Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Pam Munter, author of Fading Fame: Women of a Certain Age in Hollywood, which tells the fictionalized stories of old Hollywood actresses and addresses some of the issues that we talk about today, such as the MeToo movement. it obviously is in the news and constantly being updated, of course, as people continue to come forward with their stories. But the casting couch in particular is hardly a new reality in the world of Hollywood. So if you could tell us a little bit about the book Fading Fame and how you came to write it.
Pam: I have always been in love with Hollywood. That's no secret. Since my first movie at age five, it never quite left me. I'm really a writer of nonfiction. And mostly what I have written up to this point has been nonfiction. I wrote a whole bunch of stories about old, mostly dead Hollywood actors and actresses for classic images and films of the golden age. And so I've always written to some extent about Hollywood. When I got into the Master of Fine Arts program, though, I was told that writing nonfiction was not enough. And I had to have a second genre, which kind of freaked me out, because nonfiction is all I've ever written and really all I ever read. I thought, OK, well, I'll try my hand at fiction. So I got into my seminar and the instruction was to write a short story. Well, I barely knew what that was because I read them in high school and college, but it had been a long time. So I thought, you know, I'll have all this information about Hollywood. What if I take that bulk of data and mess with them a little bit, fictionalize it and produce a short story? And out came the first, actually it's also the first one in the book called “Frances.” It's about Mary Pickford and her best friend, Frances Marion, who was a screenwriter.
And some of the story, of course, is true. They were friends. Francis Marion was an extremely successful screenwriter. She was the first woman, in fact, to win two Oscars for screenwriting. Mary was, in fact, a pioneer in Hollywood. She was the first woman to form her own studio. Believe it or not, before the 1920s. And then she and Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin founded United Artists, which was a major studio that was still in operation today. So it was irresistible. I mean, these are such rich characters to write about. After I wrote that story, it turned out to be quite successful, almost immediately published, much to my shock. I thought, you know, maybe there are more women whose stories have yet to be told. And so each of the stories in Fading Fame, which is a collection of 10 short stories about women of a certain age, each of them have a grain of truth to them. But of course, they're fiction. And I just love putting it together, it was so much fun to give these women space and to hopefully engender some empathy in the reader for these women and what they went through.
Mindy: You say that you yourself have always been interested in films and a golden age of Hollywood. What is it about this that draws you so deeply?
Pam: Well, as a kid, the only mass media we had, the only information we had about Hollywood were movie magazines, and they were fake. They were pretty much written by the studio publicists. You know, there were five major movie studios that controlled the information flow. But I believed all of it. I just thought it was wonderful. It was a fairytale that you could walk around Hollywood and be discovered. And God knows I tried. And I believed the fairytale lives of these people. And before I knew what I was hooked. I mean, I later, of course, learned that hardly any of it was true, that there were gay people and people who were divorced many times and child abusers. And I mean, things we weren't supposed to know. I later found out, but it didn't dim my love for that era at all. And of course, they produced some pretty fine films
Mindy: Talking about that golden age and the arena of women, because women have a shorter shelf life in Hollywood. If you could talk about that?
Pam: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And a lot of the women in these stories just ran out of time. They were hired because they were sexy and willing to engage in casting couch activities. But then, you know, after a couple of years, that they were bankable was not as important as the fact that they were no longer casting couchable, to put it politely. And so movie studios moved on. They were disposable commodities.
Mindy: I feel like today things are changing somewhat. I can, of course, speak to how casting works. But I know that in media and in advertising, you are seeing more of a representation of people of color, people with all body shapes. It's not all the the white, fragile beauty that was always pushed upon the public for the longest time. Speaking then about the similarities and the differences now, do you think that progress has been made?
Pam: Well, changes have been made. Certainly we have mass media and everywhere you turn around, there's the 24/7 news cycle. There's very little we don't know now. To put it romantically, some of the magic has gone out of Hollywood. In a way, we know too much. We know who's suing whom and who's doing what to whom all of the time. Has it changed? Well, you know, one of the reasons it has changed has been the dispersal of power in Hollywood. As I said, there used to be five major studios with five nasty, old, white men in charge of it who could do what they wanted. That's no longer the case, Harvey Weinstein aside. There are so many companies now and independent producers, women have options. So it's not quite as restrictive. Is there sexism? You bet. I mean, every time you open the paper or go on Google you see #MeToo. It's there.
