CITIZEN   HOLLYWOOD

a novel by
Martin Turnbull

Book 3 in the Garden of Allah series

CHAPTER 1

Gwendolyn Brick could feel the resentment filling her like a blister. As the curvy cigarette girl at the Cocoanut Grove, she was used to being ogled, but the looks lingered longer now. They came with a smirk from the men and a sneer from the women, and there was no point pretending she didn’t know why.

It was inevitable that someone would say something. Sooner or later, a snarky bastard was going to have that one drink too many and snap off some smart line to impress his friends.

When she spotted two men in suits of imitation vicuña following the maître d’, she pegged them as trouble. They reeked of midlevel studio yes-men with enough power to sway pretty young girls. The maître d’ sat them near the dance floor, which meant they were well connected and not the sort she could afford to rebuke—especially now that Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen had bought the Trocadero. All Cocoanut Grove staff had been instructed not to put any client’s nose out of joint. No exceptions.

People were less inclined to be seen at a nightclub with mob connections, but Siegel and Cohen were influential men and their aggressive marketing had bitten into the Grove’s business. It was ten o’clock on a Friday night, and the outermost ring of tables was largely empty.

Gwendolyn had seen studio execs like these two bozos a thousand times before. They were lining the far edge of their table with empty highball glasses to advertise their drinking prowess, and within an hour, they were at four apiece. Gwendolyn watched the one with the red hair open his platinum cigarette holder and screw up his nose in annoyance. There was nothing for it but to take them head-on.

The blond one wore a pencil moustache that looked suave on Clark Gable but slimy on him. “Cigar,” he said. “Cuban if you have it. Any brand.” She handed him a one-dollar cigar and he gave her a twenty-dollar bill. “You can keep the change if you just say it for me.” A drip of sweat snuck out from under his toupee and rounded the back of his ear, but he was too plowed to notice.

“What is it you want me to say?” Gwendolyn asked.

Pencil Moustache leaned forward. “Fiddle-dee-dee.”

Gwendolyn let out a soft groan.

Back in the days before David O. Selznick cast Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, every pretty girl from California to Maine reveled in the sparkling hope that she might be Scarlett O’Hara. Gwendolyn had even wrangled herself into what she thought was her screen test, but turned out to be Hattie McDaniel’s for the role of Mammy. Gwendolyn was just there to give Hattie someone to act off. Not that it mattered, because it became the most disastrous screen test in history. Gwendolyn’s dress caught fire and she stumbled into the backdrop and her hoop skirt flipped up, and she wasn’t wearing panties. And the camera was still rolling. In Technicolor.

“The fiddle?” Gwendolyn stalled.

Pencil Moustache grabbed her by the elbow. “Come now, you sweet lil ol’ Southern belle, you.” His fingers bit into her skin. “Say it and my nineteen bucks in change is all yours.”

Gwendolyn felt her eyes tearing up. Her gaze fell on a table of two couples. The women were talking and nodding with their heads almost close enough to touch, and both were looking directly at her. The men were simply staring at her.

She pulled out her widest smile. “Come on, fellas. How about you give a poor working girl a break?”

The guy pulled out another twenty and dropped it next to the other. He ran the tip of his finger along the edge of her tray and pushed down on it. If he let go suddenly, Chesterfields and Monte Cristos would launch in every direction. She felt his other hand wrap around her arm like a python; her hand began to throb. His chum began to snort with laughter.

Whiskey breath filled the space between them. “Less the buck for the cigar, that’s a thirty-nine-dollar tip for you, Scarlett, my dear. Not bad for three little words. Come on. Say it like you did in your screen test. Just for me.” He pushed down on the tray a little bit harder.

“Why you wanna get me in troub—”

“I hope you’ve got a very good reason why you’re manhandling my sister like that.”

Gwendolyn watched Pencil Moustache’s eyes widen as he took in all six feet four of her darling baby brother. He released her arm and cautiously lifted his finger from her tray.

Gwendolyn turned around and drank in the sight of Monty in full dress uniform. The five gold buttons down his front picked up the lights from the stage and seemed to glow like beacons against the stark alabaster of his jacket. His face was granite, but she knew that look in his eye. She used to see it when he’d just gotten away with mischief, like stealing fresh cookies from the window sill of the Crowley place around the corner.

Monty stepped up to the table and saluted. “Petty Officer First Class Montgomery Brick of the U.S. Navy, at your service.” The two lowlifes attempted salutes. “And may I present my sister, Miss Gwendolyn Brick.” The men nodded at Gwendolyn. Monty rested his palms on their table. “I’m going to assume that what I saw as I came to greet my sister after a six-year tour in the U.S. Navy helping to preserve peace during these troubled times wasn’t what it looked like.”

The men nodded slowly, as though hypnotized.

“Very good.” Monty straightened up. “Now, if you gentlemen have everything you need in the way of tobacco, I’d like to accompany my sister on her break.”

Monty led Gwendolyn to the bar at the rear of the Cocoanut Grove. Chuck, the bartender, held out his hands. “Give me your tray,” he said. “Your brother’s just had a word with the boss. You got yourself a double break tonight.”

As they walked through the bustling foyer of the Ambassador Hotel, Gwendolyn decided she wanted Monty all to herself. Opportunities like this came once every five or six years and she had to make the most of it, so she guided him out toward the deserted pool area. They stepped outside and looked up at the sky. The stars were sprinkled above them like crystals.

She tightened her grip on his arm and led him to the diving board. His cotton jacket smelled freshly laundered and was smooth under her hand. They sat side by side and she asked, “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming? How long can you stay?”

Monty seemed broader, thicker across the chest than when she last saw him. He even seemed taller. Navy life must really agree with him, she thought.

“Sorry for the short notice, Googie, but I was given forty minutes to pack. I’m only here for one night.”

“One night? Mo-Mo! That’s not fair!”

“No, it’s not fair,” he agreed, “it’s the navy. I’m en route to New York. The brass decided I was the best choice to head up the U.S. Navy exhibit at the World’s Fair.”

“What an honor!”

“Between you and me, it’s really a recruitment drive. That Hitler bastard is on the march. The military’s been gearing up all year.” He stared out across the pool for a moment, then snapped out of it. “At any rate, as soon as the ship docked, I hotfooted it over to your place. I knew you worked nights, but I thought that roommate of yours might tell me where you were.”

“Kathryn’s on a train convoy to Dodge City. Some sort of publicity campaign that Warner Bros. are putting on for the new Errol Flynn movie.”

“Lucky for me, some old drunk appeared and told me where you worked.”

Gwendolyn took his broad hands and sandwiched them between hers. “I’m so glad to see you. I know how much you love the navy life, but I hate not seeing you whenever I want. Ten years and I’ve never really gotten used to it.”

Monty’s face turned grim. “To be honest, I’m kinda worried about you.”

“Me?” Oh, dear God, no, Gwendolyn thought. She felt her face go pale. Surely he hadn’t seen her screen test all the way over in Guam?

“It’s probably not my place to say.”

“You’re my only living relative, which means you get to say it anyway.”

Monty hesitated, but not for long. “You’ve been hacking away at this movie-star game now for years, but really, sis, where’s it gotten you? Have you even been in one movie yet?”

Gwendolyn wasn’t sure where the conversation was heading, but she didn’t like the sound of it. “For your information, I had a screen test for David Selznick. Ever heard of him?” Monty shook his head. “He’s the guy producing a little picture called Gone with the Wind. I’m good friends with his wife, Irene. Her father is Louis B. Mayer. He runs MGM and earns more money than the president. So it’s not like I’ve been spinning wheels in the mud here.”

Monty’s handsome face softened from a frown into the hint of a smile. “A screen test for Gone with the Wind? How come you haven’t mentioned this in your letters?”

Because the screen test ended up being the most mortifying moment of my life, she thought. “I didn’t want to jinx my luck.”

“And?”

Gwendolyn had grown accustomed to thinking of the moment she flashed her hoo-ha at the cameras as the three seconds that killed her Hollywood career. It wasn’t until Greta Garbo pulled some influential strings to get her a role in George Cukor’s new picture, The Women, that she’d regained traction. “I didn’t get the part, but I’m going to be in a new MGM picture.”

“Is it a big part? What’s your character like?”

