Stars Over Sunset Boulevard

by Susan Meissner

A. I hope the theme that will resonate most is that love and fear can sometimes feel the same, but each will lead a person to take different actions. When a decision has to be made, fear usually motivates me to choose what is best for me, whereas love motivates me to choose what is best for another person. Fear urges me to hang on, white-knuckled, to what is mine, while love can actually lead me to let go. My hoped-for takeaway is the notion that when you hold something you love tightly to your chest for fear of losing it, you actually risk crushing it against you.

  Q. Readers are often deeply moved by your stories, and quote liberally from them. Is there something unique about your writing process that results in this emotional reaction to your work?

  A. I want my readers to remember a book of mine after they’ve turned the last page, partly so they will want to read more from me, but also because I want them to feel that reading it was well worth their time. I guess I want a book that I write to be more than entertainment that is enjoyable for the moment but forgettable as the months go by. I don’t make a conscious effort to craft quotable prose when I write, but I do endeavor to pose questions and suggest insights that speak across the pages into a reader’s life. For me, that translates into a good reason for having read the book. I always remember a book more fully and longer if I’ve been so emotionally tugged that I find myself highlighting phrases I don’t want to forget. And I usually can’t wait for that author’s next book! Khaled Hosseini’s books are always like that for me.

  Q. Is this your first novel set in your home state of California? Did that proximity affect your writing?

  A. I set two of my older titles in my hometown of San Diego, but this was the first one set in Los Angeles against the glamorous backdrop of Old Hollywood. The geographical proximity made physical research far easier than with my previous book, Secrets of a Charmed Life, which was set in England. But as is the case with all historical settings, time has marched on. You can’t revisit former years; you can only look at the relics and archives that remain from them. When I visited the Culver Studios, which seventy years ago was the site of Selznick International, I entered the iconic Thomas Ince mansion, stood inside what was David Selznick’s office, and peeked at the same sound stages where many Gone With the Wind scenes were filmed. But the famed back lot is long gone, as are all the sets, the costumes, and almost everyone who worked on the film. Even so, being able to plant my feet in the very spot where history was made always has an invigorating effect on me. I can more easily imagine what an event was like if I am standing in the place where it happened, closing my eyes, and picturing it all in my head.

  Q. A section of Stars over Sunset Boulevard is set during World War Two. Can you tell us more about how people on the “home front” experienced the war, especially in California?

  A. From what I can gather, the most difficult aspect of World War Two for Californians, especially for those living in larger coastal cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, was the fear of attack by Japanese forces from across the Pacific. For Japanese-Americans living in California, life was incredibly hard. Most, including children and second-generation transplants who didn’t speak a word of Japanese, were forced off their properties and housed in internment camps for the duration of the war. Interestingly enough, I’ve read that within days of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt commissioned Hollywood to strengthen public awareness and morale, and to support the war effort by continuing to make motion pictures. Hollywood made significant movie-making advances during the years of the war despite limitations related to restrictions and shortages, and pretty much perfected the genre of combat films during that time. Plus, Hollywood worked with the war department and the army to distribute its films, free of charge, to soldiers in combat areas. The movies were delivered by boat, jeep, parachute, and any other mode of transportation available.

  Q. You’re a voracious reader. Have you read anything lately that you particularly recommend?

  A. I’ve always got a towering stack of books on my bedside table. Some of my most recent favorites have been Girl on a Train by Paula Hawkins, The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. All of these books were superbly written, but none is what I would call a light read. The books I enjoy the most are usually fairly infused with angst and moral dilemmas. It’s not that I can’t appreciate a lighter read, but those books typically aren’t the ones I remember. The books that stay with me are the ones in which ordinary, flawed but likable people have been thrust into extraordinary circumstances that have truly taken them to the mat. Even in Where’d You Go, Bernadette, a hilarious read that I loved, there is a complex, deep story underneath the witty writing and the laughs. As I write this, I am eagerly awaiting Kate Morton’s newest, The Lake House, and Geraldine Brooks’s The Secret Chord.

  Q. Can you give us a hint about your next novel?

  A. The nutshell of the story I am writing next is this: Three war brides on their way to the United States in 1946—a British telephone operator who fears the open water, a French Resistance fighter’s daughter emotionally scarred by the loss of her family at the hands of the Nazis, and a German ballet dancer who feels despised by everyone she meets—form unlikely bonds of friendship on the famed HMS Queen Mary as it transports 1,500 American GI brides and their children from Southampton to New York. The dovetailed contemporary story is about a woman with extrasensory gifts she has never felt comfortable having who boards the supposedly haunted Queen Mary with a task she hesitantly undertakes as a favor to an old flame—now a widower—and his young daughter. I live just two hours away from the Queen Mary, and I can tell you that stepping onto her deck is like walking into a time machine. This historic and majestic Cunard ship was first a luxury ocean liner, then a WWII troop carrier and bearer of GI war brides to America, and she is now a floating hotel moored in Long Beach, California. Many people insist she is haunted, but I plan to consider not which ghosts allegedly haunt which deck, but rather what stays behind in a place that has seen so much human history. Think of all those who walked the Queen Mary’s decks: kings and queens, prime ministers and presidents, millionaires, immigrants, soldiers, prisoners of war, vacationers, happy newlyweds, gray-haired spinsters, and innocent children. The Queen Mary is a character unto herself, and if there are echoes of the past aboard her, I want to consider what those echoes might mean. When the story of my three young war brides intersects with my reluctant current-day researcher, I will explore thematically how sometimes a person must bravely cross the unknown to begin a new life when the old one is gone. I can’t wait to start writing it.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. What aspect of the novel had the strongest emotional impact on you?

