Author: rmatzen

Award-winning author of the international bestseller "Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II" as well as "Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe" in 2016, "Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3" in 2014, "Errol & Olivia" in 2011, "Errol Flynn Slept Here" with Michael Mazzone in 2009, and three other books.

Masters of Fear

Callum Turner portrayed the real flier John Egan and Austin Butler the real Buck Cleven.

***Check out the fun exercise I was asked to complete at Shepherd.com regarding my latest book,
Season of the Gods, the true story of how the screen classic Casablanca came to be.***

I admit to some skepticism going into the Spielberg/Hanks miniseries, Masters of the Air. It had been so long in production through the pandemic that I figured the delays meant conceptual trouble—and disappointment for the viewer. Episode 1 seemed to confirm my suspicions, as the characters didn’t grab me and the darkness of frame and mumbling of dialogue hinted at trouble ahead.

You see, here’s the thing: I wrote a book called Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe that saw me dive deep into the history of the air war over Europe. I became all about the Eighth Air Force and the heavies and “little friends,” with the help of fliers in their 80s and 90s who still lived life at 20,000 feet battling Germans in their dreams and nightmares. All had flown with Stewart and knew him as a damn good command pilot. My research included visiting bomber bases in the English countryside and taking rides in B-17s and B-24s because I knew if I got one thing wrong in this story, the WWII buffs would nail me for it, and so I triple-checked every detail before publication.

I grew fond of Barry Keoghan as Lt. Curt Biddick, only to see him die in an exploding B-17. Note the vividly realistic bomber base in the background.

When you get that close to a topic, it leaves an impression. I have since been driven to watch the best Hollywood picture about the air war, Twelve O’Clock High, made in 1949, over and over. The other one to watch was Memphis Belle, the 1991 feature that for the first time showed us not aging Hollywood character actors populating the cast and bomber crew but young men in the cockpit and young men manning the guns.

OK, bear with me. The average age for the pilot of an American heavy bomber in World War II was 22. Twenty-two. The pilot was the commander of the ship and in charge of the other nine living, breathing young men onboard. If the 22-year-old didn’t do his job right, those boys in the plane were dead. If he did do his job right, there was still a very good chance they were dead because these kids took to the air every day against many dangers, most prominent of them the German air force—the Luftwaffe.

I found it fascinating as I wrote Mission to learn about all they faced. Jim Stewart didn’t fly the glamorous B-17 depicted in Masters of the Air. He flew the B-17’s ugly stepsister, the B-24, which could carry more bombs but was prone to fuel leaks. In short, you could blow up because of leaking gas at any point on a mission. If you managed to get to altitude in the horrible English weather, always cloudy, always damp, and if you didn’t collide with another bomber in the crowded skies, you’d get to altitude and put on an oxygen mask as the temps dropped to 30 or 40 below zero Fahrenheit. One of Jim’s contemporaries, Lucky Luckadoo of the “Bloody Hundredth” bomber group, said just the other day that it was so cold at altitude in European winter that if you took off your gloves for even a minute, you risked your fingers “self-amputating.” They would break off in the cold.

Nate Mann played Rosie Rosenthal, a fearless pilot who flew 25 missions to earn his ticket home—and re-upped because the job of defeating Hitler wasn’t done. Note the lack of a grotesque, foot-long icicle on the oxygen mask at altitude, one of the concessions to telling a concise story.

Now, back to Masters of the Air. For me, everything changed with episode 2, depicting the first mission of the 100th Bomb Group, which was one of the first units to take to the air to bomb continental Europe. They went up in a recently invented airplane, 10 men to a crew, and were slaughtered trying to bomb targets in various parts of Germany. Inhuman slaughter, yet these young guys kept going up, kept fighting Hitler, doing their part. And they kept getting shot down. It’s telling that the three WWII fliers who helped me write Mission all were shot down on missions to Germany. All three bailed out of a falling bomber on different missions and spent the latter part of the war in German prison camps.

Jim Stewart at left early in 1944 with the crew of the B-24 known as “Lady Shamrock.” *Masters of the Air* meticulously recreated the gear worn by each flier, which included a heated flying suit under shirt and pants, overalls, jacket, boots, gloves, a flak vest, headset, mae west, and parachute.

I’m finding that Masters of the Air tells a powerful story powerfully well. Sure, there are nits to pick, as with any historical miniseries, but to me, this is spellbinding stuff. All the characters depicted in the series are real; they lived and breathed—and many died—during World War II. It’s interesting to me that of all the perils depicted, the filmmakers didn’t or couldn’t take the time and expense to show the ice that formed around oxygen masks. So much ice that fliers would have to beat it off with their fists. But this bit of realism might, I guess, amount to a distraction as the film shows you how German fighters would zip by the planes and stitch them with machine gun fire as flak bursts detonated all about. These factors alone reveal what the guys in the planes went through. Young, young men fought that air war a year before the landings at Normandy. I dare to call them boys. Imagine for a moment that your own kid of 20 or 22 has to bear the responsibility of combat missions in a plane that a few years earlier had existed only on drawing boards. For a stretch, the fliers, these boys and young men, were the only Americans fighting in Europe, doing so as described—at 20,000 feet and 40 below.

