Coast to Coast: A Family Romance
By Nora Johnson (Simon & Schuster, $25)
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Essayist, novelist, and screenwriter Nora Johnson, who wrote so memorably about the meaningful places in her life in her first memoir, You Can Go Home Again (1982), returns to broaden that canvas with another, Coast to Coast. It's an unusually clear-eyed portrait of the two complicated households of her youth: the high-living one with her father, Nunnally Johnson, in Hollywood in its true heyday; and the loving, unruly one with her divorced mother in New York. Mostly it's about how unanchored she felt in either place, always.
Nunnally, a Georgia-born newspaper and short-story writer, went to Hollywood in 1932 and became Twentieth Century Fox royalty. His screenplay for The Grapes of Wrath (1940) was an early landmark; his last was The Dirty Dozen (1967).
His wife, Marion, also a writer, was temperamentally too volatile and insecure for the empty, business-driven social life of a Hollywood wife, especially one with a dangerously susceptible husband. So, when Nunnally dallied with Grapes' ingénue, Dorris Bowden, Marion snatched up 6-year-old Nora, the nanny, and the Swedish chauffeur, then stormed back to New York to be the center of her own world as a spirited divorcée, a world as long gone as her memorable martini-fueled parties.
Thus, through WWII, the McCarthy era, and college at Smith, Nora spent summers with Nunnally, Dorris, and their growing family and "regular" life and school in New York with Marion and her man of the moment. Although she doesn't yet know it, Nora is already a writer, a spy in both camps, soaking up every detail of life in the shadow of superstars: the nannies as buffers, always there, no matter how "broke" Marion feels; the indifferent meals with household help when the adults are away; the speed of kitchen gossip, beating Walter Winchell and Louella Parsons by days; the ubiquitous "friends" of her father's (from the William Morris Agency), who smooth her way on cross-country train trips, like sweepers at a curling match.
The author is merciless about what it's like to be an adolescent in an era when Hollywood so clearly sets the stakes (ah, the '50s: good girls/bad girls, nothing in between). She deftly sketches an A-list Nunnally party that finds Dorris a wreck beforehand (at this level, hostessing was "like major surgery"). There, late in the evening, a very drunk Johnny Mercer spots Nora's anorexic best friend, Julie: "Who dug that thing up? It's like a skeleton on a diet." In the ghastly silence, Humphrey Bogart becomes the "supersavior," going over to the girl with a whispered comment that lights up her face and defuses her pain.
Superstars throw Nora's life into relief even at Smith, where her English teachers try to keep classmate Sylvia Plath from answering every question, while her peers wrestle with their day's toughest question: whether to put their hard-won education to use or to fold up quietly and marry. (Although marrying means immediate expulsion from Smith, weddings are endemic, leaving Smith's educators aghast.)
At 21, still vying doggedly for her father's approval, Nora is ecstatic as he offers to advise her while she rewrites her novel in progress, The Unloved City, based on what she'd observed in postwar Berlin, on the set and behind the scenes of Nunnally's production of Night People. As his suggestions begin to erode her already fragile story, their closeness turns grim; although, as always, she's overwhelmed by the feeling that it's she who's done something wrong—again.
All the more reason for a reader to feel mild outrage when—as Nora rushes into a disastrous marriage like a barrel on its way over Niagara Falls—she stops the clock. Nowhere in Coast do we learn how, only four years later, she managed to distill everything from her mother's warm, scatty life into the background for the book and then the movie of The World of Henry Orient. By this time, she owes us the story of how she and her father could possibly have collaborated on this screenplay—turning her bittersweet comic story about adolescents, wild crushes, and parents, both good and bad, into a movie classic—without a drop of blood on the walls. SHEILA BENSON
Selling Seattle
By James Lyons (Wallflower, $22.50)
Neither simply a dismal dissertation nor a clip job culled from Nexis, this absurdly academic little monograph on our fair city is nonetheless interesting for the subject it raises: How did Seattle become, in effect, a brand? It's a great question, and one we locals don't consider often enough, because we can't see how that brand has value outside our borders—whether marketed by Hollywood, outdoor-sports retailers, or coffee-shop proprietors.
You've got to worry when what is, essentially, a semiotics study by an English film lecturer turns out to rely on "texts" like Sleepless in Seattle, Singles, and Frasier. Lyons' amply footnoted sources include the usual ivory-tower suspects (Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Walter Benjamin), but also informed local writers such as Jonathan Raban, historian Roger Sale, and former SW staffers Fred Moody and Mark D. Fefer. Problem is, the former outweigh the latter. Second-hand media accounts abound, while Lyons' direct observations—is it unreasonable to ask if he's ever previously visited the Northwest?—are entirely absent. His Seattle is a signifier, not an actual city, but of such badges are successful advertising campaigns made.