Gwendolyn broke away from her brother’s gaze. “It’s just a walk-on, really. No lines or anything.” She looked back at him in time to see his smile fade into the shadows.

“Googie,” he said, “ten years and all you’ve got to show for it is a screen test and one little bitty role?”

Gwendolyn scowled. “Do you know how rare that is? One in a hundred thousand hopefuls gets a screen test. They have to be very, very impressed with you to order up one of those.”

Monty let go of her hand. After a few silent moments, he said, “Once my stint at the World’s Fair is over, they’re making me a chief petty officer.”

“That’s good, right?”

“For an enlisted guy, it’s pretty good, yeah. And they’re restationing me.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’re moving me.” Gwendolyn wanted to grab her brother’s hand and squeeze it real hard. Please say Long Beach! Please say Long Beach! “I’m being transferred to the Philippines.”

She crossed her arms to keep warm. Her uniform wasn’t made for plying the outdoor cigarette trade. “And where’s that, exactly?”

“It’s in the Far East. South of Japan.”

“Sounds exotic.”

“Subic Bay is the biggest navy installation in the Pacific. This is a big step up for me, Googie.”

“You’ve really made a good life for yourself, haven’t you?” Gwendolyn took her brother by the arm and snuggled closer. “I’m very proud of you.”

“I’ll be in New York until the end of July and go to Subic Bay right after that.” Monty stiffened his spine and cleared his throat. “Why don’t you come with me?”

“Move? To the Far East?”

“That part of the world, it’s a wonderful place to live. I know tons of guys who’ve been stationed there and they all say the same thing.”

“That’s okay for you, Monty, but my life is here. I’m building a career.” As she heard the words come out of her mouth, she knew how ridiculous they sounded. You’re twenty-nine years old, she told herself. You know very well that hitting thirty in Hollywood is like hitting sixty everywhere else. You don’t have many chances left.

Monty winced. “You’ve spent ten years selling cigarettes to drunkards and letches and all you’ve got to show for it is a screen test and a bit part. That’s no career.” He grabbed her pinkie finger and wiggled it the way he used to when they were kids back in Florida with their boozed-out mother sprawled out on the couch and nobody else to look after them. It was their way of saying You and me forever.

Don’t say it, she thought. Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it.

“Oh, Googie,” he said, “just how much longer are you going to wait for a big break that probably will never come?”

~oOo~

This chapter is also available to read on my website:

www.MartinTurnbull.com

As with my first two books, I went back to Dan Yeager at Nu-Image Design – at this point, I can’t imagine working with anyone else.

This time, however, I wasn’t quite so clear on what I wanted.

In Citizen Hollywood we continue to follow the fortunes of our three favorite Garden of Allah residents: MGM screenwriter Marcus Adler, Hollywood Reporter columnist Kathryn Massey, and plucky actress Gwendolyn Brick. It’s now 1939. Gone with the Wind hasn’t been released yet, but it’s in the can so Hollywood needs a fresh Big New Thing to obsess over. Orson Welles happily supplies it when he answers Hollywood’s beckoning call.

As nearly all of us probably know, his first picture was Citizen Kane whose central character of Charles Foster Kane was modeled on newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst. Not that Welles would admit it at the time, but speculation that Welles might have the cojones to craft an unflattering portrait of America’s most powerful man was so rife that it ensured everyone was talking about it.

One of the most striking things about Citizen Kane is its amazing black and white cinematography. The lighting design makes the movie look like it’d been etched in glass. So I wanted the cover for Citizen Hollywood to be in black and white. But that’s all I really knew. I sent Daniel the two most famous images from Citizen Kane:

The misty shot of Xanadu, Kane’s ultimate pleasure palace (read: San Simeon)

Charles Foster Kane runs for New York State governor.

I also sent him the links to a number of books on L.A. set around this time. They were all very film noir-ish, very gangster, very James Ellroy. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when Daniel came back with this:

This is not at all what I had in mind. But I learned that sometimes when you get what you definitely don’t want, it nudges you closer to what you do want.

Instead of ignoring Welles and hoping his movie debut died a quiet death, Hearst went on the rampage. When you’ve got hundreds of newspapers–not to mention Hollywood’s leading gossip columnist, Louella Parsons–at your disposal, and you decide to go on a rampage, everybody knows about it. Consequently, a battle raged around Hollywood causing most people to fall in one of two camps.

Those on the creative side were concerned that Welles be allowed to exercise his right of free speech and make the movie he wanted to make, regardless of who he may or may not have modeled his protagonist on. The other camp was the management side of the studio system who depended on the Hearst papers to carry advertisements for their movies. To be blackballed by the Hearst group meant a huge dent in their ability to get the word out about their latest release. And if you were seen to be on the side of Welles, then you were dead to Hearst.

This was a big deal in Hollywood at the time and as it affected the whole town, I wanted the bigger picture to be reflected on the cover of Citizen Hollywood. Plus, I wanted to keep the font of the title the same as the previous two books. So Daniel and I tossed around some ideas, and this was the result.

A-HA! Now we were on to something. First off, though, I didn’t want the newspaper headline. We’d used that for The Trouble with Scarlett and I didn’t want to repeat myself. So I asked Daniel to lose the newspaper headline and move the title toward the top of the cover. I also wanted to find a different color of the font. The most striking color on Scarlett‘s cover was red and, again, I didn’t want to repeat myself. So I found a nice shade of Azure blue which I liked.

And while I liked the grainy effect he’d applied here, it was wrong for a book set amid the fight over Citizen Kane because that movie is associated with very sharply defined cinematography. So I wanted the building looming on the left (it’s the Griffith Observatory which looms over Hollywood in the same way that Xanadu looms over Citizen Kane and San Simeon looms over the Hearst legacy) to be sharply defined.

On the plus side: when designing the cover of a book, one of the most important questions to keep in mind is: “What is it going to look like when it appears on a search result on Amazon and is reduced to the size of a large postage stamp?” When I reduced this latest design to postage stamp size, the title remained clear and sharp. THUMBS UP!

But one thing bothered me. There now seemed to be a lot of black on this cover. I was fine with the bottom area but I wondered if the top area could be softened with a subtle starry night sky. It needed to be enough to give it some texture but not so much that it would detract from the cover. So I asked Daniel if he could add a starry-but-not-too-starry night sky, that would be a marvelous thing. The design he came back with was exactly what I wanted.

I am now very excited to present the cover for my next novel:

“CITIZEN HOLLYWOOD”

CITIZEN HOLLYWOOD
Book 3 in the “Garden of Allah” series
by Martin Turnbull
(click to enlarge)

Hollywood, 1939: When Tinseltown begins to woo wunderkind Orson Welles, he stashes himself at the Chateau Marmont until he’s ready to make his splashy entrance. But gossip columnist Kathryn Massey knows he’s there.

Kathryn has been on the outs with Hollywood since her ill-fated move to Life, but now that she’s back at the Hollywood Reporter, she’s desperate to find the Next Big Thing. Scooping Welles’ secret retreat would put her back on the map, but by the time she hears rumors about his dangerous new movie, she’s fallen prey to his charms. She needs to repair her reputation, find out if Welles will take on the tycoon, and extricate herself from an affair with a man whose kisses make her melt like milk chocolate.

Hollywood writers are only as good as their last screen credit, but Marcus Adler is still scrambling for his first. His “Strange Cargo” will star Clark Gable after “Gone with the Wind” wraps, but Machiavellian studio politics mean Marcus’ name might not make it to the screen. It’s time to play No More Mr. Nice Guy. Opportunity knocks when his boss challenges the writing department to outdo “The Adventures of Robin Hood”, and Marcus is confident—until the love of his life bursts back onto the scene. How can he write another word until he knows for once and for all whether he and Ramon Navarro will be together? And to make matters worse, it seems like someone in town is trying to sabotage him.

Everyone knows if you haven’t made it in Hollywood by the time you’re thirty, it’s curtains . . . and Gwendolyn Brick is starting to panic. She’s considering moving to a naval base in the Philippines with her baby brother, but she wants to give Hollywood one last go before she gives up. When she saves Twentieth Century Fox honcho Daryl F. Zanuck from an appalling fate at a poker game that goes awry, he rewards her with a chance at a role in a movie. Gwendolyn needs to win before her ship sets sail.

