The work of Thomas Tryon commands respect for its highly literate tone and the author's way of drawing out a good mystery.But his often hard-to-comprehend protagonists and thinnish plots make reading him a chore at times, and that aspect of his work becomes especially problematic when inspiration is not working.
Such was the issue I had with Crowned Heads.
Crowned Heads should have been better. It is set in and around Hollywood, looking back at its so-called golden period of the early sound era from what was at the time of its 1976 publication the present time, a couple of decades after its end. Tryon had extensive experience in America's dream factory, as a popular screen actor of the 1950s and 1960s who left the business after achieving some fame to become a writer.
The book consists of four novellas, each spotlighting a particular actor. Each, it turns out, were featured players in one of those big Hollywood productions of glossy-eyed piety, 1955's The Miracle Of Santa Cristi. The movie, we are told, was a sensation in its time, especially as it brought back to the screen the legendary actress Fedora Fedorovnya, who miraculously appeared to have not aged a day from her glory years in the 1920s and 1930s.
Crowned Heads works on the question of Fedora as a central theme of the collection, which seems a joint rumination on how different people make peace with a reality too harsh to vie with the world of their faded dreams. It is a vague sort of theme that carries with it unpleasant consequences for all concerned.
"Fedora" - The first and most Tryonesque of the four novellas introduces us to the title character when a producer of a morning-news program decides to investigate the actress's legendary life on the occasion of her passing. Looking for "a fresh angle, a new slant,'' she gets together with writer Barry Detweiller, who had an unusual relationship with the late star. Barry invites her over for dinner, promising to tell her something quite extraordinary but warning her ahead of time of three things: "You won't believe it all, even though my facts are unassailable. You'll be flattered, because I've never told another person. And you'll be very angry, because you can't use it."
The latter term is not because she will be bound to secrecy, but because the facts Barry knows are too outrageous to be believed. That they are. Fedora, it turns out, was a character of many parts, both literally and figuratively. Her time in Hollywood warped more than her love life; it transformed her very identity into something hard to manage.
Based, it seems to me, on the life of Swedish love goddess Greta Garbo, with the addition of a later-in-life Hollywood comeback, "Fedora" became the one part of Crowned Heads with an afterlife, in the form of a Billy Wilder adaptation featuring his star from Sunset Blvd., William Holden. I haven't seen the movie, and wonder if Wilder managed to make the story more fun than Tryon did, considering the dark humor he brought to Sunset Blvd. "Fedora," like all the stories here, needs that humor badly.
"Lorna" - Lorna Doone was a refugee of an unhappy childhood who became the "all-American Cookie" when Hollywood got hold of her. Blessed with fantastic legs, Lorna was never long on brains, as her mother always told her. She sought out men initially as an attempt of getting away from her parental millstone. Time and a drinking problem eventually caught up with her.
When we meet her, Lorna is holed up at a Mexican resort, trying to lay low after a shoplifting episode in California. For a time, she behaves herself, but inevitably, alas, she takes on her old, bad ways after being recognized by some leering men, to the point where she becomes a sad joke to everyone else at the resort. Even the scorpions avoid her, while the men have their way with her and laugh about it later.
"Lorna" is a singularly depressing story of isolation and dissolution without any sense of hope or spirit going for it. Lorna is too unlikable to earn much sympathy, although Tryon's unrelenting focus on her misery would seem to require it in order to work as a story. The deeper she falls, the more outrageously she acts out, burning down her cabana and maiming a handsome diver who resists her fading charms. By the time we reach the end of the line with her, and watch her be taken advantage of for the last time, we care about her fate even less than she does.
"Bobbitt" - He was once a famous child star, featured in a series of movies of the story's title. Now Bobby Ransome is a youngish middle-aged man, well out of the limelight and putting on free shows in New York City's Central Park as a storytelling minstrel in disguise. One of his former co-stars recognizes him, and the two hit it off.
When he played Bobbitt, Ransome, we are told, had the power "to lose himself in that purely imaginative world Bobbitt inhabited, for it was not to see him in the real world that audiences packed the theaters, but in the fantasy one that lay beyond the real." He tells his old friend of his new life, and of a son much like himself who will "never have to grow up either, never have to go to war, never know sorrow." It's all too good to be true, and proves to be exactly that.
"Bobbitt" is the only story lacking a downer ending, for which I might have been more grateful had it been the least bit plausible. Instead, after Tryon reveals Bobby's big secret, he throws us into a silly potboiler involving newspaper advertisements, planes flying messages over the city, and a big finale where most of New York turns out to pay their respects to the former star. It turns out everyone loves Bobby after all, and Bobby, at last, gets to return their affections on his own terms. It all seems way too much given the sadness of Bobby's condition as eternal child; Tryon seems at a loss as to how to come to terms with this problem.
