her family taking a stroll on Van Nuys Boulevard and it turns out he's arrived with a scheme for revenge.  What exactly are we all living under, Katie wonders – some kind of a Hollywood backlash moon?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Topaz Ocean Enterprises
• Release date: Jan 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223218999

Carolyn Summer Quinn

CAROLYN SUMMER QUINN, Author and Fine Art Photographer, grew up singing show tunes in Roselle and Scotch Plains, NJ, a member of an outrageous and rollicking extended family.  She has a B.A. in English and Theater/Media from Kean University and now delights in living in New York City.  She is the Author of 10 books (so far!) and they've garnered 17 writing awards!

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Chapter One

A Brooklyn Girl in Hollywood

Southern California, May 1964

If there was one good thing about being an orphan who was raised by relatives, it was this and only this.  At least the rather eccentric couple who raised me weren’t my parents.

I could never have said that out loud, of course, or I would have sounded terribly ungrateful, and I wasn’t.  I was delighted to be living here after losing my mother, father and home.  My uncle and his second wife had taken me in from the time I was ten years old, after my parents had died in a boating accident during a storm.  They’d been on their friend’s sailboat for a day of fun and fishing.  It turned out to be the end of them both, not to mention the friend, when the sailboat capsized during a sudden squall.

My Uncle Trent, real first name Thomas, was my father’s younger brother.  He stepped right in to become my legal guardian.  I was whisked me away from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where my Irish Catholic, very practical parents had run a little convenience store, and moved me to his spectacular, Spanish-style, twenty-two room home in the southern California San Fernando Valley town of Encino.  It was made of gleaming white stucco, had a red tile roof, a pool, a rose garden, and even a guest house in the vast backyard, where the housekeeper and her children lived.

Uncle Trent was a wonderful man, though he was also an actor with a handful blind spots.  He was crazy about me.  It was because I had green eyes, brown hair, and resembled his mother, my grandmother Kathleen, the one I was named after, though I preferred to be called Katie.  Grandma Kathleen was, unfortunately, also dead, or I might have been living with her.

In any event, Uncle Trent flew to Brooklyn to pick me up, arranged for the sale of the store, and swept me away to a whole other world from the tiny apartment where I’d lived with Mom and Dad over our store.  Though I was twenty years old now, and still I missed my old home desperately, it sure had always been easy to like my new one.  I also adored the whole blossoming ambience of California, flowers, palm trees, sunshine and all. What a nice place!

I could never tell if my appearance in California really sat all that well with Uncle Trent’s wife, Aunt Floriana, or not, though.  His biggest blind spot was her.

I have to say that she, at least, I suppose to her credit, regarded me the same way as she treated her two daughters, twenty-three-year-old Clover Carmody from her first marriage, and Ivy Hathaway, age twelve, who was allegedly Uncle Trent’s child, but I had my doubts.  Also residing with us was Trent’s son from his previous marriage, twenty-four-year-old Dan. 

Floriana gave all four of us the same equal treatment.  That is to say, she treated us kids like we were nothing more important to her than pieces of the furniture, and she pawned all of us off, without a second thought, on her housekeeper.  Alejandra Sanchez, late of Mexico, was like an honorary mom to us.  Aunt Floriana, known to her fans as Floriana Fairmount, but whose real name was Flory Frimmer, simply ignored us, for the most part, and went about her own business.

Show business.

Floriana and Trent were both actors on television.  They weren’t major stars, something that seemed to drive both of them straight up the wall, though to different degrees, but they did have regular recurring roles on TV programs.  Both were quite well off financially, if not exactly filthy rich, as a result.  Uncle Trent played a cop on a crime drama, My Private Eye, where the star turn was taken by the actor who played a private detective.  Floriana played the widowed mother of two happy-go-lucky teenagers in a family comedy, The Emersons.  In her case, art sure wasn’t imitating life.  That woman didn’t have the maternal instincts of a flea, but she could fake them beautifully, if she was being paid for it, in front of a camera.  The only living things she really seemed to care about were the roses she had hired a gardener to plant in a portion of our large backyard.

