Making of a Writer (9780307820464)

by Nixon, Joan Lowery

  “I’ll do the work. I’ll take everything out myself, and I’ll put it all back,” I promised. “If there are ghosts, we should lay them to rest.”

  “No,” Mother said. “And that’s final.” She began to look frantic. “I don’t want to hear one more word about secret rooms or dead bodies or ghosts.”

  Later, I caught Daddy with the measuring tape, double-checking my figures. He seemed a little embarrassed as he looked up and saw me, but he said, “There does seem to be a good-sized empty space in there, but let’s not worry your mother about it. Okay?”

  “Why?” I asked complainingly.

  “Because,” Daddy said. “Just because.”

  I was sure I knew why. Mother loved her new house, and she didn’t want it tainted with anything even the least bit mysterious.

  Six years later, one of our near neighbors, the movie star and comedian W. C. Fields, died, and his sprawling mansion was listed for sale.

  Mother returned from a walk in the neighborhood and said to us, “The realtor is holding an open house, but no potential buyers are on hand. Walk up the hill with me. We’ll tell the realtor we’re just nosy neighbors. I’d love to get a peek at the inside of that mansion.”

  Equally curious, Pat and I went with Mother and met a realtor who was alone and bored. “Come in,” she said. “I can at least show you around the first floor.”

  As we walked into the beautiful wood-paneled entry hall, she stopped us and said, “Let me show you something unusual.”

  She pressed a button that was hidden within the paneling, and one panel slid open, revealing a room about eight feet by ten feet with a door at one side. “This house was built during Prohibition,” the realtor explained. “This hidden room was used to hide the liquor. That door leads to a stairway that exits the property on the street below. It was planned so that if the house was raided, the bootlegger could easily make his getaway.”

  Our house had also been built in the twenties. Perhaps the mysterious space I had discovered was a similar room, once used for hiding liquor.

  Tentatively, I brought up the idea, but Mother was quick to squelch it. “That’s nonsense,” she said. “First you thought there were dead bodies, then ghosts, and now you’re talking about bootleggers. We do not have a hidden room in our house, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

  I realized I’d made a big mistake in the beginning by blurting out my guesses about dead bodies or ghosts. If I had pointed out only the space itself, Mother might have allowed Daddy and me to investigate it. Now I’d never know whether there was a secret room or what might be inside it.

  I had gathered some of the elements of a good mystery: measurements that didn’t add up, suspicious characters who had lived in the house, and a missing will. But my motivation was nothing more than curiosity—not strong enough for any story—and the adversary who stood in the way of my investigation was my very own mother.

  I consoled myself with the hope that at some time in the future, another owner might remodel the house and discover the secret room and its mysterious contents. I might have been denied the right to solve the mystery, but at least I hadn’t lost the element of suspense.

  Chapter Twelve

  My childhood was generally a happy time. I studied, I played, and I read more books than would be possible to count.

  Books were like popcorn, and I gobbled them. Each week Mother took us to our branch library, and I checked out the maximum number allowed, even adding some to Mother’s list.

  There were books I had never read that beckoned me, teased me, tempted me. I scooped up armfuls, reading every chance I got. Even when Mother said, “You absolutely must stop reading and go outside and get some fresh air!” I’d sneak a book outside and keep reading. And at night I read under the covers with a flashlight.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I had plenty of company. I have never met an author who didn’t love to read.

  After we moved across the city, we had a new branch library to visit—the Hollywood library on Ivar Street. When I entered it I walked across the aisle from the children’s room into the adult room.

  Often I’m asked what young adult books I read when I was a teenager. My answer is none. There weren’t any. No one thought of writing or publishing books with teen characters and issues that would appeal to teenage readers, until Nat Hentoff wrote Jazz Country and S. E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders in the 1960s.

  I read the mystery novels written by Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. I read Raymond Chandler’s mysteries because they were set in my own Los Angeles. I read humor and biographies and California history. And sometimes, in my eagerness to know why the world was in such a horrible state, I read nonfiction about the world situation.

  “Are you sure your mother will want you to read this book?” the librarian asked as I checked out Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night, which dealt with Nazi atrocities.

  “Oh, yes. She wants me to broaden my mind,” I answered.

  The librarian sighed as she stamped the due date on the card at the back of the book. “If I were you, I wouldn’t read it,” she said.

  Was she right? The book contained such horrifying descriptions, I soon wished I hadn’t read it. Yet I knew I needed to better understand why our country had to go to war to stop the terrible things the Nazis were doing. It was important for as many people as possible—including me—to know the facts.

  I knew that reading is the major key to learning, but I also used reading to fulfill my needs for fun and romance and mystery and excitement and deep satisfaction. Even with the precollege course I was taking, I managed to read my own choice of books as well. Classic and contemporary, fiction and nonfiction—they made a good mix. I saturated myself with my favorite authors’ various styles and techniques, learning from the very best.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dora was Nanny’s fifth cousin and lived with her husband, Ed, in nearby Huntington Park. Overly round and rouged, Dora was pleasant and friendly with an ever-ready smile and a halo of short, permanently waved gray curls. Best of all, Dora had a talent none of the rest of us had. Dora could communicate with the dead.