When William Randolph Hearst realizes Citizen Kane is based on him, he won’t be happy—and when Hearst isn’t happy, nobody’s safe. Marcus, Kathryn, and Gwendolyn need to go for broke, and the clock is ticking.

Citizen Hollywood is the third in Martin Turnbull’s series of historical novels set during Hollywood’s golden age.

www.MartinTurnbull.com

And so, now that I think about it, it’s rather odd that it took me so long to look into getting an audiobook done of my first Garden of Allah novel, The Garden on Sunset. Maybe because it’s fiction and I tend to associate audiobooks with non-fiction? At any rate, I was reading one of my favorite blogs on self-publishing – JaneFriedman.com, who is about as savvy as savvy gets – and she talked about a website called Audiobook Creation Exchange which pairs authors with voice over actors.

I signed up straightaway.

I was excited at the thought of having my own audiobook for sale and happily filled in all the usual fields—copyright owner’s name, book category and genre—but then was stopped cold by the section which asks you to:

Describe the ideal narrator’s voice:

I’ll admit that more than a couple of times in the past, I’ve daydreamed of having my novels translated to audiobooks, but at no time did I stop to think about whose voice the books would be read in. Like most of us, I find it hard to stomach the sound of my own voice so all I knew was that the voice of my audiobook wasn’t going to be mine.

Fortunately, ACX has a list of options to help narrow down your choices. That is to say, it is a help but the list is virtually endless.

Under GENDER, they have three choices—male, female and either. I’m a male so I always assumed the narrator would be male. But then again, two of my three lead characters are female so why not have a woman narrate it? So I chose Either.

Under AGE, they have seven choices, from Young Child to Elderly.

Under LANGUAGE, they have six choices, including Arabic and Japanese.

Under ACCENT, they have 30 choices, including six different American ones, as well as both Australian and New Zealand. To Aussie and Kiwi ears, the accents are different, but I’m surprised Amazon knew that.

Then came the big one: STYLE. No less than 62 choices of narration style are offered. The previous categories weren’t hard to choose, but faced with selecting just out of 62 possibilities suddenly became paralyzing.

I did have a voice in my head, but what did it sound like? Did it sound like me but more Professional? Authoritative? Inspirational? Persuasive? Or was it someone else altogether? And if it was, what did he sound like?

I knew I didn’t want it to be Sultry or Velvety or Spooky or Melodramatic or Submissive. I wasn’t even sure what a submissive voice sounded like although I guess the audiobook of Fifty Shades of Grey probably found it handy. Maybe I wanted Engaging or Versatile or perhaps even Quirky? Wistful? No. Storyteller? Perhaps. As two of my lead characters are female, Male Narrating A Female Part was a possibility.

I pondered this one quite a lot. As a frequent audiobook listener, I knew first hand that the quality of the narration directly informs the listening experience. The wrong voice can wreck an audiobook so this was an important decision. I decided that I wanted the listener to be fully involved in the story so I chose Engaging.

With all that decided, it was now time to find my narrator. ACX has over 11,000 narrators listed on their site. Their website allows you to narrow down your options according to the genre of books the narrators have listed themselves as being able to perform, as well as the languages they speak and the accents and styles they can do.

That left me with a list of only 159 narrators that could possibly be a good match. But it was better than 11,196 so I started at the start and spent about an hour listening to the sample recordings posted on their page. Six or seven voiceover actors later, I realized that it only took a maximum of fifteen seconds to know if this person was right or not. Usually more like ten.

John C. Zak

After a while I began to wonder if perhaps this voice inside my head only existed inside my head. It dawned on me that it was quite possible that nobody had the voice I’d conjured. I needn’t have worried. On the fifth page I found John C. Zak who had everything I was looking for – depth, warmth, authority, fluidity. His samples were both articulate and friendly, soothing but engaging.

But would he be interested?

Recording every word of The Garden on Sunset—and be word perfect—would take him hours and hours and hours. Although you can offer your narrator a one-time fee, I assume most writers like myself choose the other payment option: going 50/50 on the royalties. A project like this could take hours of effort with no or little remuneration but there was no harm in asking.

John emailed back almost straight away and told me he’d be delighted to take on the project. He said that he had three other books to complete first which I didn’t mind. In fact, I was glad to hear it. Evidently, I’d chosen someone who was in demand.

So I made an official offer which he officially accepted and we set an official schedule for deliver of the first chapter—just to make sure that I liked what he was doing before he spent 9451 hours doing a voice I don’t care for.

But, again, I needn’t have worried. In due course John posted the first chapter of his narration and it was exactly what I wanted. Right off the bat! I gave him the go-ahead to record the rest of the book and the other day he announced to me that the audiobook was completed. So I listened to it and loved what he’d done. He put a lot of effort into giving my audiobook a narrative style that was at the same time crisp and clear, engaging and involving. He’s delivered an audiobook that’s highly listen-to-able (if that’s a word) and I’m very happy to make it available now to via

Amazon.com

Audible.com

iTunes

You can read Debra’s Next Big Thing at debraannpawlak.blogspot.com

The Next Big Thing blog tag invites writers to answer questions about their current book or Work In Progress), and then to tag other authors about their Next Big Thing. Here goes!

What is the title of your book?

It’s called Citizen Hollywood.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

It is the third book in my Garden of Allah series set during Hollywood’s golden era (late 1920s to late 1950s) at the famously infamous Garden of Allah hotel which stood at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights Boulevard during that time. Citizen Hollywood is set between 1939 and 1941—this was the era when Hollywood was consumed by the escalating feud between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst.

At the time, Orson Welles was a wunderkind of radio and theater who came to Hollywood to make his first movie. After a couple of false starts, he decided to produce a movie based on the life of America’s most powerful media mogul. The result was Citizen Kane. Understandably, Hearst didn’t take to kindly to the idea—to say the least—and used every means at his considerable disposal to bring the movie down, and Welles along with it.

My novel, Citizen Hollywood, plays out against the backdrop of this battle in a similar way to the second book in my series, The Trouble with Scarlett, played out against the saga of the casting of Scarlett O’Hara for the movie version of Gone with the Wind during the mid-1930s.

What genre does your book fall under?

Historical fiction

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Hmmm, that’s a bit of a tricky one.

Gwendolyn Brick (aspiring actress) could be played by Christina Hendricks (“Joan” on Mad Men.)

Kathryn Massey (gossip columnist at the Hollywood Reporter) needs to be played by a young Holly Hunter type. Maybe Anna Kendrick? Perhaps Mila Kunis?

Marcus Adler (MGM screenwriter) is the hardest one for me to cast. Lately I’ve been thinking along the lines of Dax Shephard (“Crosby” by Parenthood) but I’m open to suggestions.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Orson Welles, the enfant terrible of New York, comes to Hollywood to make his first movie and Tinsel City is asking itself what will it be about? Will he scandalize the West Coast the way he’s shocked the East Coast? And, more importantly, who will he bed first and does he kiss-and-tell? (Yes, I know – that was more than one sentence but really…? A 400-page novel reduced to one sentence…!??!?!)

Is your book self-published or represented by an agency?

Self-published

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

About six months

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

When I started to develop the central idea for these books and looked around for other books similar to what I had in mind, I couldn’t really find anything to compare and contrast them with. The closest I can get is the Tales of the City series. Although they’re set in San Francisco in the 70s and 80s and my books take place in Los Angeles in the 20s and 30s, they’re both about a group of people who are living at the same address and making their way through life during a very specific time and place.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I came across an article about the Garden of Allah hotel in an online article. It mentioned all the people who stayed there and it was a passing parade of famous Hollywood names: Tallulah Bankhead, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Errol Flynn, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (who wrote the Thin Man series), Lillian Hellman, Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra . . . the list seemed to go and on.

I wondered how the hell I’d never heard of this place so I did some research and found there was a book about the place called “The Garden of Allah” by a popular gossip columnist, Sheilah Graham who was there a lot when she was going out with Scott Fitzgerald. So I got a copy of her book and when I found that the Garden of Allah opened at the dawn of the talkies—1927—and closed at the dusk of the studio system—1959—I realized that the residents of the Garden of Allah witnessed the unfolding of what we now consider to be the golden era of Hollywood. I saw there was a rich field for storytelling and couldn’t believe nobody had ever done anything with it. That’s when I decided that it was up to me!