For the past few months, and for the very first time, there had been one big yet rather upsetting exception to Floriana’s obliviousness to us kids.  Once her daughter Clover, now age twenty-three, had begun going on acting auditions, Floriana had finally noticed her, all right.  My aunt was jealous as all get-out of her own beautiful daughter. 

Clover was talented.  That in itself had probably been enough to annoy Aunt Floriana, even before Clover declared her intention to become a star, too.  After that happened, though, so did a lot of family fireworks.  Floriana had been making increasingly nasty snipes and vicious remarks in Clover’s direction in an attempt to undermine the girl’s efforts.  It started from the moment Clover’s father, Jimmy Carmody, who was a well-known Hollywood talent agent, had taken Clover on as his client.

Nepotism, Floriana would sneer.  Pure and simple.  And if you’re so talented, Clover, if you’re such an actress, how come you never seem to get a part?

Clover didn’t answer her mother, but privately she told me that she got very nervous on auditions and sometimes that was enough to make her stand there, heart pounding and knees shaking, and she’d blow it.  All she had to do was find a way to get past that, though, and I knew she’d get ahead.  Clover was ethereally beautiful as well as having an ability to act.  Hollywood old-timers who had once known the late actress Carole Lombard were always saying Clover looked a whole lot like her.  I had a feeling that my crazy aunt was just afraid that one day, quite soon, her daughter would surpass her in the fame department.

It would happen or it wouldn’t, but in the meantime, Floriana was making Clover’s life hell.

The main problem in both Trent and Floriana’s lives, as they seemed to see it, anyway, was that both of them were playing regular roles on television series that were second fiddles to the real stars of their shows.  He wasn’t the ultimate star of My Private Eye and she wasn’t the main attraction on The Emersons.

The two of them were co-stars. 

They weren’t the stars.

Oh, crisis! 

Oh, misery! 

Oh, what a lot of nonsense! 

I often thought the two of them might just have been a little happier if they’d cultivated at least a small portion of gratitude for obtaining any regular acting jobs at all, especially in a business that was overflowing with an avalanche of tough competition, but they didn’t.  They’d rather complain about their lot.  And it wasn’t my place to suggest to them that they look at their situation in any other way, either. 

But still.

I had never stopped missing my parents, with a terrible ache in my heart that never really seemed to go away, which was something I kept hidden from all of the others.  I often thought, if only our family could be restored, but if it couldn’t be then it couldn’t be.  Even so.  If only.

Mom and Dad had not been perfect by a long shot but at least they’d really been mine.  Mom prayed too much, and Dad sometimes pilfered too many beers from the refrigerator at our store, but they had been so down to earth and genuine and so real.  They were the opposite of a lot of these California actors that I now knew.  Reality was the last thing that managed to fly out here in Tinsel Town, unless of course some chintzy version of it was created on a studio soundstage and filmed to be presented to the public.  That was the place where it seemed to work best, in front of the cameras.  It was the opposite of most non-show business people’s circumstances, where you could be most honest at home and had to behave a how other way when you went to work.

It was impossible for me not to miss the good people of Brooklyn,  and the whole upbeat atmosphere of that terrific place.  We had the best borough in New York City and we knew it, though the Manhattanites would have argued with us on that.  Brooklyn had Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Museum and the fabulous Botanical Gardens.  For a while there, until 1957, we’d even had the best and most beloved baseball team that ever played athletics, the Brooklyn Dodgers.  At least the Dodgers had moved here, to L.A., three years after I did.

The best thing about Brooklyn though, to me, had been the ultra-blunt attitude of the people.  Folks back there had always seemed to know exactly who they were and weren’t afraid to shout their thoughts, feelings and opinions right out loud. 