Ncuti Gatwa played 2nd Lt. Robert Daniels of the 332nd Fighter Group, better known as the Red Tails and Tuskegee Air Men. Daniels was shot down in a mission over Marseilles and then a prisoner in Luft Stalag 3.

Masters of the Air manages to cover a lot of story threads, from the psychological toll of the missions to the grief of losing friends, from the fliers who bailed out and evaded capture with the help of the various resistance movements to those who ended up in German prison camps. In episode 8 we meet the Tuskegee Airmen of the 332^nd Fighter Squadron and I was glad to see them. Welcome to the war, boys! Welcome to this series, showing us what it was like for black fliers doing their part and facing a cold reception after they had been shot down and arrived at Luft Stalag 3. Sometimes you barely get to know characters before they die in battle, but guess what—that was their experience, too. You met a guy yesterday, and today he died in an exploding plane.

I’ll be sorry when Masters of the Air ends with episode 9. It has been an emotional experience for me as an author who listened to stories from men who lived this part of the war; an author who tried to do those stories justice in Mission. How did any of these fliers master their fear to climb into those planes time and again, knowing the odds? They did it for freedom, for democracy—ideals that have become so fractured in our modern day. But Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks clearly understood these concepts when they took on the mission of giving us Masters of the Air, which provides a visceral look at what the young men of the U.S. Army Air Forces endured on the long haul to victory in Europe.

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Givin’ It All Away*

So you say you haven’t yet read Season of the Gods—the novel about how Casablanca came to be? Would it pique your interest if you learned that a major Hollywood production company is now attached to this story and enthusiastic about its possibilities as a feature motion picture? Would it poke you in the ribs if you learned of a sweepstakes underway on Red Carpet Crash that includes five finalist prize packs and one grand prize winner of a set of replica letters of transit and other key documents from Casablanca? I kid you not—the grand prize is the letters of transit (see photo above for a glimpse), and also Ilsa’s rain-smeared letter to Rick and other Casablanca papers.

A photo of the #Casablancalettersoftransit and other documents critical to the film. — The grand prize set of *Casablanca* documents.

Here’s the finalist prize pack:

Signed copy of Season of the Gods
Casablanca Blu-ray loaded with special features
Casablanca t-shirt
Rick’s Café Americain matchbook
Season of the Gods bookmark

And the grand prize winner gets all that PLUS the set of replica Casablanca documents, including the letters of transit.

To enter, visit Red Carpet Crash today—the sweepstakes ends Friday, February 2.

Just as a quick reminder, Season of the Gods is 100 percent fact-based and tells the story of Irene Lee, Warner Bros. story editor (the only female executive in the company) who finds an orphan stage play and engineers its purchase by the studio’s executive producer, Hal Wallis. Irene’s a plucky one, five-foot-nothing and holding her own in misogynistic Hollywood. She serves as a de facto producer of Casablanca even though Hal Wallis won’t give Irene, a mere female, that title. She works with the crazy brother screenwriting team of Phil and Julie Epstein to craft the story and then with other writers brought in—Howard Koch and Casey Robinson. And she finds love along the way, or rather doubts she has found love when she considers her “junkyard of a love life.” I have such great fondness for the characters in the book, not only empathic Phil Epstein and his edgy brother Julie, but also Dooley Wilson, Hollywood novice in a white man’s world and dreaming of buying his wife a house; Claude Rains the easy-going roué; Conrad Veidt the elegant German expat eager to play Nazis and expose their evil; dark and cynical morphine addict Peter Lorre; gentle giant Sydney Greenstreet; Aaron Diamond, the New York carpet buyer who’s crazy about Irene; and Joy Page, Jack Warner’s stepdaughter who sees a role in Casablanca as a potential escape route from her difficult life at the Warner mansion, dubbed “1801” for its street address on Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills. And the backdrop. Oh, that backdrop. The dark months after Pearl Harbor when U.S. coastlines braced for invasion and defeat after defeat of Allied forces blasted across the headlines.

Plucky, little-documented Irene Lee, the real hero of *Casablanca*.

I guess you can tell … I like this book. And I’m not alone. Season of the Gods has gotten some great ink, from Publishers Weekly BookLife (an Editor’s Pick), from Kirkus Reviews (which called it “EPIC”), and most recently from Annette Bochenek’s website, Hometowns to Hollywood. The Historical Novel Society interviewed me about the book, as did Grace Collins for her True Stories of Tinseltown podcast. I always felt that I wasn’t going to take the world of fiction by storm and that this would be a marathon; not a sprint. Fiction is a place bulging with seasoned talent and passionate readers who know what they want and what they like, and who am I but a nonfiction author daring to cross over with an idea that came from who knows where?

The fact that Hollywood likes the book is a potential game changer. No kidding, they signed me up as soon as they received and devoured the copies sent over. That said, this company-that-must-not-be-named now controls the film rights and it’s up them to announce the deal or not, and to make a movie or not. We shall see what we shall see, but all I can say to these great people is: Thank you for believing in this story.

To order Season of the Gods, visit Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or if you favor the independent booksellers (and want a discount), Bookshop.org.

As always, thank you for checking in. See you at the movies—the golden age movies, that is. And please let all your friends know about the sweepstakes!