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I have three fictional main characters who, in the course of their lives, meet and interact with all sorts of famous people from the Hollywood era – Louis B. Mayer, George Cukor, Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley. I try to represent these people accurately but interestingly. Specifically in Citizen Hollywood, the late 1930s saw the arrival of the gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen so things start to take a darker turn in the lives of my characters.

Here are  authors I’ve tagged to tell you about their Next Big Thing:

N.M. Pondus
Pamela Fagan Hutchins
Alysia Gray Painter

Thank you to Debra Pawlak for tagging me!

“The Trouble with Scarlett” by Martin Turnbull

I am very happy to announce that my next novel
The Trouble with Scarlett
is now available.

The story picks up not long after the end of The Garden on Sunset, during the summer of 1936.

~oOo~

     Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s first novel, takes the world by storm. Everyone knows Civil War pictures don’t make a dime, but renegade producer David O. Selznick snaps up the movie rights and suddenly America has just one question: Who will play Scarlett O’Hara?

When Gwendolyn Brick gets her hands on the book, the clouds part and the angels sing the Hallelujah Chorus. Only a real Southern belle can play Scarlett—and didn’t her mama raise her on stories of Sherman’s march and those damned Yankees? After years of slinging cigarettes at the Cocoanut Grove, Gwendolyn finds a new calling: to play Scarlett. But she’s not the only gal in town with a deep-fried accent. She’s going to have to stand out bigger than a hoop skirt at a Twelve Oaks barbeque to win that role.

Marcus Adler is the golden boy of Cosmopolitan Pictures, the studio William Randolph Hearst started for his mistress, Marion Davies. When Marcus’ screenplay becomes Davies’ biggest hit, he’s invited to Hearst Castle for the weekend. The kid who was kicked out of Pennsylvania gets to rub shoulders with Myrna Loy, Winston Churchill, and Katharine Hepburn—but the trip turns fiasco, and he starts sinking fast. He needs a new story, real big and real soon. So when F. Scott Fitzgerald moves into the Garden of Allah with a $1000-a-week MGM contract but no idea how to write a screenplay, Marcus says, “Pleased to meetcha. We need to talk.”

When Selznick asks George Cukor to direct Gone with the Wind, it’s the scoop of the year for Kathryn Massey, the Hollywood Reporter’s newest columnist. But dare she publish it? Scoops are the exclusive domain of the Hearst papers’ all-powerful, all-knowing, all-bitchy Louella Parsons. Nobody in Hollywood has ever dared to outscoop Louella—until now. When Louella fights back low and dirty, Kathryn’s boss lets her dangle like a scarecrow in a summer storm. Then the telephone rings. It’s Ida Koverman, Louis B. Mayer’s personal secretary, and she has a proposition she’d like to make.

~oOo~

The first chapter is available to read on my website: CHAPTER ONE

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Martin Turnbull with “The Trouble with Scarlett”

The Trouble with Scarlett is available in all formats:

Amazon Paperback

Amazon Kindle ebook

Barnes & Noble Nook ebook
- Sorry Nookers, but B&N are really dragging their feet. This should have been available by now but there’s no sign of it which is odd because you can buy the paperback on BN.com. Go figure! So the status of the Nook version of this book remains: COMING SOON!

Apple iTunes ebook – go to iTunes Store and search on “The Trouble with Scarlett”

Diesel ebookstore

Amazon UK (paperback and Kindle ebook)

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And when you have read it (and assuming, of course, that you enjoyed it), if you have the chance and inclination, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a review on my Amazon page. Rate it as many stars as you see fit, and give your honest opinion. The more reviews a book has, the higher its Amazon profile. Thanks!

Or at the very least take a half-second and click on the “LIKE” button underneath the book’s title on the Amazon page. Apparently that helps a lot too! Thanks!

Oh, and if you could take a moment to do that for The Garden on Sunset, that’d be a huge help.

~oOo~

Have you read Book One yet?

The Garden on Sunset

is available in all formats
(audio book version coming soon!)

More information can be found on my website:

www.MartinTurnbull.com

(The audiobook version of The Garden on Sunset is coming soon!)

> > >   S P E C I A L   P R O M O T I O N   < < <

As a special promotion to celebrate
the release of The Trouble with Scarlett,
the Kindle version of The Garden on Sunset has been slashed
to only 99 cents until the end of October 2012!
Procrastination is not recommended!

PLEASE NOTE: It is not necessary to have a Kindle ereader
to read the Kindle version of any book.
You can download the free Kindle app for any
computer, smart phone or mobile device.
FREE KINDLE APP

~oOo~

You can also follow me on

FACEBOOK and TWITTER

~oOo~

And a personal note to everyone who read The Garden on Sunset and took the time to tell me how much they enjoyed it: THANK YOU! Your support has been wonderfully encouraging.

All the best,

Martin Turnbull

P.S. – feel free to pass this email along to anybody who you think might be interested!

~oOo~

Main dining room at the Musso and Frank Grill, on Hollywood Blvd since 1919

Richard and Kim had lined up a pair of speakers: Adrienne Crew, the president of the L.A. Chapter of the Dorothy Parker Society, and David Kipen from the Libros Schmibros bookstore in Boyle Heights to talk about Fitzgerald. And they asked me to be the meat in their literary sandwich (my words, not theirs) and set the scene for mid-30s Hollywood by talking about the place both Parker and Fitzgerald called home: the Garden of Allah hotel.

Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley

In 1936, when Fitzgerald scored a $1000-a-week contract to write screenplays at MGM, he checked in to the Garden of Allah. Being a chronic alcoholic who was desperate to dry out and get his life back on track (he was $40,000 in debt, his wife Zelda had been institutionalized since 1930, and daughter Scottie was in an expensive boarding school en route to Vassar), Scott’s choice of living quarters was probably not the wisest he could have made. There was a boozy party going on at the Garden of Allah pretty much every night of the week. They were usually held in the villa occupied by Robert Benchley whose all-too-frequent partner-in-hooch was the inimitable Dorothy Parker. She stayed off and on at the Garden of Allah over the years depending on finances and marital status.

Richard and Kim asked me if I could speak about the Garden of Allah, where and when it existed and how I’d come to use it as a setting for my novels set during the golden years of Hollywood. I told them I’d be delighted to be their literary sandwich filler . . . and then wondered how delighted I’d still be on the night when it was my turn to approach the microphone and have 100-plus people look up at me, expecting me to sound intelligent and articulate and cohesive and informative and entertaining. After all, I’d never done anything like that before, nor had I ever given a reading of my work.

But, as a fellow writer friend of mine said, “Giving readings is one of the few perks left to being a writer so enjoy it.” So I put my thoughts together, came up with a spiel about the Garden of Allah, practiced a two-page reading, and showed up at Musso and Frank’s with a stack of copies of The Garden on Sunset in case I’d sufficiently impressed anyone to buy a copy.

Musso and Frank Grill where LAVA’s bi-monthly literary salon takes place.

It was a lovely night in a charming 1920s era restaurant, perfect for a salon like this, and the audience was enthusiastic and receptive to everything we had to say. I can only hope that someone might ask me to speak at some other salon/event/conference/supermarket opening, and if that happens, I will bring to mind the lessons I learned that night:

Yes…that’s right…we’re all staring at YOU!

1… Don’t Be Nervous
Fat chance. Not being nervous was never going to happen but there are a few things you can do to still the beating heart-clammy hands-cottonmouth syndrome. One common piece of advice is to imagine everybody is sitting in their underwear. Let me save you some time: Don’t even bother. Whoever came up with that probably had an underwear fetish. So instead, I reminded myself that every person in the room had come that evening to hear what I had to say. They were very interested in the time and place I’ve been reading about, researching and writing about for the past five years. These were my people and there was no need to be nervous. Did it work? Marginally. Perhaps even more than marginally, but I wasn’t there yet. What did help was to picture my two biggest supporters—my partner Bob and my editor Meghan Pinson—standing at the rear of the room holding huge red pom-poms (apparently they had to be red) and cheering “Go Martin! Go Martin!” Okay, now we were cooking!