  2. Who did you like more—Violet or Audrey? Which woman is most like you?

  3. Who is your best friend? Did this person ever save your life? What do you think is the most remarkable quality about friendship?

  4. The novel suggests that Melanie in Gone With the Wind is as capable of deceit as Scarlett is, if deceit is required to get what she wants. Do you agree? How do Violet and Audrey compare to Scarlett and Melanie?

  5. Have you ever stolen your friend’s significant other?

  6. Are you keeping a secret from your partner and/or friend because the truth would reflect poorly on you?

  7. In Chapter Twenty-nine, Violet tells herself that “Sometimes a person had to do something drastic, like rip apart beautiful curtains to make a dress and hat, to bring about the better good.” How does Violet use this analogy to rationalize her actions?

  8. How would the characters’ lives have been different if Violet had told Lainey the truth about her mother when she first began to ask?

  9. It has been said that there are only two basic emotions, love and fear, and that all the other emotions are variations of these. Do you agree? How are fear and love the same? How are they di
fferent?

  10. Are you a fan of Gone With the Wind—the book and the film? Tell us how you felt and what you thought when you first read the book or saw the movie. Has your opinion changed over time?

  11. Have you heard stories or read depictions about what life was like in the U.S. during World War Two? How do they compare to Violet’s experiences?

  12. What do the nightingales represent in the novel? Have you ever looked for something beautiful that might not exist?

  If you enjoyed Stars over Sunset Boulevard and want more historical fiction, read Susan Meissner’s

  A FALL OF MARIGOLDS

  Available in paperback and e-book from New American Library.

  Read on to see how an Ellis Island nurse’s experience with life and love is not so different from that of a twenty-first-century New York woman’s. . . .

  Ellis Island

  August 1911

  It was the most in-between of places, the trio of islands that was my world after the fire. For the immigrants who arrived ill from wherever they came from, the Earth stopped its careful spinning while they waited to be made well. They were not back home where their previous life had ended; nor were they embracing the wide horizon of a reinvented life. They were poised between two worlds.

  Just like me.

  The windowed walkway of the ferry house connected the hospital’s bits of borrowed earth to the bigger island known as Ellis: a word that by contrast seemed to whisper hope. Beyond the hospital where I worked as a nurse was Battery Park in Manhattan, a short boat ride away. The hospital at Ellis was the stationary middle place where what you were and what you would be were decided. If you could be cured, you would be welcomed onshore. If you could not, you would be sent back where you came from.

  Except for this, I didn’t mind living where the docks of America lay just beyond reach. I looked to her skyline with a different kind of hunger.

  Five months had passed since I’d set foot on the streets of New York. I could see her shining buildings from my dormitory window, and on gusty mornings I could nearly hear the busy streets coming to life. But I was not ready to return to them. I shared a room with another nurse, Dolly McLeod, who also worked and lived on island number three, the bottom rung of Ellis’s E-shaped figure. Our dormitory stood a pebble’s throw from the wards where the sick of a hundred nations waited. Their sole desire was to be deemed healthy enough to meet their loved ones on the kissing steps and get off the island. We cooled their fevered brows, tended their wounds, and nurtured their flagging hopes. Some were sick children, separated from their healthy parents. Others were adults who had diseases they had had no idea they were carrying when they set sail.

  They spoke in languages that bore no resemblance to anything familiar: long, ribboned sentences looped together with alphabetic sounds that had no rhyme or meter. It seemed there were a thousand words for dreams realized and only one common whimper for hopes interrupted. Many would leave the hospital island healthier than when they arrived, but not all, of course. A few would leave this world for heaven’s shores.

  The work kept us busy from dawn to dusk. Sleep came quickly at night. And there were no remnants of the fire here.

  Dolly and a couple of other nurses looked forward to going ashore on their off days and they would come back to the island on the midnight ferry smelling of cologne and tobacco and salty perspiration from having danced the evening away. In the beginning they invited me to join them but it did not take them long to figure out I never left the island. Dolly, who knew in part what kept me here, told me she had survived a house fire once. I wouldn’t always feel this way, she said. After a while the dread of fire would fall away like a snakeskin.

  I was not afraid of fire. I was in dreadful awe of how everything you were sure of could be swept away in a moment.

  I hadn’t told Dolly everything. She knew, as did the other nurses, about the fire. Everyone in New York knew about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. She and the other nurses here knew that I, and everyone else from the seventh floor on down, had escaped to safety when fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building. They knew that one hundred and forty-seven employees of Triangle Shirtwaist had not.