__________

*Givin’ It All Away was the greatest song by a solid 1970s band called Bachman Turner Overdrive. When I typed this for the title, I thought OMG, remember that song? I’ve got to go listen to that song, which I hadn’t heard in ages. And, wow, what a blast from the past. “You took my heart/And you went away/We said goodbye/And we’re givin’ it all away.” Still a great song—all the fury of love gone wrong. (Just so you don’t think I’m a Johnny One Note who only writes about wartime Hollywood. Rock on, my friends.)

Playing It Safe

The first choice of Hal Wallis: Hazel Scott.

I was watching Turner Classic Movies (U.S.) yesterday and heard Dave Karger’s introduction of Show Boat, MGM’s 1951 adaptation of a Broadway musical based on a 1926 bestselling novel by Edna Ferber. The plot of Show Boat concerns a traveling troupe of entertainers on the Mississippi River, one of whom is singer Julie LaVerne, part Caucasian and part Black. Karger explained that Lena Horne was originally penciled in as Julie because she had performed a number from Show Boat in the 1946 MGM musical, Till the Clouds Roll By. But MGM executives worried about putting a Black actress in such a pivotal role in a theatrical release and opted instead to cast Ava Gardner, all white, in the role. And at that moment I exclaimed to Dave Karger on the TV, “Why, those chicken shits!”

It’s difficult today to comprehend a United States in 1951 where Black people couldn’t be seen as equals in Hollywood productions. U.S. culture of the time still had white restrooms and “Colored” restrooms, white swimming pools and Colored swimming pools. It was the time of the Green Book and would stay that way for another generation!

But, to me, Louis B. Mayer and his MGM brethren were chickenshits because Hal Wallis, executive producer at Warner Bros., had already stormed this beach, had already claimed this ground, had already planted the flag of equal rights by daring to show a Black character as equal to white when Wallis had said “Screw it” and cast Dooley Wilson as Rick Blaine’s best friend in Casablanca a whopping nine years before Show Boat entered production.

Wallis then deferred to up-and-coming Lena Horne.

As detailed in Season of the Gods, Wallis and his team had bought the stage play “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” which featured “Sam the Rabbit” as a key character, a flamboyant Black entertainer at Rick’s nightclub in Casablanca, French Morocco. Originally, Wallis’s inclination was to play up the flamboyant part by switching the Sam character to a Black female and his two choices for Sam were Hazel Scott, gorgeous multi-talented 20-year-old sensation then taking New York by storm, or the aforementioned Lena Horne, then beginning her career in Sunset Strip venues.

I’ll rely on you to read the debates in Season of the Gods and move on to the next plan, which was to cast Clarence Muse, dependable Colored stereotype, as Rick’s more-or-less second banana, this when early script drafts of Casablanca by Phil and Julie Epstein relied more on humor and less on romance. But Muse didn’t fit the evolving storyline, and Muse had been seen and seen and seen in this one type of role. Overseen. Wallis wanted more out of what was rapidly becoming a Very Important Picture as the world unraveled and Northern Africa hit the headlines. In the opinion of Hal Wallis, if young Black men were willing to go and die fighting the Axis powers in the name of freedom, then Black people could be seen as equals in Warner Bros. pictures.

Sam #3, the safe choice: character man Clarence Muse.

Cue more debates in Season of the Gods, as Wallis was warned he could “lose the South,” a critical market for box office returns, if he dared cast a Black man as equal to whites. Southern audience members could get up and walk out, demand their money back, and tell all their friends to stay away. This was the same American South that protested the working title of a George M. Cohan biopic then in production at Warner Bros., Yankee Doodle Dandy, because it dared to include the word “yankee” in the title! This, my friends, was the screwed up world of 1942: Americans were fighting racist authoritarianism overseas while ignoring their own racism at home.

Wallis saw it, and Wallis made a stand. He eschewed the stereotyped Clarence Muse and cast a well-worn, globetrotting entertainer named Dooley Wilson as Sam. I attempted to try to see the world of that time through Dooley’s eyes in the narrative of Season of the Gods and that in itself proved a surprising experience. Dooley just wanted to get by, so he looked away from the racism, figuratively and also literally, as he avoided eye contact with the people he met at Paramount and Warner Bros. But oh, the surprise in store for Dooley when he began production of Casablanca. You want me to WHAT? Underplay? He couldn’t believe it as his first couple of roles in Hollywood had been as a porter and a butler, doing the usual wide-eyed comic takes.

Casablanca holds up so well today because of the truth it presents. The people crammed into the lifeboat called Rick’s Café Americain—whether terrified Jews fleeing Hitler, a world-weary Black piano player, or a Czech freedom fighter and his wife—are just people trying to survive, trying to find peace. Wallis had gambled and won; his picture became everything envisioned and much, much more. I don’t know how many people walked out in the South, but that number was offset many times over by box office in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. Casablanca scored big on release in 1943, then again in 1949 and 1956 reissues, then endured on television.

The real Sam: new-to-Hollywood Dooley Wilson.