  Ed, on the other hand, was a gruff, meat-and-potatoes, no-nonsense person, muscular and sun-weathered as dark as my second-best brown oxfords.

  Dora and Ed eagerly accepted every invitation to our family’s big Sunday dinners because Nanny was a truly great cook.

  Each Sunday afternoon’s feast began with a Jell-O fruit salad and relish dishes full of sliced celery, carrots, and olives. These were followed by a large roast of beef with browned potatoes and gravy, string beans, fresh corn cut from the cob, sliced tomatoes, and sometimes creamed pearl onions, a favorite of my father’s. There were always fresh yeast rolls, set to rise that morning after eight o’clock Mass, and at least three of Nanny’s special fruit pies—peach, cherry, apple, or strawberry-rhubarb, depending on the season. We always had Sunday visitors, and Nanny enjoyed that. Her talent lay in cooking, and she loved an appreciative audience, invariably urging them to “have a second piece of pie.”

  Dora always ate with a healthy appetite, so it was hard for me to believe that she had been quite ill a few years before—so ill that her doctors didn’t know how to help her.

  However, as Nanny had told me, a friend brought a spiritualist to pray over Dora, and she was cured. Dora was so fascinated with the man’s religion, which was called “spiritualism,” that she studied it and became a spiritualist herself.

  Any type of fortune-telling, psychic reading, or public visitation with the dead, unless it was in conjunction with a church service, was against the law at that time in California. So Dora opened her own church in Huntington Park; she became a spiritualist minister, and her church thrived. She loved to go into trances and believed that a messenger from the next world inhabited her body and could speak through her.

  Ed obviously loved Dora, but he had little patience for her so-called dealings with spirits. He enjoyed repeating h
is story about an incident during a severe earthquake that took place in Los Angeles on March 10, 1933.

  According to Ed, Dora had spent the two previous Sundays preaching about the next world and how she looked forward to entering it. “I’m not afraid of death,” she had told her congregation. “I welcome death.”

  But at 5:54 P.M., when the first and strongest jolt hit, Dora raced out of her house and dropped to her knees in the middle of the street. Raising her arms to the heavens, she shouted, “I didn’t mean it, God! I didn’t mean it!”

  When Dora and Ed visited us after her church service on Sundays, Dora was often on a roll. That meant we might have a few extra guests no one but Dora could see. Although this made my mother very nervous, it didn’t bother me. I thoroughly enjoyed everything Dora told us. I was a sophisticated graduate of soap opera’s Psychology 101, and I was fascinated by unusual people.

  One Sunday afternoon, soon after we had moved to Laughlin Park, Dora and Ed arrived to have dinner with us. I came downstairs to greet Dora, who was seated on the sofa chatting with Mother.

  Mother had begun to tell Dora about one of my activities at school when Dora suddenly raised a hand and said, “Hush, Margaret. Your aunt Gussie is with us.”

  Mother stiffened and paled and gripped her fingers so tightly her knuckles turned white.

  In a soft, breathy voice Dora said, “Gussie is standing behind Joan. Her hands are on Joan’s shoulders. She is telling us that Joan will become a writer.”

  I already knew I would be a writer, and my parents always showed a great deal of support for my writing, but I thought it was kind of Aunt Gussie to show up and offer her encouragement, too.

  Writers welcome support, no matter where it comes from. My parents and grandparents were proud of the poems and stories I wrote, but what Dora had said gave me a special confidence in the direction I was taking. It was exciting to have Mother’s aunt Gussie, someone outside my immediate family, give her honest, unbiased opinion. Besides, I was well aware that this support came from someone who ought to have a better-than-human chance of predicting the future.

  On that day I moved one step closer to becoming a writer.

  Chapter Fourteen

  On the first day of the fall semester at LeConte Junior High School, I walked onto campus with a feeling of dread. I knew no one. I was miles away from the friends with whom I’d grown up. I wished we hadn’t moved. I wished I were home in bed.

  Then I met Mary Lou Weghorst. As a new student, too, she was probably as lost and scared as I was, but her smile never wavered. We introduced ourselves, we talked until the first bell rang, and we arranged to meet for lunch. Mary Lou became my best friend forever.

  Starting a new school and making new friends is always difficult, but it was especially so during the worldwide turmoil of 1940. Germany’s military forces were plundering Europe, and everyone was afraid it would be only a matter of time until the United States would be involved in war. Large defense factories had opened in the Los Angeles area, and people were moving to the city in droves to help build planes, tanks, and armaments.