"Willie" - He was once a big star, but now Willie Marsh lives alone just outside Beverly Hills after the death of his lifelong companion, Bee, in a house with its own private chapel (Willie is a devout-seeming Roman Catholic) and keepsakes from his stardom. Then fate calls upon him in the form of two young people who claim they had an appointment to meet him. His mind befogged by nostalgia and alcohol, he invites them in, whereupon they invite a friend. A night of debauchery and terror ensues.
Based very loosely on both the story of Hollywood actor Clifton Webb and on the sad end of silent-screen star Ramon Novarro a few years before, "Willie" has promise. It's the one story with a distinctive element of horror to it, a genre where Tryon's imagination thrived. But "Willie" quickly devolves into a story about a drunken old man and three obnoxious guests who wouldn't leave.
Willie seems to be a closeted homosexual, which was the case with Webb and Novarro and apparently the case with Tryon as well. So you expect more attention to this in the narrative. But as what we are witnessing here is not Willie soliciting sex as was apparently the case with Novarro, but merely trying incongruously to play happy host to three refugees from the Manson Family. Character development, like everything else Tryon throws up at us, tends to get lost in the home wrecking and casual torture that ensues. It keeps going and going, like all the other novellas, without let-up or changes in tone, to the point where I was as angry with Willie for his obtuseness as I was with Lorna for her cabana-wrecking. When one of his "guests" wantonly destroys a priceless artifact and dares him to do something about it, Willie tries to make a joke and worries if his toupee is on straight. When the end comes, Willie embraces it as a martyr for his lost faith, in God and in Hollywood. Again, the author renders all this too convoluted to care much about.
There is also a fifth piece, a short story called "Salad Days" that reintroduces Fedora and Willie briefly in their prime and suggests the Dream Factory will continue to churn out victims at the same heartless pace. The last line, said by Fedora of a nameless drum majorette who may well be Lorna, is "such a pr-retty girl...she really ought to be in the movies."
It's supposed to be ironic, of course, but irony requires a certain human sympathy to work, a sympathy wholly absent from this perplexing book. I'm glad Tryon got out of Hollywood to follow truer dreams, but Crowned Heads offers less evidence of his success in that department than do other works of his like The Other, The Night Of The Moonbow, and Harvest Home, all of which merit your attention. Crowned Heads, sad to say, does not.
Crowned Heads should have been better. It is set in and around Hollywood, looking back at its so-called golden period of the early sound era from what was at the time of its 1976 publication the present time, a couple of decades after its end. Tryon had extensive experience in America's dream factory, as a popular screen actor of the 1950s and 1960s who left the business after achieving some fame to become a writer.
The book consists of four novellas, each spotlighting a particular actor. Each, it turns out, were featured players in one of those big Hollywood productions of glossy-eyed piety, 1955's The Miracle Of Santa Cristi. The movie, we are told, was a sensation in its time, especially as it brought back to the screen the legendary actress Fedora Fedorovnya, who miraculously appeared to have not aged a day from her glory years in the 1920s and 1930s.
Crowned Heads works on the question of Fedora as a central theme of the collection, which seems a joint rumination on how different people make peace with a reality too harsh to vie with the world of their faded dreams. It is a vague sort of theme that carries with it unpleasant consequences for all concerned.
"Fedora" - The first and most Tryonesque of the four novellas introduces us to the title character when a producer of a morning-news program decides to investigate the actress's legendary life on the occasion of her passing. Looking for "a fresh angle, a new slant,'' she gets together with writer Barry Detweiller, who had an unusual relationship with the late star. Barry invites her over for dinner, promising to tell her something quite extraordinary but warning her ahead of time of three things: "You won't believe it all, even though my facts are unassailable. You'll be flattered, because I've never told another person. And you'll be very angry, because you can't use it."
The latter term is not because she will be bound to secrecy, but because the facts Barry knows are too outrageous to be believed. That they are. Fedora, it turns out, was a character of many parts, both literally and figuratively. Her time in Hollywood warped more than her love life; it transformed her very identity into something hard to manage.
Based, it seems to me, on the life of Swedish love goddess Greta Garbo, with the addition of a later-in-life Hollywood comeback, "Fedora" became the one part of Crowned Heads with an afterlife, in the form of a Billy Wilder adaptation featuring his star from Sunset Blvd., William Holden. I haven't seen the movie, and wonder if Wilder managed to make the story more fun than Tryon did, considering the dark humor he brought to Sunset Blvd. "Fedora," like all the stories here, needs that humor badly.