Mindy: Speaking about women in particular. I know, of course, that women feel pressure to keep up their looks, keep up the image of youth, even if it's fading, even if it's leaving them. And hopefully we are moving away from it. But we're used to seeing Botoxed faces and faces that change and women that change their looks like Renee Zellweger, you can’t even recognize anymore. And they go under the knife to sometimes an extreme extent. Were those options available to women during the golden age? How did they go about attempting to preserve their youth.
Pam: Well, some were, but of course, the joys of plastic surgery that most of the technological innovations have happened in the last, what, 20, 30 years? They could fix your nose pretty easily. Facelifts were riskier. With Rita Hayworth, who, of course, was a bombshell in the 40s, they changed her hair line, which they thought was important, but mostly they did it with makeup. They didn't do a lot of surgery back then, so there weren’t options. If you got old, well, that was just too bad. Look at women who tried to keep looking young, and it's sort of sad to see that they feel they have to.
Mindy: Speaking of makeup, I know I don't know much about Marilyn Monroe, I'm not a fan girl, but I read Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates, and she talked about how Marilyn's personal makeup artist would work on her as she aged for hours and hours, getting her just right even to walk out of the trailer.
Pam: And, you know, she was only thirty six when she died. So you talk about aging and it's pretty cruel.
Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. Thinking about that makeup and of course, the irony being that the more of the makeup and the chemicals that you're piling under your skin, the more you're actually aging your skin.
Pam: Yes. And of course, we didn't know about tanning and the costs of that kind of thing on skin cancer in those days. And so you'd see movie stars sitting out by the pool, you know, getting tan for the next role.
Mindy: When we talk about women and the various things that we will do and you don't even have to be in Hollywood to do these things. You certainly don't have to rely on your looks as income. We all participate in it. The attempt to not age is certainly not restricted to Hollywood. These women that have aged out and like you said, Marilyn Monroe was only thirty six when she died. What was considered aging out? Like at what point were they bringing in the fresh crop and it was harder for women to attain any type of role or interest?
Pam: Boy, I don't know. There wasn’t a cutoff point. I think it had to do with box office to some extent, the whims of those five white men who decided that there were better, more exciting women lining their office waiting for their next break.
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Mindy: You mentioned that you yourself have a history as a performer. Why don't you tell us about that?
Pam: Well, as part of falling in love with Hollywood, I think, you know, I was convinced that anybody could do it. I don't believe that anymore, but certainly I did then. One of my undergraduate degrees is in theater. So I started doing some of that. And as I got older, I realized that you really couldn't have a career in that, that was stable. There was a lot of common sense in my life. So I know better than that. I grew up to have a lot of college training and other things besides theater. But when I finished my career as a clinical psychologist, I decided to jump into show business full time, which I could do. And I had the luxury of doing that.
I went to an actor's conservatory. I took singing lessons. And I started appearing in independent productions in Portland, Oregon, which is where I was living at the time. Got an agent, got some film parts, and started traveling the country with a jazz cabaret show, played all the major cities in the country. I needed to play that out. I needed to find out what I was capable of doing and to experience really from the inside what some of my heroes had gone through. And I'm so glad I did it. My last gasp was I decided to learn to play the cornet. When I was a young girl, girls didn't play that instrument. They didn't play trumpets and cornets, they played flutes and violins. And so I thought, screw that. I'm going to learn to play the coronet. And I formed a Dixieland band. We were traveling around the area I live in now near Palm Desert, doing shows. I was singing and playing the cornet. And that was the last really showbizzy thing I did. Now I'm just writing about it, which is a lot more fun in some ways.
Mindy: And when you talk about writing about Hollywood, this particular book, Fading Fame, is fiction. But you said you've done quite a bit of nonfiction writing as well. It was a topic close to your heart. So who are some of your favorite Golden Age of Hollywood actresses, and what are some of your favorite stories from that time?
Pam: Well, I fell in love with Doris Day, very young. My first movie, in fact, was hers. It was called Romance on the High Seas. And she had a really blockbuster part; it was her first starring role. One of those magical things, you know, she's discovered at a party and she's hired and boom, she is a star almost overnight. I love that story, of course, because that's the myth of Hollywood. But as I followed her career, I realized that all was not wonderful with Doris Day. One of those stories, of course, would have to be about Doris in Fading Fame, because I felt I knew so much about her already and her travails later on. The more I read, the more I realize how victimized she was and how oppressed. You wouldn't know that because Warner Brothers created this Sunny Girl next door image for all of us that she maintained all of her life, really. But it wasn't quite true. When she was discovered, quote unquote, at this party, she was signed to a contract by Michael Curtis, who was a very well-known director. People know him really for having directed movies like Casablanca, for instance, but he was a predator.
