Meg Waite Clayton has a thing for the past.
While not all of the author’s nine novels are works of historical fiction, her most recent works, including “The Race for Paris,” “The Last Train to London,” and “The Postmistress of Paris,” have taken readers to World War II-era Europe.
For her latest book, “Typewriter Beach,” Clayton is staying closer to home – Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, to be exact, where she lives part-time. (She also has a home in New Haven, Connecticut.)
SEE ALSO: Like books? Get our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more
The novel takes place in Carmel-by-the-Sea and Hollywood, and spans two different eras: 1957, when young actress Isabella Giori befriends a blacklisted screenwriter, Leo Chazan; and 2018, when Chazan’s granddaughter, Gemma, also a screenwriter, makes the trip to Carmel to prepare her late grandfather’s cottage for sale. While there, she meets Isabella — and learns a series of secrets about Leo. The novel became an instant USA Today bestseller upon its release this month.
Clayton spoke about her book via telephone from Los Angeles, where she was preparing for a book event. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: How did the idea for the novel come to you?
I have long been fascinated with the [Hollywood] blacklist, and I actually have one book in a drawer, which is a mystery exploring the blacklist that I wrote when I couldn’t get my first literary fiction published. But then I ended up getting that published, so I stuck it in a drawer.
Then two things happened. One, the pandemic hit, and two, my dad unexpectedly passed away at a time when my mom was already terminal. I was executor of the estate, and it was a mess. We had just moved to Carmel, so I was driving from Carmel an hour and a half each way a few times a week to help take care of my mom. I was not writing anything, but I had this little writing group with three friends. We met by Zoom once a week. And during one week in February, I said I was going to set the novel I was working on aside, and try to write a novel about a blacklisted screenwriter.
So we turned off our little Zoom lights and our microphones, and we just wrote for 40 minutes. And what came out was the first Gemma chapter, where she arrives at Leo’s cottage to clean it out after he’s passed away. It was very much just an outpouring of my grief at losing my dad.
Then, when I worked on the 1950s story, I came to see that both Leo and Isabella are people who have deeply buried secrets that they would never share, so I needed to have somebody who would uncover them. Gemma and then Sam served that purpose, and then allowed me to explore women in Hollywood, then and now. That turned out to be perhaps a bigger part of the book than even the blacklist. It’s something that I’ve been passionate about and was really interested in exploring.
Q: The book explores the similarities between the sexism and misogyny of the 1950s and that of today.
Sexism is alive and well, especially in Hollywood. About 15 years ago, I became very interested in the fact that there were very few women directors and very few women screenwriters, and much of that drives what we see behind the scenes and what we see on screen. I started exploring it and writing opinion pieces about it. I got a lot of women directors to talk to me off the record, but not a single one would talk to me on the record.
They all said, “If I’m the squeaky wheel, I’m not going to get the directing gigs.” Because I was outside of Hollywood, I was somebody who could write about it. I wrote maybe five or six pieces when the #MeToo movement happened, starting at the end of 2017, and other people took up the charge and started writing about it. When we see something on film that’s on the big screen and on the small screen, that informs us what’s OK for women to be in real life. When Mary Tyler Moore was the first career woman to appear on TV, it made women start to think that maybe they could have careers too, in a way that they didn’t before. I feel like it’s changing, but it’s changing much more slowly than I would’ve imagined.
Q: The book has real-life characters, including Alfred Hitchcock, Edith Head, and Benny Thao. What kind of research did you do into some of the actual people who appear in the novel?
There are two schools of thought about historical fiction. One says that you need to be true to the history, and the other says that you can do whatever you want. And I am on the “true to the history” side of that. If I’m going to have a real person named in the novel, I need to know who they were and do my best to present them as they actually were. For this, it was not that hard, in part because I’ve been a Hitchcock fanatic for many years. I read a whole bunch of books that I hadn’t yet read on Hitchcock. I reread the interviews between Hitchcock and François Truffaut.
Isabella is a fictional character, but she’s drawn very heavily from reading a gazillion biographies of Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn and all the stars of that era, just to soak in what their experiences were like. Leo is drawn from Dalton Trumbo and a whole bunch of interviews with people who were actually blacklisted. I’ve read a lot of history, and [nonfiction] teaches you what the history is, but historical fiction allows you to experience it, to imagine yourself in that world.
Q: Did you go back and rewatch any of the Golden Age movies while you were writing the book?
Yes. One of the nice things about doing this is that you could watch old movies in the afternoon and call it work. I watched “Rear Window” so many times it was ridiculous. I went back and watched “Roman Holiday” with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. I watched a lot of the blacklisted films, “The Brave One,” and “Born Free,” which was a 1966 film that was written under a pseudonym, Lester Cole writing as Gerald L.C. Copley.
Q: Carmel-by-the-Sea is almost like another character in the book. Did you end up doing a lot of research into what Carmel was like in the 1950s?
I moved to Carmel just before the pandemic, and things were closed. I couldn’t necessarily see everything, but I could walk around, I could experience it. One of the things that is really lovely about Carmel is that it’s this charming little town, but we have two theaters and two Michelin-starred restaurants that I can walk to.
But the other thing we have is a local paper, The Carmel Pine Cone, that has been our local paper since 1915. And by a gift from the literary gods, the historian at the Carmel Library had decided that all its archives should be put online, and they had done that by the time I moved to Carmel and started researching this novel. So if I had a scene that was set on July 1, 1957, I could dial up The Carmel Pine Cone from that day, and I could see exactly what was playing at those two theaters, which were in existence then as well. I could see exactly what the stores were advertising. So that was really a huge resource, a great way to come to know the history of Carmel through the newspaper.
Leave a Reply