2… S-p-e-a-k   S-l-o-w-l-y
Between the beating heart and the cottonmouth, this is easier said than done. Way easier. But worth the effort, even if you have to write the word SLOW on your hands with a thick black marker. Which I didn’t. But which I wish I had.

3… Bring Reading Glasses That You Didn’t Buy In Egypt
Here’s where I really messed up. I had no expectations that I was going to reach the goal of being word perfect with my reading, but I was keen to botch as few words as possible. So I stood in front of my laptop and read the passage out loud once a day for the 10 days leading up to the salon. My mistake, though, was that I’d brought along a pair of cheap reading glasses that I bought in a market in Egypt last year thinking that they’d do the job just fine which they did . . . at home. Yeah . . . well . . . the problem with that was that I was doing the actual reading in a restaurant whose lighting is soft and low and flattering—as lighting in nice restaurants should be. I opened the book to commence the reading, put on my cheap Egyptian glasses and—oh crap. I could barely see the printing on the page. It was okay but you kinda sorta want to be more than “okay” when you’re reading your work to exactly the sort of people who will, with any luck, want to rush right out and buy your book.

4… Make Sure Booze Is Waiting For You Back At Your Table
This is crucial. Despite the success of the red pom-poms, and managing to speak slowly, and faking your way through slightly blurry words that you’ve written, re-written, read, and re-read literally a hundred times by now, making your way back to your table while thinking of all the things you wanted to say and planned to say but forgot to say is made easier knowing that there is a glass of chilled pinot grigio awaiting you.

Martin with his partner, Bob, sitting in the booth at Musso and Frank Grill where Marilyn Monroe liked to eat whenever she’d stop by for a meal.

5… Fake It Till You Make It
If everything else fails, just fake it till you make it. Pretend like you’re totally relaxed and in control like you’ve done this dozens of times before. In all likelihood, people will either not notice or not care or give you the benefit of the doubt. Which is apparently what happened because at the end of the night, I happened to look over to the booth where I’d set up my books and found a line had formed! I sold 20 copies of my book that night.

Jack Marino – Warrior Filmmaker on LA Talk Radio

6… Do A Radio Interview Instead
As it happened, that same week, I was invited to appear on Jack Marino’s Warrior Filmmaker radio show. Jack is a huge Errol Flynn fan, and loves anything to do with Hollywood during the time when Flynn was at his peak, mid-1930s to early 1950s. Flynn was also a frequent resident of the Garden of Allah and so he asked me to come on his show to talk about it and my series of novels. Surprise, surprise! It’s a whole lot less stressful to talk about your work when you’ve got one easy-going, smiling guy looking at you from across the desk than it does to have 100 easy-going, smiling people sitting in a restaurant whose subdued lighting is about to throw you through a loop. The 50 minutes we spent talking about Hollywood and the Garden of Allah and Alla Nazimova were over before I could say “In like Flynn.”

You can listen to my interview with Jack here

Jack Marino Warrior Filmmaker, with guest: Martin Turnbull

or you can can download it as a podcast from his website or through iTunes.

www.MartinTurnbull.com

Enjoy!

“THE TROUBLE WITH SCARLETT”
Book 2 in the Garden of Allah series
by Martin Turnbull

CHAPTER 1

Kathryn Massey let the cardboard box slide out of her arms and onto the mottled linoleum, where it landed with a thud. She turned around and addressed her apple-cheeked pal standing in the doorway. “What the hell was in this?” she asked him. “Bowling balls?”

The guy dropped his suitcases, walked over to the box, and lifted out a shiny Remington typewriter. “It’s a villa-warming present from Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker.” He broke out into a giddy grin she hadn’t seen in ages. “I can’t believe either of them are my neighbors now, let alone both of them. Benchley’s in the villa next door, and Dottie’s right below me!”

Kathryn smiled back at her friend and gazed around the villa. The afternoon sun filtered through the elm tree outside the open window, filling the living room with warmth and the scent of the jasmine from across the pool.

“Well then, Mr. Marcus Adler,” she said, planting her hands on her hips, “let me be the first to officially welcome you to your new home at the Garden of Allah’s villa number twenty-three. I trust you and Mr. Remington will be very happy here.”

“It’s so bright in here!” Marcus said, setting the typewriter on his new dining table. He took a look around his new home. “I can scarcely believe all this space is mine.”

“No more dark little rooms for you, mister.”

“Quite frankly, I can scarcely believe anything about my life these days.”

Kathryn had heard that one hit movie could change a person’s life, but she’d never witnessed it firsthand before. She’d been sitting next to Marcus at Grauman’s Chinese, holding his hand when the credit for Return to Sender, a Marion Davies vehicle, flashed up on the screen: WRITTEN BY ROBERT MCNULTY. He’d let out a raw groan and clamped her hand in his fist hard enough to pop her knuckle. It didn’t take Kathryn long to figure out what had happened. McNulty was Marcus’ boss, and the fink had pilfered his credit when he saw what a socko screenplay Marcus had turned in. But to her credit, Marion Davies had squared things off with W.R. Hearst, and Marcus’ salary jumped from seventy-five dollars a month to a hundred and fifty a week. Goodbye, horrible dark little room, hello, sun-drenched villa.

The place had exactly the same layout as the one Kathryn shared with her roommate Gwendolyn, but the girls’ was painted pale coral and dotted with vases of flowers. Here, the stark white walls, bookshelves filled with Drums Along the Mohawk and Northwest Passage, and that sturdy typewriter already made it feel like Marcus’ place. Kathryn hugged her friend. “I never doubted your success for a second.”

“I got my first new paycheck yesterday,” he said. “Wouldn’t you know it? I start making decent money the same month they introduce the income tax. Maybe Hearst is right: income tax is a Commie plot and we should all refuse to pay it.”

“At least y’all earn enough to have to pay income tax.” Gwendolyn Brick appeared in the doorway, a bottle of 7-Up in each hand. The sun shone through her honey-blonde hair and onto her lightly tanned shoulders. How a movie studio hadn’t snapped her up was a mystery to Kathryn. “It ain’t champagne, but it’s all we got.”

“As long as there are bubbles.” Marcus waved her into his sunny but tiny new kitchen. They were clinking tumblers when a theatrical voice filled the place.

“Vive la villa twenty-three, bébé!”

The three of them turned to find George Cukor standing in the doorway holding an enormous magnum of Dom Perignon. When he saw that Marcus was not alone, he apologized with an endearing blush.

It had been several months since that crazy night Kathryn and Marcus ran all over Los Angeles in an effort to bail out poor George before sleazebag journalists trawled through the city lockup in search of a juicy story. Marcus had never mentioned it again, so Kathryn had decided to behave as though nothing had happened.

“A housewarming gift!” she exclaimed. “How very thoughtful!”

George looked around at the boxes. “That’s today?”

“So if the bubbly isn’t a housewarming present . . . ?”

George’s eyes smiled through his wire-framed spectacles but he said nothing more until Marcus had conjured four champagne flutes. George filled them all and asked everyone to raise their glasses. “At the risk of sounding revoltingly self-serving,” he said with a smile so wide it threatened to split his face in two, “here’s to me!”

“What’s the occasion?” Gwendolyn asked. She peered at her champagne but didn’t take a sip; her history with booze wasn’t pretty. Kathryn wondered for a moment if Gwendolyn was going to offend MGM’s best director by not partaking of his expensively delicious champagne.

George drew in a deep breath. “Mr. David O. Selznick has just bought the film rights to Gone with the Wind, and he’s asked me to direct!”

“Holy crapoly!” Marcus exclaimed, clapping a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“That’s huge!” Gwendolyn said, and took her first sip. “I read the other day that book will have sold half a million copies by the end of the year.”

Kathryn leaned toward George and hinted a smile. “So, Mr. Cukor . . . ?”

George returned her grin. “Yes, Miss Massey . . . ?”

“Excuse me for being nosy but, you know, professional curiosity and all that. Care to share with us who you see as Scarlett O’Hara?”

“You might want to tell your former boss that she’s a front runner.”

Kathryn bit into her top lip. Anything connected to Gone with the Wind was big news these days, but she could use none of this information in her Hollywood Reporter column. Only one woman in Hollywood could do that: Louella Parsons.