Yes, Show Boat “played it safe” in 1951 by casting Ava Gardner in a leading role instead of Lena Horne. And yes, groundbreaking Warner Bros. (minus Hal Wallis, who had moved on) would also play it safe in 1957 when time came to cast for Band of Angels, an antebellum story set in Louisiana. In the role of half-Black heroine Amantha Starr, Warner Bros. cast Yvonne De Carlo instead of, say, Dorothy Dandridge in the part because the world wasn’t ready for Clark Gable to be kissing Dorothy Dandridge. What if they walked out in the South?! (I will acknowledge progress made by 1957 in casting Sidney Poitier in a key role.)

So, sure, the world has changed, and yet the world hasn’t changed. There’s still hate because of the color of your skin or your ethnic heritage or the god you worship. And there’s still a burning need for courage like that displayed by Hal Wallis, who dared to do the right thing back in 1942.

Season of the Gods: A Novel is now available from Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Bookshop.org, and other booksellers.

Taking it to a higher plane

A good friend and colleague of mine picked up a sign on the WGA picket line in Hollywood the other day. That sign read on one side: AI WILL NEVER GIVE YOU and on the other side: CASABLANCA. He sent me a video showing the two sides of the poster because he knows how much I’ve been into Casablanca lately due to my new novel, Season of the Gods—which he had read in draft form months ago, offering key feedback for improvement.

Only through a historical novel could I get as close as I needed to get to the story of how Casablanca came to be. I wanted to understand its writers, Julie and Phil Epstein—that’s where this project started. Who were these guys who have already been lost to history except for a few well-worn anecdotes that have been spun into implausibility over the decades? Once, the Epsteins—“the boys” as everyone on the Warner Bros. lot knew them—were young, vital, ambitious, and living by their own code—and I needed to travel back there and walk around Hollywood with these guys to grasp the evolution of a masterpiece day by day.

Read the September 23 article in Air Mail.

Why can’t AI ever give you Casablanca? You’ll find all the reasons in Season of the Gods. A high school teacher named Murray Burnett wrote the stage play on which the film was based. On Broadway it didn’t need to contend with Hollywood’s morality code, and Warner Bros. story editor Irene Lee, nicknamed “Renie,” looked past the code when she purchased the play, figuring her writers would simply adapt key parts of the story and junk the rest.

Cue the hand-wringing.

Two veteran studio writers were assigned to the project and hit a brick wall because of the illicit sex that formed the foundation of the story. But the Epstein brothers, twins then age 32 and ready to conquer the world, all but begged production boss Hal Wallis for the assignment when the first two writers failed. Wallis granted the Epsteins’ wish and then they too got stuck. A third writer, political idealist Howard Koch, came aboard for new angles, and then a fourth writer, studio Cadillac Casey Robinson, stepped in and offered critique on the work of the other three. And still these four highly skilled craftsmen couldn’t figure it out.

Julius and Philip Epstein, who appear in Season of the Gods, a novel about Casablanca by Robert Matzen — Julius Epstein (left) and his twin brother, Phil, ready to take on the world.

Cue the ticking time bomb.

Irene Lee had sold Hal Wallis on the timeliness of a story set in North Africa, where Montgomery was battling Rommel. Wallis wedged the property he had retitled Casablanca into an already crammed production schedule. He couldn’t find actors—they were already booked on the other productions. He couldn’t build much in the way of sets or use real airplanes—wartime restrictions. All he knew was he had to make a movie and get it cut and release it, and the goddamn writers were holding him up! He gritted his teeth and started shooting a movie based on a partial script and kept a gun to the backs of his writers to figure out the ending!

Irene Lee, who appears in Season of the Gods, a novel about Casablanca by Robert Matzen — Warner Bros. Story Editor Irene Lee, who championed development of *Casablanca*.

Imagine you’re a fly on the wall of those story conferences, particularly the last one when Renie and her four writers had literally reached the end of the runway and would shoot something in the morning to represent the end of the story. They had filmed everything but the airport climax, and it had to make sense for the German to die, the freedom fighter to escape, the freedom fighter’s wife to leave the hero, and the hero to walk away free and clear.

As my WGA screenwriter friend said yesterday, “One of the things I find so interesting about your book is that it really is a celebration of the writing process—Casablanca, with its myriad contributors, seems like an early, unintentional example of the value of the writers’ room that is so much at issue.”

Could AI have reasoned out the ending to Casablanca? Could AI have written all the great lines the Epsteins created, lines that everyday people around the world have repeated on the job or at the dinner table for 80 years and counting? These zingers charm your pants off because you can’t see them coming. They’re human, revealing, self-deprecating, and ironic.

Season of the Gods, a novel about Casablanca by Robert Matzen — Ludwig Stössel, Ilka Grüning, and S.Z. Sakall, three famous European actors who had been driven to America by the Nazi regime. All were taken into the production at the urging of director Michael Curtiz.

Season of the Gods takes you inside studio walls, inside the writers’ room, inside the soundstage. You will meet the Epsteins, Renie, Wallis, Koch, Robinson, Bogart, Bergman, Lorre, and a dozen others who made this masterpiece come together despite the odds. You’ll walk a mile in the shoes of Dooley Wilson, watch refugees from Europe join the cast and weigh it down with loss and sadness, and learn how the Epsteins’ secretary saved the day at the very last moment. You will relive fateful months at the beginning of World War II, and you will understand for the first time exactly why we all love Casablanca so much—because of those who rose to a higher plane and brought it to the world.

Season of the Gods: A Novel, from GoodKnight Books.

