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Groom: Nathanael West, age 36 Bride: Eileen McKenney, age 26 Date: Friday, April 19, 1940 Location: Beverly Hills, California Ceremony: Performed by Judge Charles J. Griffin, mayor of Beverly Hills Reception: Dinner at Chasen’s. Close friends only Honeymoon: Oregon fishing trip planned for July-August. At Home: 6614 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood Find your moldy ashes parked in a Wall Street filing cabinet 20 years after your death. Find your moldy old ashes in a Baltimore parking lot for eternity. Find your novels selling for 25 cents at the P.S. 75 book fair. Discover your unsold novels in a dumpster behind P.S. 75. See your Bible listed on eBay for the ridiculous price of $7,500. Notice nobody buying your Bible at any price. Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, by Marion Meade. My first screen job was on a Columbia Pictures film, “Beauty Parlor,” destined for the cutting room floor. After that I worked on a bunch of pictures, many of them comedies but none that I can honestly recommend. Here are my Valentine’s Day picks for romantic comedies worth viewing: 1. Sweethearts (1938). Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in Victor Herbert’s sappy sentimental operetta. Screenplay by the one and only Dorothy Parker and her husband Allen Campbell, contributing writers Laura Perelman and her husband S.J. Perelman (my sister and brother in law). 2. The Thin Man (1934). Myrna Loy and William Powell succeed in solving a murder while stinking drunk. Nick and Nora Charles are a fantasy couple owing little (okay, nothing) to the real lives of my friends Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, who were never known for solving crimes, only drinking. 3. My Sister Eileen (1942). Rosalind Russell and Janet Blair. The love affair between two Ohio sisters– my gorgeous wife Eileen McKenney and her dumpy sister Ruth—and a basement apartment in Greenwich Village. Spawned 60 + years of copycats including “Sex and the City.” 4. The Front Page (1931). Pat O’ Brien and Adolphe Menjou are that famous same-sex twosome Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson. A Hecht and MacArthur special forever imitated, never surpassed. 5. The Cameraman (1928). Buster Keaton and Marcelline Day. Buster finds love and a new career in the movies. They don’t make them like this anymore. You’ll never notice it’s a “silent” film. 6. I’m No Angel (1933). Mae West and Cary Grant. Mae was Superangel until she was muzzled by the Production Code. Her comedies remain in the genius category. 7.The Lady Eve (1941). Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. Remember shipboard romances? Remember ships? Pure magic from the great Preston Sturges. [Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, by Marion Meade. Available now on Kindle. Paper edition March 1.] Q. Where did you get information? Did you interview my relatives? A. A few members of your family clearly are basket cases. Approached for their memories of you, they collapsed into screaming and frothing, and generally carried on like lunatics. Probably they had gone off their meds. Another explanation is that they really hate you. As far as I know, all the rest of your relatives hold you in the highest esteem. They spoke admiringly of your work, even the books they had not read. They expressed gratitude when my assistant Rebecca DiLiberto trekked to Mount Zion Cemetery with garden shears to tidy your grave. For example, I relied on Maxine, Nancy, Adam, and others. They conducted themselves like ladies and gentlemen by searching their memories, copying photos, and attending my store appearances. They sent sweet notes even when they disagreed with my interpretations. Others dug deep in their garages for your leftover belongings hoping to find buyers so that West artifacts could belong to the world. A first edition of The Day of the Locust is currently listed on eBay for $1,062.50. Your leather wallet, offered last year for $1,250, is no longer for sale. Possibly some wealthy collector had no problem with the price. Other than your family, many remarkable people contributed to the book. I learned a lot about you from Joe Schrank and his daughter Sarah Gold, Budd Schulberg, Alice Shepard’s daughter Linda Seifert, Al Hirschfeld’s widow Louise Cullman, Sid’s friend Leila Hadley Luce, and tons of kind individuals in Erwinna, Pennsylvania. Oddly, some of your relatives (now deceased) saw fit to destroy documents. I imagine this was done for your protection. Apparently there are skeletons in your closet that would have caused them embarrassment. But they believed themselves doing the right thing, and, hey, we do what we have to do. [Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, by Marion Meade. Available now on Kindle. Paper edition March 1.] Q. Why make such a big fuss over my driving? I was a pretty good driver. A. That you remember yourself as “a pretty good driver” brings up the meaning of the word good. Good drivers keep their eyes on the road, stay in their own lane, and never make U turns in downtown LA traffic. They don’t run red lights or drive off bridges or take