Parsons ruled the world of Hollywood gossip like a barely-literate Borgia, and had managed to engineer for herself an unimaginable coup: forty-eight hours of exclusivity on all scoops. The fact that she wrote for the all-powerful William Randolph Hearst probably had something to do with that. So why then, Kathryn wondered, was George Cukor throwing around this precious information as though it was yesterday’s confetti?

“Oh!” George snapped his head around to face Kathryn’s doe-eyed roommate. “I’ve just put two and two together. You must be Gwendolyn. The girl with the brooch.”

Marcus and Kathryn couldn’t have made Cukor’s bail that night without pawning Gwendolyn’s only real piece of jewelry—a sparkling diamond brooch that was a gift from one of her admirers.

Kathryn watched George blanch. “I never properly thanked you—either of you—for what you did that night. I’ve been terribly remiss.”

Kathryn gave a discreet shrug. “Some sleeping dogs are better left alone,” she said.

But she was already mentally writing her headline. “So,” she asked him, “when are you sharing your news with Louella?”

George’s face soured. “Miss Louella Parsons and I are not currently on speaking terms. This week, she barged onto the set of Camille uninvited and ruined one of Garbo’s most difficult scenes. The whole thing upset Garbo so much that she flung her script at Louella. Unfortunately, it hit an antique lamp instead and shattered the damn thing. Then Garbo stormed out and went home. A complete waste of an afternoon. I was absolutely furious!” He let a string of silent moments slip by to let his audience picture Greta Garbo, usually so reserved, erupting like an opera diva.

Then he permitted himself a sly smile and laid a gentle hand on Kathryn’s arm. “My dear, this one is all yours.”

Kathryn heard her friends softly gasp as she held the director’s unblinking gaze. George couldn’t possibly mean what I think he means. That would be inconceivable. She laid her hand on top of his and squeezed it gently. “This one?”

“Selznick has acquired the rights and has signed me on as director. It’s all yours for the next twenty-four hours.”

Kathryn’s throat went dry. She looked down at her empty champagne flute. “Louella always gets the scoops first.”

The director’s eyes gleamed. “Apparently not always.”

* * *

It was well after eleven o’clock by the time Kathryn got the night guard to let her into the Hollywood Reporter building. The newsroom was deserted; rows of empty desks were lined up in the shadows like tombstones. Kathryn had only the faint glow of the streetlights to guide her. She felt her way to her desk and flicked on her lamp. It eyed her silent typewriter in a solitary circle.

She had until midnight. That was when the morning edition was put to bed and couldn’t be changed. Everything she wrote was supposed to go through Billy Wilkerson, the paper’s owner, but he hadn’t answered her calls to his home or his men’s club. The course of history, she decided, would have to change without his approval.

She slid a fresh sheet of paper into her typewriter.

Selznick Nabs GWTW Screen Rights, Taps Cukor As Director

Considering Tallulah Bankhead as Scarlett

by Kathryn Massey

Her fingers recoiled from the typewriter. You can’t do this, she told herself. It was idiotic to think she could get away with breaking the unbreakable rule. Louella would have her guts for garters. And the most powerful man in the world was the last person she wanted as an enemy.

She re-read what she had written. “You were a nice dream while you lasted,” she told the sheet of paper, and pulled it out of the typewriter. A crash of glass splintered the silence and Kathryn poked her head into the corridor. The light was now on at the far end of the corridor.

“Hello? Anyone there?”

Wilkerson’s office door was slightly ajar, allowing a slice of light to etch the parquet floor. As she drew closer, she could hear heavy breathing coming from inside. The last thing she wanted to do was walk in on her boss making out with someone.   Especially if that someone wasn’t his wife.

But when she heard Wilkerson yell, “JESUS CHRIST!” she decided he was in pain. She pushed his office door open and peeked inside. Her elegant boss sat cross-legged on the floor with one hand bunched around the other. Blood was seeping out between his fingers.

“Mr. Wilkerson! Are you all right?”

He didn’t register surprise that anyone was there. “You got a handkerchief?”

“In my purse. I’ll go get—”

“Breast pocket.” He jutted his head toward the suit jacket slung over the back of his chair. Kathryn rounded her boss’ desk and pulled out a linen handkerchief. It wasn’t until she knelt down to tie it around his finger that she smelled the pall of whiskey hanging over him.

“Careful,” he said. “Broken glass.”

Thick shards of what had been a bottle of Royal Crest lay scattered around him.

“Had a bit of an accident?” she asked, winding Wilkerson’s handkerchief around his index finger, which had a nasty gash along nearly its whole length. “I think this might need stitches.”

“Forget it,” Wilkerson mumbled. “I deserve to bleed to death.”

She helped him stand up. “Bleed to death?” she asked, fashioning the ends of the handkerchief into a knot. “Now you’re just being melodramatic.”

Wilkerson parked his backside against the edge of his desk and slumped over his bloodied finger, nursing it with his other hand. He was stony with silence for a moment or two, then mumbled something that sounded like “Sananee . . .”

“Sana . . . what?”

“Say, what are you doing here, anyway?”

“I came across a big scoop. Or at least I thought so, but it didn’t check out.”

He raised his head slowly and looked at her for the first time. His eyes were bloodshot and she could tell he hadn’t been listening.

“Santa Anita,” he said, low and hoarse.

It took a moment for the meaning of those two words to sink in. “You lost a stack of dough at the racetrack? Can’t have been the first time. If you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Wilkerson, you smell like a whiskey factory. Perhaps you ought to think about going ho—”

“It wasn’t just a stack o’ dough.” Wilkerson’s eyes shifted away from her. “It was the whole goddamned payroll.”

Kathryn felt her jaw drop and a volley of questions pelted her mind. He gambled the payroll away? The whole thing? Am I the only one who knows? Will he remember he’s told me when he sobers up in the morning? Should I tell someone? Why is he telling me?

The urge to slap her boss consumed Kathryn like a brushfire. She crossed her arms and anchored them there. “All of it?”

Wilkerson kept his head hung low. “There’s nothing you can say to me that I ain’t already said a hundred times tonight. I’m a bastard an’ deserve to be shot. My staff’s gonna walk out on me, and they should. They deserve a boss who will look aft’ them. Ev’thin’ I’ve worked so hard for, ev’thin’ the Hollywood Reporter stands for will be pfffft.” He looked up at her, creasing his sweaty brow. “What did you say that about a scoop?”

“It’s not important.”

“It was important enough for you to come into the office at midnight.”

“I thought it was,” she corrected him. “But on reflection, it’ll cause more complications than it’s worth. So don’t worry about it. You should think about getting to a hospital. That cut looks—”

“Tell me.”

“Really, Mr. Wilkerson, I don’t—”

“Come on, out with it and let me be the judge.”

She shifted her weight from one foot to another as she related the Gone with the Wind news. Wilkerson’s eyes grew to saucers and his smile stretched from ear to ear. “How’s your source?”

“The horse’s mouth.”

“Selznick himself?”

“One of the horses in the stall next door,” she conceded.

“Oh boy, is that old nag going to be pissed when she reads the morning edition!”

“We can’t publish this,” Kathryn told him. “You know the rule. We break it at our mortal peril.”

Wilkerson’s dark eyes narrowed and a crafty smirk played on his face. “You telling me you don’t have the gumption to play with the big boys? Kathryn Massey, I’m surprised at you. I thought you were made of sterner stuff.”

“Me and my sterner stuff are just fine, thank you very much, but somebody in this room has to be sensible. Let us not forget, you’re down an entire payroll.”

“William Randolph Hearst can go screw himself. This is what we’ve been waiting for. Why wouldn’t we print this?”

He started to bunch his hands into fists, but it loosened Kathryn’s handiwork and he started to bleed again. She went to retie the makeshift bandage but he brushed her away. She grabbed his hand anyway and pulled it toward her, tightening the handkerchief while she kept him firmly in her gaze.

“We’ll be crossing a line here, Mr. Wilkerson. Outscooping Parsons will unleash the four horsemen of the apocalypse, followed by the seven plagues, the hounds of the Baskervilles, and the entire contents of Pandora’s box. There would be no going back.”

Wilkerson drew in a deep breath. “GO!” He pushed her toward the door. “I’ll get the print room to hold the front page. I promised it to DeMille, but he can bite my ass.”

Kathryn stood at his office door and stared at her boss, willing him to change his mind. He stared back at her. “What now?” he demanded.