Glendale Forever

Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

I once wrote a book called Fireball about an actress named Carole Lombard. Just to give you an idea of the theme, America’s preeminent Hollywood historian Leonard Maltin, as much as he loves Carole Lombard, never could crack Fireball open because it’s about, in part, her grisly death in a plane crash. Don’t get me wrong—Fireball is indeed part forensics study as recovery teams tried to clean up a crash scene where 23 people died and also understand how that crash happened. But more than anything, Fireball is a love story.

The experience of Fireball came back to me kaleidoscopically the other day as I watched the 1932 Paramount pre-Code picture No Man of Her Own, which starred a hot newcomer to the screen, Clark Gable, then age 31, and Paramount’s slowly rising star, Carole Lombard, then not quite 24. Given the fact this picture is now 91 years old, I understand if you don’t know who either of these people were but suffice to say Gable had burst on the scene in 1930, first portraying a convict in a stage play and then a love ’em and leave ’em tough guy in a number of movies made at MGM. Carole Lombard, meanwhile, had managed to land a contract at Paramount Pictures and was at this time struggling to find her footing. I think it’s fair to say early on she possessed mediocre talent balanced with buckets of natural charm.

MGM loaned Gable to Paramount so he could appear with Lombard and give her a career boost in one of those ridiculously plotted melodramas of the period; he plays a card sharp who goes on the lam from New York City and in the rural town of Glendale meets librarian Lombard. Lickety-split she falls in love with him and they wed on a bet, after which for 70 plodding moments we think how can this stupid thing ever work itself out, because by the nature of this kind of star vehicle, they have to live happily ever after.

Don’t worry—I don’t write movie reviews. The points I want to make are spooky points because there are spooky aspects about No Man of Her Own given that the love story in Fireball concerns these very same people, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. When they made this picture 91 years ago, they didn’t know each other, and both were on their best behavior. Gable was married by convenience to a much older society matron, and Lombard was one year into a miserable marriage with a much older actor. Sparks between Clark and Carole didn’t fly in real life any more than they flew onscreen. Once in a while, you can see a glimmer of chemistry between them as the film lumbers along, but mostly they seem to be workers punching a timeclock.

In the picture she is the mature, stable, down-to-earth woman who, when she learns that her husband is a scoundrel who fleeces people in card games, doesn’t leave him. She chooses to stay and become his moral compass, which is exactly what Carole Lombard became for Clark Gable when they married seven years later and she discovered he was a scoundrel who had sex with every willing woman in Hollywood—and women threw themselves at Clark Gable every day because he was then considered “King of the Movies” and the most desirable man in the continent if not the world.

As described in Fireball, Lombard knew what she had gotten when marrying Gable: he was in demand and something of a scoundrel, but just like her character in the movie, she saw good points as well and determined to steer him on a navigable course. But real life wasn’t as clean and simple as a 1932 romantic melodrama, Carole learned when her husband began seeing a sexy starlet named Lana Turner who was just past her teens but already worldly. Suddenly, the bargain Carole had made took a Faustian turn that led directly to her death in flames on the mountain, as you will read in Fireball.

It struck me while watching No Man of Her Own how much the art of 1932 mirrored real life in 1941 as the dutiful wife stuck by her man through thick and thin until a particular other woman came along. It’s no stretch of the imagination to believe that a conversation like the one at a pivotal point in the movie played out at various points in real life.

Her: Don’t you know this had to happen sooner or later?

Him: What had to happen?

Her: Me finding out you’re a cheat.

Him: Don’t say that to me!

Her: I’ve been fighting the thought for weeks.

Him: My affairs are my own. Don’t butt into them!

Her: I thought we were married, and your affairs were mine.

This exchange written for actors in 1932 captures the dark side of the Gable-Lombard relationship. Other dialogue is downright chilling, as when they talk about settling down in Glendale, which in the movie is a fictional town somewhere in the east, maybe but probably not Glendale in the Queens borough of New York. In real life, a town by the name of Glendale is exactly where these two actors reside today, side by side in Glendale, California, in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Fun fact: Carole Lombard comes back to life for an appearance in my new book, Season of the Gods, which will be released on October 3, 2023.

Almost Ilsa

Have I mentioned that I’ve written a historical novel? Season of the Gods follows real people and actual events from 1941 and ’42, taking you inside the heads of key players at Warner Bros. studio during the golden age of Hollywood. The rough draft hit around 180,000 words and about 40,000 words got cut along the way, meaning entire story threads were lost. One of those storylines involved Michèle Morgan, an actress who gained a reputation in France working with international sensation Jean Gabin; Morgan came to the United States in 1941, after the Nazi occupation of France and before U.S. entry in WWII.

You probably have no idea how close Casablanca came to seeing Michèle Morgan as Ilsa Lund, with the only hang-up her asking price—RKO, which owned her contract, demanded $55,000 and wouldn’t budge; Ingrid Bergman, under contract to David O. Selznick, would cost only $25,000. Casablanca producer Hal Wallis had seen Morgan and Paul Henreid in the RKO wartime drama Joan of Paris during a screening at the Warner studio, where he was taken with both leading players. Morgan was a petite 21-year-old with topaz blue eyes who played well beyond her chronological age. In fact, when Paul Henreid first heard he would be working with Morgan in Joan of Paris, his mouth watered just thinking of the French sexpot. But meeting her in person he thought, My God, she’s just a young girl!