  They knew that the door to the stairs for the Washington Street exit was locked—to prevent stealing—and that the only alarm signaling the blaze came from the fire itself, as there was no siren to warn anyone. And they knew that garment workers by the dozens—mostly women—fell from windows to die quickly on the pavement rather than minute by agonizing minute in the flames. They knew the death toll was staggering, because it was in all the papers.

  They didn’t know about Edward because I had said nothing about him.

  I had only just started working as a nurse at the doctor’s office on the sixth floor and had few acquaintances in New York. Not even Dolly knew that Edward Brim stole my heart within hours of meeting me in the elevator on my first day.

  I had dropped my umbrella and he retrieved it for me.

  “Are we expecting rain?” he said, smiling wide. He was first-generation American like me. I could tell from the lilt in his voice that his parents were European. Like mine. His nut-brown hair was combed and waxed into place with neat precision, but his suit was slightly wrinkled and there was a tiny bit of fried egg on his cuff—just the tiniest bit—convincing me without a glance at his left hand that he was a bachelor. His eyes were the color of the dawn after a night of wind and rain. But he had the look of New York about him. His parents surely had stayed in the city after they had come through Ellis, unlike my parents.

  “Smells like rain,” I’d responded.

  His smile widened as the elevator lurched upward. “Does it?”

  “Can’t you smell it?” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Of course he couldn’t. He was from the city.

  The man next to him laughed. “She’s a country girl, Edward. They always know what’s coming.”

  “Well, then. I guess I’m glad I didn’t bother to shine my shoes this morning!” Edward and the man laughed.

  He bent toward me. “Be glad you know when rain is coming, miss. There aren’t many things we’re given warning of.”

  I smiled back at him, unable to wrest my gaze from his.

  “New to New York?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Welcome to the city, then, Miss . . . ?”

  “Wood. Clara Wood.”

  He bowed slightly. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Wood. Edward Brim, at your service.”

  The elevator swayed to a stop on the sixth floor and the doors parted.

  “My floor.” I reluctantly nodded my farewell. Edward tipped his hat. And his eyes stayed on mine as the doors closed and the elevator resumed its lumbering ascent.

  I saw him later that day as he ran for a trolley car in the rain. And I saw him nearly every day after that, either on the elevator or in the lobby of the Asch Building. I heard him talk about his work as a bookkeeper at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the tenth floor, and I knew the coworker who often rode the elevator with him was a fabric buyer named Oliver. I knew Edward liked Earl Grey tea and macaroons and spearmint, because I could smell the fragrance of all three on his clothes.

  He always said good morning to me, always tipped his hat to me, always seemed to be on the verge of asking me something when the elevator arrived at my floor and I had to get off. The day of the fire, just as the elevator doors parted, he asked me whether I might want to see the work floor just before the shift ended. I said yes.

  The nurses on Ellis didn’t know I watched Edward leap from the ninth floor, a screaming girl in tow, her hair and skirt ablaze. The girl had been afraid to jump alone and Edward had grasped her hand as the fire drove them out the window.

  Dolly and the others thought I was spectacularly fortunate to have escaped.

  “You’re very lucky, Clara,” they said.
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  I didn’t feel lucky.

  When I was little, luck was finding something you thought was lost for good, or winning a porcelain doll at the county fair, or having every dance filled on your dance card. Good luck made you feel kissed by heaven and smiled upon by the Fates.

  Good luck made you feel giddy and invincible.

  Good luck didn’t leave you desperately needing a place that was forever in between yesterday and tomorrow.

  My parents wanted me to come home to Pennsylvania when word of the fire reached them. But I didn’t want to go back to what I had been, back to the rural landscape where everything is the same shade of brown or green. I had just celebrated my twenty-first birthday. I was living in New York City, where every hue audaciously shone somewhere, day or night. I had been on the cusp, or so it seemed, of the rest of my life. Edward would have asked me to dine with him or see a show if the fire had never come. We were destined to fall in love; I was sure of it, even though I had known him for only two weeks.

  But as ashes and burned fabric fell like snow on Edward’s broken body and on so many others, none of whom I could help, I knew I would need a place to make sense of what I had lost and yet never had. Only an in-between place could grant me that.

  If you enjoyed Stars over Sunset Boulevard and want to meet another woman who reinvents herself, read Susan Meissner’s

  SECRETS OF A CHARMED LIFE

  Available in paperback and e-book from New American Library.

  Read on to meet the woman who calls herself Isabel and lived through the London Blitz. . . .

  The Cotswolds, England

  Isabel MacFarland steps into the room. She is a wisp of tissue-thin skin, weightless white hair, and fragile-looking bones. She is impeccably dressed, however, in a lavender skirt that reaches to her knees and a creamy white blouse with satin-covered buttons. Her nails are polished a shimmery pale pink and her cottony hair is swept up in the back with a comb of mother-of-pearl. She carries a fabric-wrapped rectangle, book shaped and tied with a ribbon.