Take a subject as simple as the weather, which in Brooklyn ran the gamut from blizzards to heatwaves to hurricanes and everything in between.  If it was too cold, lots of the Brooklyn folks could be heard to say, It’s cold as a bastard! Bas-tudd, they’d mispronounce it.  In summertime, it was, It’s a scorcher, pronounced scaw-tcha.  They’d say what they meant and no holds barred.  Tough if anybody around them didn’t like it.

Honesty!  Truth!  Once you miss it, you realize there’s nothing like it.

Here in La-La Land, however, the acting colony crowd rarely said what they meant for fear of being overheard by a casting director and making a bad impression.  These particular Angelenos couldn’t have cared less about anything as useless to them as the truth.  They had other priorities. 

Like self-promotion.

An overwhelming number of the people here cared for nothing more than getting a starring role somewhere. 

Anywhere. 

In anything.

They’d say anything, do anything, even if it wasn’t moral, let alone legal, and fawn over anybody and everybody they thought might just lead them to a showbiz break.

Far too many of them, wanting to become stars, had even been living out here for several decades now, starting from about 1915, when the movie makers first set up studios here, and onwards.  They arrived from all over the country and even the world.  An amazing number of them were still here, trying to make it.  Most of them wouldn’t.  Just the same, they kept on striving.  The older I got, the more I felt it was nothing less than bizarre, and it could be rather suffocating to be around it, too.   

This was a place where appearances were everything.  A person could be a total reprobate, and plenty of them were, devoid of any substance or redeeming qualities, but as long as he or she wore the right outfit, and said the right superficial things, especially in front of anyone they thought was powerful, nobody cared.  Even when I had begun in the fifth grade here in my new grammar school, there had been a few kids whose parents hadn’t made it as far as Uncle Trent and Aunt Floriana had, and those children sucked up to me, trying to befriend me for what they thought were my, ahem, connections.  This had started when I was ten.  I can’t even imagine being a parent and telling my child to be nice to this new kid in your class because, hey, you knowing her might lead us to a break.  But that’s what had happened.

After all, orphaned or not, I was a Hathaway.  The surname wasn’t Gable or Dietrich or Olivier, not by a long shot, but it still carried some clout, especially to those who had less.  The whole dance seemed pretty twisted and desperate to me.

On the other hand, none of this nonsense had really managed to screw me up in any major considerable way because I basically lived on the outside of it.  Well, except whenever some of it hit home, like it had been doing lately, ever since Clover started trying to be an actress.  I never lost sight of the fact that these were other people’s messes of their own devising.  That way I let it all roll right off me, even as I worked as a costume assistant at one of the studios, where I had a front row seat to all sorts of offscreen drama.  It was better to watch it from the sidelines than join in the fray.

But getting back to my parents, they had mostly gotten along with each other pretty well, though I could vaguely recall a few long-ago family arguments.  Yet where Mom and Dad had been concerned, our family fights had been honest-to-goodness family fights, period.  They took place in our apartment over our store.  Small as I was, I remembered a few times when I had tried as best I could to intervene, usually without success, until whatever had caused the storm of the moment finally blew over and it was calm waters at home again.

That was not the case here in Hollywood.  Nothing private, not even something that should have been like a full-on battle royal at home, ever usually stayed that way for long.

Not in a family of actors.

There were reporters who lived for this kind of thing.

Rivals who absolutely adored it.

Household help who couldn’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut about what they saw and heard.

And it seemed to me that all the while Fate, or God, or whoever might be ultimately in charge of the universe, was way up above us somewhere, sitting on His tuffet, looking down and laughing.

I was two months away from turning twenty-one years old on the day, in the middle of May in 1964, when the worst sort of pandemonium began at home in earnest. 

It was set off, naturally, by none other than vain, irascible Floriana.