Morgan’s story fascinates me. RKO, the studio that had teamed Astaire and Rogers, imported Michèle because of her uniqueness, and then, once she arrived in Hollywood, her handlers worked tirelessly to obliterate that uniqueness. Change how you talk, how you walk, how you think, to become the French-girl stereotype that Americans expect. And she went through it alone, completely alone, a stranger in a strange land.

I believe Michéle Morgan would have been a dynamite Ilsa, whether walking into Rick’s Café Americain to knock Rick right off his pins, or hold a gun on him, or walk out of his life to board the plane for Lisbon. She would have been more vulnerable than the physically imposing Bergman, and edgier because of nerves that plagued Michèle’s career in the United States.

*At left, Morgan at the front door of her new home in 1942; at right, Sharon Tate there 26 years later.*

But the fact Michèle Morgan tested for and almost landed the role of Ilsa is only half the reason she worked her way into the storyline of Season of the Gods. The other involves the paranormal, and unspeakable evil, in the modest farmhouse Michèle built in November of 1941. The address was 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, just off Benedict Canyon. In her autobiography, published in France, Morgan tells how her agent had advised she place her a new house on available cliff-side land at the end of a quiet street because its dramatic location would make good publicity, and indeed, many movie star magazines depicted every angle of the interior and exterior. However, in 1941, the spot was also remote. Very remote. She said, “This wild hill above Beverly Hills was quite isolated. I faced the former estate of Rudolf Valentino [Falcon Lair]. At the bend in the canyon was Ray Milland’s home, closer to Harold Lloyd’s. Still, I would have had time to scream for an hour and die 20 times before anyone heard me.”

*Michèle poses in just about the spot Sharon would be found.*

Despite the fact that the home was new construction and smelled of fresh-cut lumber, things went bump in the night immediately after move-in. She said, “In vain I reason with myself, tell myself that a new house, barely completed, cannot be haunted, but I am afraid.” It seemed logical there were prowlers—but no one was ever seen. She bought a guard dog, a Great Dane that took over the house but turned out to be as frightened as she was. Finally, her pal Madeleine LeBeau, another young French actress of only 18, moved in with Michèle so both could experience what they finally determined were ghosts. And, at that time, LeBeau was working on Casablanca as Rick’s friend with benefits, making another interesting storyline—LeBeau was cast in Casablanca while her friend Michèle was not—that I ultimately had to cut because of the length of the narrative.

Please note that the dog pictured is not the Great Dane that would sequester himself in her bedroom and bare fangs when she tried to reclaim her bed. As a result, she slept on the couch–the better to hear bumps in the night.

After Michèle Morgan married and sold the house, many Hollywood celebrities lived there as renters, including Lillian Gish, Cary Grant and his bride Dyan Cannon, and later, record producer Terry Melcher and his girlfriend Candice Bergen. It was during this time that a young musician named Charles Manson first stopped by the place, and aficionados of true crime know 10050 Cielo Drive all too well: on August 8, 1969, the Manson family would strike here and kill Sharon Tate and her friends Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski, along with random visitor Steven Parent.

Michèle Morgan returned to France after the war and enjoyed a long and decorated cinematic career. In 1969, when she heard where Sharon Tate had been murdered, Michèle was shocked but not surprised. In her book she asked, “How could a house without a past, which I had built, be haunted by its future?” An intriguing question, Michèle. I wonder that myself.

Season of the Gods will be released by GoodKnight Books on October 3, 2023.

Miracle Baby

I’ve written a novel. I didn’t plan on writing a novel and didn’t have any ambition to write one. It’s like out of the blue I learned I was pregnant and out popped this historical novel. If you ever read the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, this novel is like that. Except instead of being about real-life characters fighting the battle of Gettysburg, it’s about Warner Bros. in 1942…and features all real-life characters fighting studio battles while they live their lives at the beginning of U.S. involvement in World War II.

It’s called Season of the Gods, which is an allusion to the power held by Hal Wallis as the Zeus of his Burbank Olympos, and all the lesser gods who schemed and feuded in the name of art on the one hand, and commerce on the other. Reactions to date from Hollywood experts who had read the manuscript are positive. All systems are go.

I’ve learned plenty about the craft of fiction in the last year courtesy of this experience. My knuckles are black and blue from being rapped by my editor for using nonfiction techniques instead of fiction techniques. I’d write a biographical paragraph and, WHAP! Right across the knuckles. I’d summarize some episode or other and, WHAP! Another one across the knuckles. Don’t summarize, she’d say. Live the moments. It’s almost like I wrote the novel twice, once the wrong way, and then again the right way.

I knew what I wanted the story to be about, but I didn’t know that once characters come to life, they have minds of their own and suddenly what you thought was going to happen doesn’t happen, or doesn’t happen the way you figured it would. And that led to the most fun I’ve ever had writing, finding out what these people would say or do next.