other unnecessary risks. At four-way stops, a careful driver stops. Really. Were you unaware that motorists in Bucks County would pull over whenever they saw you approaching? It’s curious that you forget how your wife—and some of your friends— refused to drive with you. Anecdotal evidence, to be sure. However. If you still insist on your expertise as a driver, consider this: on Sunday December 22, 1940, you lost your life and the life of Eileen near El Centro, California, after ignoring a four-way stop. No, you were not hurrying to the funeral of F. Scott Fitzgerald, as some fabulists like to believe. In fact, I could not find a single excuse for your action. You ran the stop sign because you were a notoriously careless driver. [Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, by Marion Meade. Available now on Kindle. Paper edition coming next month.] http://nyti.ms/a6LhpG Q. Who reads me now? A. Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you still have plenty of fans. The Library of America loves you. So do Bookforum, Slate, and Salon. Thoughtful readers celebrate you as one of the important novelists of the 20th century. To Hollywood screenwriters in particular you are a patron saint. Scholars claim to appreciate you but that’s doubtful. (Given your scorn for academics, you won’t consider it a loss.) The bad news is that you are ignored by the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and The Center for Fiction,. Your name means nothing to readers under the age of thirty. The titles of your two masterworks tend to confuse people. For instance, The Day of the Locust mostly rings a bell with readers of the Old Testament. As for Miss Lonelyhearts, the name has been appropriated by a New York boutique selling designer handbags. “The Lonelyhearts” is a rock band now. To add insult to injury, that book by your buddy Scott, the one about a Long Island bootlegger, continues to sell like crazy. Go figure. Probably you could get back in the game if you wrote another novel. Think about it. [Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, by Marion Meade. Available now on Kindle. Paper edition coming next month.] That’s not a prison sentence. It’s shorthand for the fate of books whose authors have had the misfortune to croak. On January 1, 2011, seventy years after I departed, my novels passed into THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. (That’s shorthand for FREE.) From now on my work is available to all, online, at no cost. Sounds like a good deal to me. My most read books are: The Day of the Locust Miss Lonelyhearts Some people liked A Cool Million. Nobody liked The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Public Domain Review recently published an interesting piece about The Day of the Locust and my life in Hollywood. http://bit.ly/ems09e Christina Stead’s best-known work is The Man Who Loved Children. An essay by Jonathan Franzen, in the New York Times Book Review, June 6, 2010, urges that the Australian writer’s powerful 1940 novel should be re-read because it “deserves a permanent place in the canon.” http://nyti.ms/c5C3ZB Excellent advice. It’s an unforgettable book. But Stead also wrote 14 other novels. One of the most interesting is her last, published posthumously in 1986. I’m Dying Laughing: The Humourist is a sizzling roman a clef about her close friend, the writer Ruth McKenney. Just as Sam Pollit in Children was a portrait of Stead’s father, Emily Wilks in Dying is based on the messy lives of Ruth and her husband Richard Bransten. The portrait of McKenney offers a surprising contrast to her famous comic sketches, collected as My Sister Eileen, and first published as cutesy fluff by The New Yorker. For more on Stead and McKenney, see Marion Meade’s biography Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney (2010). “Christina Stead met Ruth and Richard Bransten around 1938 and remained a friend throughout their lives. She and her husband William Blake, a Communist Party member, shared the Branstens’ leftist views. I’m Dying Laughing is an undisguised portrait of the warring Branstens, written over a period of several decades and based on personal knowledge in addition to Ruth’s letters. Stead admired Ruth’s strength, but felt appalled at her emotional excesses and copious greed. (“I never thought of her as anything but Gargantua.”) In a 1973 radio interview, Stead said the book showed the passion of an American couple in mid-century, “who wanted to be on the side of the angels, good Communists, good people, and also to be very rich. Well, of course, they came to a bad end.” (Preface to I’m Dying Laughing, x.) The book was published three years after Stead’s death to avoid possible libel suits.” From Lonelyhearts, p. 351: http://amzn.to/9ll8nO I once tried (unsuccessfully) to earn a living making candy bars. I once tried (successfully) to earn a living by managing hotels. I once tried (unsuccessfully) to earn a living by writing novels. I once tried (successfully) to earn a living by writing movies. So draw your own conclusions. Story of the Week, The Library of America. “Business Deal,” http://bit.ly/9amCcj |
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