Chapter Two

The Battle

There were four more people living on Uncle Trent’s spacious property in the flourishing suburb of Encino.  Alejandra the housekeeper had two children.  Her daughter, Estella, who was thirteen, was one.  Incredibly, or maybe inevitably, Estella’s name meant star.  I had to wonder if Alejandra gave her that moniker not knowing the meaning of the name or deliberately, to help her kid fit in with all the beautiful people. 

Alejandra’s other child, her son Diego, age fourteen, was another.  God only knew where those children’s father was.  Alejandra never mentioned it and I didn’t dare ask.  All three of them lived in our guest house behind the built-in aqua blue pool in our gigantic backyard.

Another resident was Parker Perkins, a new addition to the household, and an aspiring actor.  Ha, what else would a chauffeur around here be?  That was his job, at least officially.  He drove Uncle Trent and Aunt Floriana to their respective studios every day but, unfortunately, wasn’t usually available to get the rest of us wherever we needed to be going.  That was why I was always riding around on the bus.

Parker Perkins always struck me as a furtive character, one I’d caught listening at doors to try and overhear some kind of information that might lead him to land a starring role. Since he had the face of a weasel, his prospects as a leading man were slim, but he fervently believed he’d one day become the next Tyrone Power.  He stayed inside the house with us in a room of his own in our attic. I wished there was someplace else where we could lodge him because he didn’t seem one shred trustworthy.

And Aunt Floriana’s dragon lady of a mother, Freida Frimmer from South Dakota, had ensconced herself here, too.  Freida spoke with a heavy western twang and tried to rule over all of the rest of us, though no one took her seriously, so most of the time it didn’t work. 

The trouble began, once again, when Clover’s father, Jimmy Carmody the agent, got her an audition for a major upcoming movie.

I rather liked Jimmy Carmody.  He had twinkling blue eyes and a ready smile, and somehow he never struck me as desperate, like so many others around here did.  Maybe that was because Jimmy Carmody wasn’t an actor.  He was a talent agent and therefore he lived above the scuffle.

Aunt Floriana heard about the audition and hit the roof.

I came in off the bus after a long day of sorting out costumes at the studio where I worked to find Floriana standing in the living room, dressed in a frightfully expensive powder blue Chanel suit and her best royal blue and chartreuse silk scarf, pacing back and forth like a ping-pong ball and going completely berserk.  I’d never seen anything quite like it, even from her.  And that was some statement.

"What do you mean you’re auditioning for The Garden Maze?  You of all people?  Floriana was all but screaming at a cowering Clover.  That’s going to be Grand Manor Studio’s biggest hit of the year!  They’re going to want a major star for that, not some little twitty upstart like you!"

That you.  Floriana pronounced it with sheer venom, and drew it out into a word five syllables long, saying it more like, yee-ee-ee-ee-ewwww.

This was the way I found her, standing up and screeching at her own daughter, in the middle of our outwardly appearing cozy Southwestern-themed living room that had been put together by a high-priced interior designer.

The movie The Garden Maze concerned the dead body of a man found shot by the burbling fountain in the middle of the boxwood maze of a wealthy owner’s home during a wedding celebration.  The dead man was a rival for the affections of the bride, who chose to marry somebody else, and the intrigue started from there, with assumptions going in the wrong direction about the groom having done it. I knew all about it because Grand Manor Studios was where I worked.

A new dark and handsome actor who was primed to become the next national heartthrob, Mason Wentworth, was playing the groom.  Clover was up for the role of Annabelle, the bride, who was supposed to be seventeen, still in high school but visibly pregnant, and therefore she had to marry.

Daddy is my agent, Clover tried to get a word in edgewise, and he’s arranged it for me, and –

Daddy, Floriana scoffed, "your worthless daddy, Jimmy goddamned Carmody, is also my ex, and he’s only sending you up to Grand Manor Studios as his latest attempt to kick me in the teeth for dumping him when you were a baby!  Don’t you fall for it or ever forget it!  This is his kick in