A recent biography came out about him that suggested that he was a compulsive womanizer on the set. Doris had to pay her dues to be involved with that. She was signed to a contract by Jack Warner, who was another famous predator. You know, we didn't know all of that. So you have to wonder, what did she go through to get where she got? And where she got was fame. You know, she was famous. She was obviously very talented. I mean, a wonderful actress and even better singer. And had a wonderful career, and really she was one of the few people I think of, the women I have written about in Fading Fame who had a satisfactory ending to her life. You know, she left the career when her husband, who bilked her out of millions of dollars, died. She went on to found animal foundations, moved to Carmel, and had this huge operation. But she loved what she did then, and most of the women in the book didn't as well. So her story is sort of a tale of Hollywood. What you had to do and how to escape successfully.
Mindy: And a lot of women didn't escape successfully.
Pam: That's right. They didn't. One of the people I discuss in the book is Joan Davis, who your listeners may not know or remember, but she was a vaudeville performer for years. She had a very popular radio show, top rated, and is probably best known for her starring role in a TV sitcom about the same time as I Love Lucy premiered. It was called I Married Joan, and it was very popular. And she did it for three or four years, I think. My story deals with her short term affair with Eddie Cantor, who was also well known at the time. And her ending was sad because of her alcoholism. She pretty much drank herself to death. And again, the time was up for her. She couldn't get a deal. Her television show was canceled. She was too old by that time. She was in her 50s. Way too old to be hired by anybody. And that's a more typical ending, not necessarily the alcoholism, but the kind of petering out of a life.
Mindy: Yeah. Without having something else, another interest, something else to live for. Well, and I think that's true of anything. If a person is completely sold into and dedicated to one thing, if that one thing is no longer available to you, that's devastating.
Pam: Oh, you're right. And certainly Hollywood stardom required a 24/7 dedication. I mean, that was the only way to be. And they had no hobbies or interests outside, really, of themselves, to put it bluntly. Everything was around being successful, being famous, being known, getting fans. You know, all of that was what was most important to them. So when that went away, there was nothing. They didn't even develop close relationships, many of them, Doris, for instance, her closest friends were her schleps, you know, people who worked for her. And that's a very different kind of friendship than you or I might develop.
Mindy: When you talk about yourself and making that transition from being a performer to being a writer. What kind of skills were useful in both?
Pam: Well, I'd always been a writer of some sort. You know, I started a typewritten newspaper when I was nine, and I got so much reinforcement from teachers. And in high school, I was editor of the paper and I wrote movie reviews every week. When I was a psychologist, I wrote a newsletter for my clients. And of course, I wrote academic articles which were required for being a professor at the university. And when I did showbiz after that, I wrote my own shows. Cabaret, you do a lot of talking you sing, but you also have patter, as they call it. So it wasn't difficult to make the transition to writing.
I started by writing about, again, old dead movie actors that I was curious about from my childhood. I was watching TV once, and I saw a movie featuring five actors who pretended to be teenagers. Actually, they weren't teenagers, but the series was starring “the teenagers.” And I sort of wondered about the lead actor whose name was Freddy Stewart. As much as I studied film, nobody I knew had ever heard of this guy. And he made, you know, maybe a dozen movies in Hollywood in the 40s. So the first article I ever wrote was a research piece about Freddy Stewart, because I was curious. And I went on to write, as I say, a couple dozen more about people I wanted to know more about. So really, it was an intellectual, emotional curiosity that got me started writing about Hollywood more aggressively than I have been in the past.
Mindy: And what led you to become a psychiatrist? Because that is so divergent from these creative urges of writing and acting.
Pam: I think people work in mental health because of their own personal experiences. You know, I was raised in a loving but dysfunctional family and wondered how I turned out the way I did because I'm nothing like them. And again, a curiosity about my own life, I think, led me to read books about human development and personality development. I wanted to know more. And so I went back to school. I got a master's degree in psychology, admitted into a Ph.D. program in clinical psychology. I knew I wanted to be in private practice because I'm a very independent person. I'm happier not working for somebody else. And did that for 25 years, really, and loved every minute of it. The only reason I left was managed care, a movement which kind of removed my independence in big ways.