"Lorna" - Lorna Doone was a refugee of an unhappy childhood who became the "all-American Cookie" when Hollywood got hold of her. Blessed with fantastic legs, Lorna was never long on brains, as her mother always told her. She sought out men initially as an attempt of getting away from her parental millstone. Time and a drinking problem eventually caught up with her.
When we meet her, Lorna is holed up at a Mexican resort, trying to lay low after a shoplifting episode in California. For a time, she behaves herself, but inevitably, alas, she takes on her old, bad ways after being recognized by some leering men, to the point where she becomes a sad joke to everyone else at the resort. Even the scorpions avoid her, while the men have their way with her and laugh about it later.
"Lorna" is a singularly depressing story of isolation and dissolution without any sense of hope or spirit going for it. Lorna is too unlikable to earn much sympathy, although Tryon's unrelenting focus on her misery would seem to require it in order to work as a story. The deeper she falls, the more outrageously she acts out, burning down her cabana and maiming a handsome diver who resists her fading charms. By the time we reach the end of the line with her, and watch her be taken advantage of for the last time, we care about her fate even less than she does.
"Bobbitt" - He was once a famous child star, featured in a series of movies of the story's title. Now Bobby Ransome is a youngish middle-aged man, well out of the limelight and putting on free shows in New York City's Central Park as a storytelling minstrel in disguise. One of his former co-stars recognizes him, and the two hit it off.
When he played Bobbitt, Ransome, we are told, had the power "to lose himself in that purely imaginative world Bobbitt inhabited, for it was not to see him in the real world that audiences packed the theaters, but in the fantasy one that lay beyond the real." He tells his old friend of his new life, and of a son much like himself who will "never have to grow up either, never have to go to war, never know sorrow." It's all too good to be true, and proves to be exactly that.
"Bobbitt" is the only story lacking a downer ending, for which I might have been more grateful had it been the least bit plausible. Instead, after Tryon reveals Bobby's big secret, he throws us into a silly potboiler involving newspaper advertisements, planes flying messages over the city, and a big finale where most of New York turns out to pay their respects to the former star. It turns out everyone loves Bobby after all, and Bobby, at last, gets to return their affections on his own terms. It all seems way too much given the sadness of Bobby's condition as eternal child; Tryon seems at a loss as to how to come to terms with this problem.
"Willie" - He was once a big star, but now Willie Marsh lives alone just outside Beverly Hills after the death of his lifelong companion, Bee, in a house with its own private chapel (Willie is a devout-seeming Roman Catholic) and keepsakes from his stardom. Then fate calls upon him in the form of two young people who claim they had an appointment to meet him. His mind befogged by nostalgia and alcohol, he invites them in, whereupon they invite a friend. A night of debauchery and terror ensues.
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| One thing author Thomas Tryon had in common with his character Willie Marsh is both achieved notice playing Catholic prelates, Marsh in the fictional The Miracle Of Santa Cristi, Tryon in his Golden Globe-nominated turn as the title character in Otto Preminger's 1963 film The Cardinal. He is seen here playing a scene from that film with Romy Schneider. Tryon later said the experience of working with Preminger proved so taxing he decided to leave movies. After 1971, he did. [Image from http://www.allocine.fr/] |
Willie seems to be a closeted homosexual, which was the case with Webb and Novarro and apparently the case with Tryon as well. So you expect more attention to this in the narrative. But as what we are witnessing here is not Willie soliciting sex as was apparently the case with Novarro, but merely trying incongruously to play happy host to three refugees from the Manson Family. Character development, like everything else Tryon throws up at us, tends to get lost in the home wrecking and casual torture that ensues. It keeps going and going, like all the other novellas, without let-up or changes in tone, to the point where I was as angry with Willie for his obtuseness as I was with Lorna for her cabana-wrecking. When one of his "guests" wantonly destroys a priceless artifact and dares him to do something about it, Willie tries to make a joke and worries if his toupee is on straight. When the end comes, Willie embraces it as a martyr for his lost faith, in God and in Hollywood. Again, the author renders all this too convoluted to care much about.
There is also a fifth piece, a short story called "Salad Days" that reintroduces Fedora and Willie briefly in their prime and suggests the Dream Factory will continue to churn out victims at the same heartless pace. The last line, said by Fedora of a nameless drum majorette who may well be Lorna, is "such a pr-retty girl...she really ought to be in the movies."
It's supposed to be ironic, of course, but irony requires a certain human sympathy to work, a sympathy wholly absent from this perplexing book. I'm glad Tryon got out of Hollywood to follow truer dreams, but Crowned Heads offers less evidence of his success in that department than do other works of his like The Other, The Night Of The Moonbow, and Harvest Home, all of which merit your attention. Crowned Heads, sad to say, does not.
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