“This is insane. You’re drunk. This cannot possibly end well.”

He leaned over his desk and jutted out his chin. “I’ve got the guts if you want the glory.”

It was quite possibly the one thing Billy Wilkerson could have said to make her change her mind. Oh my God, Kathryn thought, he’s actually going to let me do this. He trusts me, she realized for the first time. He trusts me. She looked at her watch; it was twelve minutes to midnight. “Is there even going to be a Hollywood Reporter tomorrow?”

He nodded.

“What are you going to do about the payroll?”

“If you can dig up a scoop like that, I can dig up three hundred grand.”

~~~oOo~~~

So, what do you think? I’d love to hear from you!

www.MartinTurnbull.com

I was so pleased with the work Dan Yeager did at Nu-Image Design that I went back to him for this project too. I didn’t have a specific image in my mind but I did, at least, have a clue about what I wanted.

As The Trouble with Scarlett is set against the casting of Scarlett O’Hara in the movie version of Gone with the Wind, I knew that I needed a cover which incorporated a Gone with the Wind feel, but I didn’t want it to look like a romance novel. I didn’t want any prospective reader to think that it was a GWTW knock-off or parody. But I did want it to appeal to GWTW fans. As I couldn’t use any of the actual images from the movie, I needed Dan to come up with a GWTW-y feel.

Also, as Gone with the Wind was a landmark Technicolor production, I wanted this cover to reflect that. Whereas The Garden on Sunset was set in the sepia-tinted late 20s/early 30s world of the early talkies, this new book opens in 1936, the dawn of the Technicolor era so the cover had to reflect that.

I also wanted the title to be a GWTW-y style font. Not necessarily the same one used on the cover of the original book or in the movie, but something else which evoked it.

“Right!” said Dan. “Got it.” And amazingly quickly, he came back with:

First up was the font. I’d asked for a GWTW-y font but got the same font he used on my first book. He reasoned that this is part of a series and it’s better to have a cohesive look to the whole series, and one way to do that is to keep the same font throughout. Okay, fair enough. Good point.

I did like the colors he used. The vivid sunset and silhouetted tree were very reminiscent of that famous shot from the movie. But it looked a bit too romance novelish to me. Plus, the couple looked like they were out of the court of King Louis XVI of France, not the Civil War. So I decided to go with something else.

One of the key scenes in my novel takes place during the first night of filming on Gone with the Wind when they recreated the burning of Atlanta by setting fire to old movie sets (including King Kong and, ironically, a Marlene Dietrich movie called The Garden of Allah). It’s a very cinematic scene and as fire is a recurring image in my book, I wondered if perhaps Dan could recreate that famous shot of the stand-ins for Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh caught in front of those enormous, fiery movie sets.) And he did:

That is what I asked for but I didn’t like it as much. It didn’t say Gone with the Wind as readily as the first version did. Plus, changing the font from yellow to blue, the title got lost in the background. I follow a blog which analyzes book covers and the mantra there is MAKE SURE THE TITLE POPS OUT. So this version was a no-go.

But it did help me to realize that the cover needed to communicate in a single glance that this is a novel about the movie version of Gone with the Wind, not the book version. So I told Dan to go back to the first cover but come up with something that says: “HOLLYWOOD!” And as this book is about the casting of Scarlett, not Scarlett & Rhett, we need to replace the figure of the couple with a single silhouette of Scarlett, preferably something along the lines of As God is my witness… as in “As God is my witness, I will be cast in the role of Scarlett O’Hara!”

“And please,” I addded, “just to humor me, change the font to something GWTW-y. I’ve been picturing a cover using that font for a year. I need to know that it’s the wrong way to go.” And, patient man that he is, Dan complied.

Okay, now we’fre were getting somewhere. I liked the newspaper headline, and I liked the Scarlett silhouette. While I liked the new font, I decided Dan was right, we need to stick with the original. This looked too much like a blatant rip-off Gone with the Wind wannabe. Also, the red sunset and the blue sky made for too much going on in the background.

I decided that this book (and this series) is about Hollywood and so the cover needs to reflect that. The Hollywood aspect of the cover needed to be emphasized more and the GWTW aspect needed to be emphasized less. I was also concerned that Dan may have lifted the new Scarlett silhouette from a screen capture off the movie which, copyright-wise, is a no-no. So I asked Dan to ditch the blue sky, choose a different font color to make the title pop better, feature the headline more, and pull back on Scarlett.

So close! So close! I liked everything about this but two things. The new Scarlett looked more like an ink blob dripping off the newspaper headline, and the trees in the silhouetted horizon were obscuring too much of the headline.

I sent Dan back to the drawing board just one more time and I am now very excited to present the cover for my next novel:

“THE TROUBLE WITH SCARLETT”

THE TROUBLE WITH SCARLETT
Book two in the “Garden of Allah” series
by Martin Turnbull

Summer, 1936: Gone with the Wind is released by first-time author Margaret Mitchell and becomes an international sensation. Everyone in Hollywood knows that Civil War pictures don’t make a dime, but renegade movie producer David O. Selznick snaps up the movie rights and suddenly the talk around dinner tables and cocktail parties across the country is fixated on just one question: Who will win the role of Scarlett O’Hara?

When aspiring actress Gwendolyn Brick finally gets her hands on the book, it’s like the clouds have parted and the angels are singing the Hallelujah Chorus. Only a genuine southern belle can play Scarlett and didn’t she spend her childhood listening to Mama’s stories of Sherman’s march and all those damned Yankees? After years of slinging cigarettes at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Gwendolyn finds a new purpose in life: to become the silver screen’s Scarlett O’Hara. But isn’t that the ambition of every other pretty Hollywood gal with a deep-fried accent? She knows she’s going to have to stand out bigger than a hoop skirt at a Twelve Oaks barbecue.

Marcus Adler finds himself the golden boy of Cosmopolitan Pictures, the vanity production company set up by William Randolph Hearst for his movie star mistress, Marion Davies. He’s written Return to Sender, Davies’ first-ever genuine smash hit and wins a coveted invitation to spend the weekend at Hearst Castle. The kid who got kicked out of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, is now the guest of the richest man in America, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Myrna Loy, Winston Churchill, and Katharine Hepburn. But the trouble with flying high is that you have such a very long way to fall. When Marcus’ Hearst weekend turns into an unmitigated fiasco, Marcus finds himself sinking fast. He realizes he needs a new idea to impress the studios—real big and real soon—when the Garden of Allah hotel gains a new resident. F. Scott Fitzgerald arrives in Hollywood with a $1000-a-week contract at MGM but no idea how to write a screenplay. “Pleased to meetcha,” Marcus tells him. “We need to talk.”

When Selznick gives the nod to MGM’s George Cukor to direct Gone with the Wind, it’s the scoop of the year and falls into the lap of Kathryn Massey, the Hollywood Reporter’s newest columnist. But dare she publish it? All scoops are the exclusive domain of the Hearst papers’ all-powerful, all-knowing, all-bitchy Louella Parsons. Nobody in Hollywood has dared to outscoop Louella before, but isn’t it about time someone did? When Kathryn plunges ahead with her story, Louella retaliates low and dirty. Kathryn’s boss loses his nerve and leaves her dangling like a limp scarecrow in a summer storm. Then the telephone rings. It’s Ida Koverman, Louis B. Mayer’s personal secretary, and she has a proposition she’d like to make.

The Trouble with Scarlett is the second in Martin Turnbull’s series of historical novels set during Hollywood’s golden age.

www.MartinTurnbull.com

• Will anybody be the slightest bit interested?
• And, if they are, will they be interested enough to buy my book?
• And, if they do, will they be interested enough to want to know more about what went into writing the book?

All these thoughts swirled around my brain last January as my novel—The Garden on Sunset—hit the internet. It turned out that yes, people were interested. And yes, they were interested enough to buy my book. But it wasn’t until Katie and Hilary, the lovely girls at The Scarlett Olive appeared on my horizon that I realized that someone out there actually wanted to know more.

Katie and Hilary run The Scarlett Olive, a podcast devoted to the memory of classic films and are very active on Facebook, which is where I found them. We started to comment on each others’ posts and . . . I’m not really sure what happened next  . . . yadda yadda yadda . . . we were emailing each other. Katie said she planned to review my book on her blog once she’d read it but pleaded college student poverty. I happily sent her a copy and in due course, she did review it.