Mindy: That in-depth knowledge that you have about the functioning of the id and the ego and everything that comes into play and is fed very much by Hollywood and everything about the scene there. Does that help you when you're writing about these women? Does it give you some insight into who they were and why they made the decisions they made?
Pam: Oh, absolutely. I think a strength in my writing is my ability to get inside their head. There's a lot of internal dialogue, in these stories, really more than action, because I have a sense of what they were probably thinking and experiencing internally. And I enjoyed writing about that. I actually met some of these women over the course of my life, but I didn't know them very well. So I was guessing. But one can predict, really, if you have a certain set of characteristics in your life, some experiences you have to undergo to get to where you want to be, the things that happen inside your head. You know, the way you characterize your own self is very different than how you may present yourself to the outside world. And that divergence, I think, is fascinating.
Mindy: Definitely. And I think it becomes even more fractured when you have people that are not only having to convey a certain manner to keep up a public performance at all times, but also then having to put on a new hat every time they walk out of a trailer, come onto the set.
Pam: It's all artifice. It's all image. More so back in that golden age, perhaps, than it is now. I think people, as you suggested earlier, I think that things have changed enough that women can be themselves more now and they know who that is than they might have in the golden age. That's good.
Mindy: I feel like it would be mentally exhausting to have to keep up performance 24/7.
Pam: It becomes so much who you are and you lose track of who you are, you know, and a lot of these women, because they were in the business so young, missed important developmental stages and developing a personality. You know, again, the friendship and the trial and error of education. A lot of these women didn't have much education. If anything, I don't think Mary Pickford went to school at all
Mindy: When you were working on Fading Fame, you mentioned in your email to me that it had a unique writing process. Can you illuminate that?
Pam: Well, it was done in chunks. You know, I had done this story, as I mentioned earlier, for my class, and I thought that would be it. I just wanted the degree to get out. And what I didn't think about writing anymore. Again, I'm not a fiction writer, but I got encouragement from not only the quick publication, but my classmates who were telling me it's good and I should be writing more. And so it came in spurts. The next one was, of course, about Doris, because it was so easy for me to write. I just sat down and out it flowed. I knew the crux I wanted to talk about the violation done by her husband in stealing all our money and how she might react to that.
And so one followed another one of the stories called “The Curtain Never Falls,” is about an older woman who is in a wheelchair in a nursing home. And probably there are the rest of her life. And I got the idea for that story, because I was watching a documentary about Rosemary, who was a cabaret performer, and she's best known for being Sally Rogers on the Dick Van Dyke Show. The documentary was in her last years of her life. And she said to the interviewer, “you know, some nights I lie in bed and go over my act.” And I thought, wow, I mean, there is a story there. This woman who's about to die is still fantasizing, performing.
Mindy: I can speak to how I, as a writer, then go out and, of course, you know, have to do public speaking and panels and interactions. And that, too, is a performance in many ways. And it's something you do kind of analyze. Think about how you could have done it better. It can. It can make you crazy.
Pam: Yes. Yes. We are our own worst critics. No, no doubt about that.
Mindy: Absolutely. And that applies to both those public performances and our writing in private.
Pam: Yes. I try not to reread anything that I have published. I did two CDs when I was singing and I never, ever listened to them because I know I'd be frustrated and want to go back and do it all again.
Mindy: I tell everyone that once it's in print and once it's out there and published there, I don't think there's any point in reading it or really interacting with it any further, because you can't change it. And you will, of course, improve as you continue to write. And if I read my first book, which was published in 2013, but I wrote it in 2010, 11 years, a better writer now I have 11 years more experience if I were to read it. I'm sure I would want things differently.
Pam: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I agree. And just move on, you know, see what's next. As you say, there is a learning curve to writing. And I found that the more I wrote, I think the better writer I became. I've never been a lyrical writer. I'm very meat and potatoes. I want to tell you the story and move on. I don't think I'm ever going to be any different, but I'm learning to describe things better and to immerse myself better and to throw in more dialogue and some of the things I've learned over the years.
Mindy: You end up populating that toolbox.
Pam: You're right. Yes. That's a good way to put it.
Mindy: Last thing. Why don't you let listeners know where they can find the book, Fading Fame and where they can find you online?
Pam: Absolutely. Amazon, which of course sells everything, also sells Fading Fame. And you can find my memoir there, too, which is called As Alone As I Want to Be, which is a little bit about the saga of my Hollywood adventures up and down. I can be found at Pam Munter dot com.
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