Season of the Gods concerns how a woman executive named Irene Lee (yes, a woman executive at Warner Bros.) had a funny feeling about an unproduced stage play and approached Hal Wallis about buying it. He had just bought rights to The Man Who Came to Dinner and was negotiating for Watch on the Rhine, so when Wallis hears it’s a stage play out of New York, he asks Lee, “Which theater? Who’s starring?” She confesses it’s unproduced and he says, “No track record? No stars? No press? Pass.” But Lee’s a sharp cookie and develops her own game plan to work the system and get the property in the door. Then she’s involved every step of the way through all the twists and turns and politics and serendipity and genius day by day as the unproduced stage play becomes an ever-more-important component in the Warner Bros. production schedule for 1942.

Irene Lee had served as story editor at Warner Bros. for eight years at this time. She stood five-foot-nothing and weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet, but by age 31 was going toe to toe with Wallis and with the chief himself, Jack Warner. Irene sought to become a producer—which was unheard of at the time, a woman producer—and even after Wallis shot the idea down, she became the de facto producer of her pet project, proving you shouldn’t get in Irene Lee’s way.

Her unproduced stage play arrived at the studio on Monday, December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, and within two months, Hal Wallis had changed his mind about moving forward with it, despite the fact the play had no track record, or stars, or press, and its plot about all manner of illicit sex couldn’t be filmed because of censorship restrictions. The idea and setting were too good to pass up, and the concept could be adapted as a war picture, which was key because the day after Pearl Harbor, the United States and Japan were at war, and a couple of days later came a U.S. declaration of war against Germany.

As the novel unfolds, everyone in Hollywood worries about a Japanese invasion every moment. Were the carriers that had taken out Pearl Harbor going to steam east and flatten Los Angeles? Nobody knew. And, in fact, Japanese submarines did shell the coast in January, so Californians had reason to worry.

Throughout pre-production of Irene’s picture, the Allies were losing the war. It wasn’t until after cameras rolled, after a very long stretch of script development, that the U.S. fleet kicked Yamamoto’s ass at the battle of Midway, and so up until that moment in June 1942, nobody from Hal Wallis and Irene Lee on down knew if their movie would make it to release, or if America would already be beaten. All they knew for sure was that the world needed this story she had found. As the passage of time proved, the world did indeed need it, and continues to need it. Season of the Gods shows how it all happened. I guess it’s sort of one miracle baby describing another miracle baby. Cool.

Season of the Gods will be published by GoodKnight Books, with release on October 3, 2023.

Finding Audrey

A while back I received an email from Brenda Janowitz, author of The Grace Kelly Dress, The Liz Taylor Ring, and six other books. Brenda explained that she had found inspiration for her new novel in part from my book Dutch Girl, which was nice to hear, although at the time I couldn’t imagine what she meant. Brenda sent along an advance reading copy of this new book, called The Audrey Hepburn Estate, and I wanted to pass along my thoughts about a reading experience that, for me, touched all the bases.

The story will be familiar to fans of Hepburn’s filmography: the parents of Emma Jansen worked for a family that owned a Long Island estate called Rolling Hill and Emma grew up living over its garage. Years later she returns to the grand house as it’s about to be torn down, setting off an adventure with childhood friends, including the grandson of the estate owners and the son of their driver. Dark memories are confronted and secrets revealed along the way and at various points, the plot evokes parallels to the life of Audrey Hepburn or characters she played.

As you can imagine, I’m all about historic preservation and loved the subplot about passionate attempts to save the crumbling Rolling Hill mansion. Just reading about the place and those dedicated to keeping it standing made me want to join the effort because who needs yet more luxury condos or another apartment building? Must we always bulldoze the past in the name of commerce? Oh, it’s in disrepair so we might as well flatten the old building. I’ve gotten involved in many efforts to preserve historic places, whether it’s a home or part of an old fort or a viewshed as once experienced by George Washington; sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. To me this aspect of the plot really resonated.

But there were still more goodies in store—mysteries related to Rolling Hill connecting back to the Netherlands in World War II, and secret passages in the old mansion, and was the place in fact haunted? So, what do you get when you round all the bases; that’s right, you hit a home run, and that was the treat Brenda Janowitz gave me. She handed me a page-turner of a book inspired in many ways by Audrey Hepburn, cleverly so, with a satisfying result. Time and again I smiled at a subtle Audrey allusion and then realized at book’s end that Brenda had included a “Finding Audrey Hepburn in The Audrey Hepburn Estate” epilogue taking the reader chapter by chapter through Hepburn references, parallels, and Easter eggs. I thought to myself, what a great device—the reader ends up not only with an entertaining novel but also an Audrey Hepburn primer, and I have no doubt Audrey herself would have been enchanted by this story because she loved to read and loved a great mystery.

The Audrey Hepburn Estate by Brenda Janowitz will be released in the United States on April 18, 2023. Good luck with it, Brenda, and thank you for an evocative reading experience that will inspire a new generation to learn more about one of the most inspiring people of the twentieth century.

Like Audrey’s character in *Sabrina*, Emma once lived above the garage of a grand estate.

Reunion

I was reminded how much I miss Audrey Hepburn the other day when The Nun’s Story played in the U.S. on TCM. As you probably know if you’re a Hepburn fan, she never considered herself an actress and always classified herself a dancer. If she’d had her druthers, she’d have been a Balanchine girl, or at the very least a choreographer, but fate had other plans and thrust her into the limelight as an actress who occasionally enjoyed opportunities to dance in her films.