Then they asked if they could interview me. My first! Naturally I said yes, but I wasn’t sure how it would go, or how I would come across, or if I’d end up so tongue-tied that “Garden of Allah” would come out “gthenbly ock allawalla.” So we set up a time to record it and when the phone rang, I picked it up and hoped for the best.

It went very well. The girls are easy going, had done their homework, and knew that all they needed to do was ask a thoughtful question and then leave me to blather on. It was a great experience, but I did learn a few things.

1 . . . Don’t ask for questions ahead of time.
I did, but the girls told me they prefer not to supply them before the interview and favor letting the conversation go where it wants. They were exactly right. You don’t want an interview to be a Q&A session of pre-prepared questions and carefully rehearsed answers.

2 . . . Slow the hell down for crying out loud
Through most of the interview I was clear and understandable, but there were times when I got so caught up in my responses that I started speaking way too fast. Even I couldn’t comprehend what I’d said—and I’m used to my Australian accent. If I had my time over, I’d have grabbed the nearest marker and written the words SLOW DOWN on a piece of paper and stared at it.

3 . . . Don’t assume anybody knows what the Garden of Allah was
I’ve been reading about and writing about the Garden of Allah hotel for so long now that I’ve reached the point where I’ve started to assume that everyone knows about it. During the 32 years it was open, it became a famously infamous place where many, many people stayed, often when they were at the start of what later evolved to become a legendary career—how could anybody not have heard of it??? But there was a time when I’d never heard of the place either, and if I had my chance at a do-over, I’d probably take the opportunity to talk about the Garden of Allah more as it’s central to the whole series of these novels I’m writing.

4 . . . Stand up more
Although, in retrospect, there was no reason to be nervous, this was my first interview and so I was a teensy bit nervous. Perhaps “nervous” is the wrong word. More accurately, I was a teensy bit anxious that I didn’t come across like a numbskull with a concussion. About two-thirds through the interview I found that I felt better if I was standing up and keeping in motion, even if that motion was largely shifting my weight from one foot to the other.

5 . . . Have a large gin and tonic first
Actually, that wasn’t one of the things I learned during the course of this process, but I think it’s a good life lesson to keep in mind, no matter what’s going on.

If you’d like to hear the interview, click here >>>

Lost in the Garden: An Interview with Martin Turnbull

 And be sure to check out the graphic that the oh-so-clever Katie and Hilary created for the podcast. Notice how the 1920s girl is actually holding a copy of The Garden on Sunset. I must ask them how they did that.

www.MartinTurnbull.com

]]> http://martinturnbull.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/four-and-a-half-things-i-learned-while-giving-my-first-interview/feed/ 2 martinturnbull man-on-phone slow_sign garden-of-allah-hotel-sunset-blvd http://martinturnbull.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/reblurbing-the-blurb/ http://martinturnbull.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/reblurbing-the-blurb/#comments Mon, 28 May 2012 20:52:27 +0000 martinturnbull http://martinturnbull.wordpress.com/?p=1299 Continue reading →]]> Generally speaking, I’m not one much for looking back, or second-guessing myself, or playing “Yeah, but what if I’d . . .?”

“The Garden on Sunset” by Martin Turnbull

My first book – “The Garden on Sunset” – has been out for a few months now and I’ve been happy with both the way it turned out and the way it’s been received. And while I’ve facebooked and tweeted and blogged about it at every opportunity, I’ve also moved on to the next book: The Trouble with Scarlett. And I’m happy to report that it has progressed smoothly and according to schedule.

Now, that said, I’m also open to doing something better, more effectively, and smarter. So when I came across a blog which offers to give feedback on how you’re marketing your novel, I thought: What the hell. If there was something I could tweak about the presentation of my book (which largely means “How it looks on Amazon?”) which could encourage more people to take a chance and buy it, then I’m all for giving it a go.

It wasn’t until after I’d done it and was talking to several writer-type friends about it that I was told more than once how brave I was to open myself up to criticism like that. I was surprised because I really like the cover to the book, worked hard on the blurb to make the book sound as appealing as possible, and had gone through a dozen drafts of the opening before I was happy with it. I really wasn’t expecting too much negative criticism to be flung at me like horse poop.

Wrong! A total of 11 people, including the blogger weighed in what they thought wasn’t working. As a result, I got 11 different people telling me that nothing worked. The cover was wrong—too dark, too dim, too vague, misleading the genre. The blurb was a mess—too long, too wordy, not focused enough. The opening didn’t grab, they didn’t care much about the characters—too bland. And a number of them must have gone to my Amazon listing because they even criticized the reviews left by people there. Something about the fact there wasn’t a bad review . . . ? I’m not really sure about that one.

So I took a step back and tried to look at each factor—the cover, the blurb, the first 300 words—and see if (a) I agreed with them, and (b) if I did agree, should/would/could I do anything about it?

I decided that I loved the cover of my book and that it didn’t need any tweaking or redoing. It’s exactly what I was going for and I think it’s a keeper. Redoing any of the first 300 words, I decided, was an exercise in second-guessing that wouldn’t result in achieving anything productive.

But the blurb! Ah, now that was something I could do something about. In case you’ve never had to write a blurb before, let me tell you: it’s really, REALLY hard. You have to distill a 90,000-word novel into a punchy, catchy, intriguing, pithy sock-it-to-‘em pitch of 200 to 300 words that will make a finger itch to click “Add to cart.”

But when you’re looking at a book on Amazon or in a real, live bookstore, what do you look at to help decide if this book is for you? In most cases, it’s the cover and the blurb. As an author, those are your primary selling tools. If a potential new reader likes what he or she sees, maybe then they’ll go inside the book to read the opening pages. But if the cover and the blurb fail to ignite or intrigue, then who cares about the opening paragraph?

And, I decided, these people who bothered to respond to the blog (which, lest we forget, invited people to say what they thought wasn’t working) were probably right. I didn’t think my blurb was “a mess” as one person described it, but clearly it did need sharpening and refocusing.

So I started from scratch and wrote a new one. Then rewrote that, and then rewrote the rewrite. Then I called on some writer friends for their input and incorporated some of their suggestions. Then I rewrote it again, and then again. Then I sent it to my editor, Meghan Pinson, so that she could cast her wise eyes over it. She completely rewrote it, and then I rewrote her version.

And then I got a headache and then I went cross-eyed and then I got drunk and then I woke up and then Meghan and I rewrote several more versions of the parts which still weren’t working yet. And then I finally decided I was done.

And that’s when I went onto Amazon and posted the following new-and-improved blurb for The Garden on Sunset.

~oOO~

Right before talking pictures slug Tinsel Town in the jaw, a luminous silent screen star converts her private estate into the Garden of Allah Hotel. The lush grounds soon become a haven for Hollywood hopefuls to meet, drink, and revel through the night. George Cukor is in the pool, Tallulah Bankhead is at the bar, and Scott Fitzgerald is sneaking off to a bungalow with Sheilah Graham while Madame Alla Nazimova keeps watch behind her lace curtains.

But the real story of the Garden of Allah begins with its first few residents, three kids on the brink of something big.

Marcus Adler has a lot to prove after his father catches him and the police chief’s son with their pants down. He flees Pennsylvania for Hollywood with his mouth shut and his eyes open, and begins to write the lines all those starlets will say out loud. Can a smart, sensitive guy find his own voice in a town that’s just learning to talk?

Kathryn Massey’s childhood was a grinding routine of auditions, but she couldn’t care less about being a movie star. When she takes off with her typewriter, determined to become a newspaper reporter, she finds that breaking into the boys’ club is tougher than breaking free of her bossy mother. To make it in this town, she’ll need some serious moxie.

Gwendolyn Brick is a sweet Southern beauty who’s come a long way to try her luck on the big screen. She’s hoping the same succulent lips the guys want to kiss will land her more than a bit part on a casting couch. She’s going to need some help keeping everyone in line.

Nobody gets a free pass in Hollywood, but a room at the Garden on Sunset can get your foot in the door.

The Garden on Sunset is the first in Martin Turnbull’s series of historical novels set during Hollywood’s golden age.

~oOo~

www.MartinTurnbull.com