The book was a big deal at around the time of the film’s release.

I lived with Audrey Hepburn for five years writing first Dutch Girl and then Warrior, and that’s why I say I miss her. Any author will tell you that strong relationships are formed during the creation of a biography and you’re living with your subject, hearing her voice, walking in her footsteps, making sense of her decisions—and sometimes yelling at her, “You fool! Don’t do that!”

Audrey was one tough woman, hardened by all the trials of life smack-dab in the middle of a world war. She lived by instinct, and I can argue instinct was her superpower because she used her instincts to make a living as an actress and mold her own personality into whatever character she portrayed, even without formal stage training as an actress.

And there it all was in The Nun’s Story, where the non-Catholic Audrey portrayed long-suffering Sister Luke, a woman of passion and talent trying to live a life of humble obedience serving others in Europe and Africa. It’s a beautiful performance, always understated, with never a false step that I could see, and it earned her an Academy Award nomination and a Best Actress award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

If you’ve read Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II, you know what Audrey endured in the war. The parallels in the plot of The Nun’s Story always startle me—in the last reel of the picture, World War II breaks out in Europe and Sister Luke is stationed in the Netherlands when the Germans march in. We hear that the Nazis have swept through Holland and forced a capitulation, and then that Sister Luke’s father has died in the fighting. When another nun starts to work for the Dutch Resistance, Sister Luke tries to look the other way but still sanctions the actions of her colleague. Finally, Sister Luke leaves the order so she can do her own fighting on the outside, and the last shot we see is this young woman walking out into the streets of the Netherlands toward an uncertain future.

Peter Finch plays a doctor in the Belgian Congo for whom Sister Luke develops feelings, especially after he helps her past a near-fatal bout of tuberculosis.

Imagine what she was thinking as she made this picture. Imagine her motivations for these scenes, as when German soldiers swarm onto the set. She had seen that uniform every day for years. Her uncle and cousin and many friends had been executed by men in that uniform. German soldiers had caused so much pain and hardship that the sight of those costumed extras, and the plot of invasion and death, could only have produced visceral reactions.

In preparation for making the picture, Audrey met with the author of the book The Nun’s Story, Kathryn Hulme, and through Hulme formed a friendship with Marie-Louise Habets, whose story was fictionalized by Hulme. Like Hepburn, Habets was born in Belgium and lived through the war in Europe. After leaving the convent, Habets did indeed join the Dutch Resistance, as did Audrey Hepburn. Until publication of Dutch Girl, the world didn’t fully grasp Audrey’s role in the war—after all, she was only 15 so what could she have done? Well, she did a lot, as it turned out, displaying toughness and discipline that would serve her through a variety of situations over a lifetime, including her work in The Nun’s Story. This was my third viewing of The Nun’s Story and I appreciate it now more than ever for reminding me of my very dear friend Audrey. We had some times together, you and I. They are with me always and I’ll cherish them, and you, forever.

Audrey was self-conscious about the bags under her eyes, but they served her well here as a nun under relentless pressure as both her health and faith begin to fail.

Going Camping

Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is my hero. She and I have shared the stage twice, the first time 20 years ago in Presidents Day interviews on KDKA Radio Pittsburgh talking about George Washington, and then more recently in a joint interview with Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Willie Geist on MSNBC’s Morning Joe discussing the holiday tradition of It’s a Wonderful Life and the circumstances of its creation just after World War II. Recently I saw Doris on C-Span as she donated the DKG and Richard Goodwin papers to the University of Texas at Austin Library. Doris said something to the effect that “it breaks my heart” that so few people are studying history these days. It breaks mine, too. And it probably breaks yours, because if you read my columns you are, de facto, a history-lover.

History’s my thing. I’d much rather retrace old footsteps than blaze a trail of my own. When I go to Gettysburg, I hear the guns. When I visit Warner Bros., they’re making The Adventures of Robin Hood and Casablanca. On a street here in my hometown, I fixate on the spot where the Flathead Gang blew up an armored car in 1927. If you don’t get history, my friend, you can rest assured that I won’t get you.

Recently I was invited to appear on a holiday edition of History Camp, an hour-long video interview series, discussing Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe and the circumstances around the making of It’s a Wonderful Life. This show will air Thursday, December 22, at 8 p.m. ET.

It’s an understatement to say that I admire the work of this nonprofit, The Pursuit of History, which stages on-location workshops at historic sites in Boston, Philadelphia, and other places, and provides virtual events, including its weekly author interview series. A quote on their website states, “We create and present these innovative programs because we believe that more people gaining a broader understanding of history has never been more important.” I share this belief, that the accumulated knowledge and wisdom provided by history can guide us in uncertain times—like now. I encourage you to sign up for their emails, donate to the cause, and begin walking in historic footsteps. Pursue history with this group, from the Egypt of Tutankhamun to Radio City Music Hall, from Valley Forge to Camp David. These people believe in preserving the past, just as I believe, and you probably believe. It’s common sense that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But learning about history is also Fun with a capital F. The best stories are the true stories, crazy twists of fate, people defying odds, and outcomes that changed the future of individuals and nations. Come on, take my hand. Let’s jump through the portal and revisit the past in The Pursuit of History.

Happy Holidays, everyone.