  When I enrolled in ninth grade at LeConte, which included grades seven through nine, I found myself in a homeroom composed entirely of newcomers. The administration, for some reason, had lumped us all together, in essence keeping us apart from the other ninth graders. We were treated like outsiders not only by the kids who had gone to school together from their days in kindergarten, but also by a few of the teachers. However, all of us newcomers were going through the pangs of trying to turn strangers into friends, so in a way being segregated made it easier to make the adjustment to this new school.

  I had to choose an elective, and somehow I found myself in journalism class. Mrs. Edna Ammons was our teacher and sponsor, and she soon discovered how much I loved to write. At the end of the first week she appointed me assistant editor of the school newspaper, then set about teaching me the rules of journalism.

  “Begin each story with the most important fact,” she said. “Get your readers’ attention. Grab their interest. Then proceed to tell them the rest of the story—who, what, when, where, why, and how.”

  I gave what she had said a great deal of thought. Grab your readers. Get their attention. I knew this worked for writing fiction. Apparently it was the key to writing news stories, too.

  I had read in a magazine feature story that Ernest Hemingway rewrote the beginning paragraphs of his stories as many as fifty times before he was satisfied.

  I knew I could be satisfied with a lot fewer than fifty rewrites, but I began to see the importance of the opening sentences of a story and the equal importance of polishing and perfecting those sentences to capture readers.

  I took the lesson to heart and, with strong, intriguing beginning sentences that had been written and rewritten, the stories I wrote for my own enjoyment began to improve.

  That year, one of the teachers at LeConte, Mrs. Fern Jones, celebrated a contract from a publisher for a book she had written called Friday, Thank God! The publisher was G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York, and her book was scheduled to be published in 1943 under a pen name, Fern Rives.

  Some of the other teachers teased her good-naturedly about her future fame as an author. Some teased her about writing under a pen name. But Mrs. Jones had won my total awe and admiration. She had written what would become a real hardcover book. It would be published by a New York publisher. Mrs. Jones would even earn money for what she had written.

  She wasn’t a famous author. She hadn’t lived a hundred years ago. She was a real person, like me. If she could get paid for what she had written, someday so could I.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Another friend in my homeroom of newcomers was a girl named Betsy Mills, whose father was Felix Mills, an orchestra leader for a Hollywood studio.

  When Betsy asked about my interests, I told her that I liked to write poems and stories and that someday I was going to be a writer.

  Betsy said, “And someday I’m going to compose music. Let me see some of your poems.”

  She read a few of them, then said, “Let’s collaborate and write the senior class song.”

  A notice had been posted, to which I had paid little attention, aside from making sure that it was included in the school newspaper: One of the English teachers was judging the annual contest among ninth grade seniors for the class song, which would be printed in the spring yearbook.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.” And Betsy and I got busy.

  For the next few days she’d hum bits of the melody, which had a great beat, and I’d write lines to fit. Finally we had what we thought was a terrific song.

  We performed our song for Mrs. Ammons, who beamed as she heard us sing it. “That’s the best class song I’ve ever heard,” she said. “It deserves to win.” She told us to visit immediately the teacher who was judging the contest and present our song to her. “Come back and tell me how you did,” she added.

  The judge didn’t exactly scowl at us, but with a look as though she’d tasted something bad, she said, “I think we already have our winner. And she’s not a new student. This is her third year as a straight-A student at LeConte.”

  “We can’t help it that we’re new to Hollywood,” Betsy said.

  “And the deadline for the contest isn’t until after school today,” I reminded her.

  “Mrs. Ammons told us to sing our song for you. She’s waiting to hear about it,” Betsy insisted.

  Before the teacher had a chance to object, Betsy and I went into our song. A few people stopped outside the open classroom door, listened, and began to clap in rhythm.

  When we had finished, the teacher looked grim, but she said, “I’ll deliberate and announce my decision tomorrow.”

  I don’t know with whom the judge deliberated, but the next day we were told that she had decided in favor of two senior songs.

  When an assembly was held and the school orchestra played both songs, everyone liked Betsy’s an
d mine better. We weren’t surprised. We didn’t even mind that there were two senior school songs. We didn’t mind competition. We were preparing for futures in which there would always be competition. Writers have to keep trying. They have to compete.

  When the yearbooks came out, however, we couldn’t help feeling extra proud of our accomplishment. The straight-A student’s song was published on the back page of the yearbook. The song Betsy and I had written was published on the front page.

  During the first part of the semester Mrs. Ammons had told me, “A writer must always have faith in herself. If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will.”

  I took to heart what she said and never forgot it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  After graduating from LeConte, Mary Lou and I attended Hollywood High, taking with us all our teenage insecurities and worries and joys and excitement and fears and hopes and dreams.

  The administrators at Hollywood High used an unusual system of registration for classes. Each student signed up for one of three programs, academic, secretarial, or vocational, and was given a list of the classes required for that particular course for graduation.

  On the first day of each semester, newspaper-sized sheets were handed out, and we sat on the grass, the steps of the buildings, or the benches in the quad—wherever we could find a seat—and made out our schedules.

  When the first bell rang, we walked—“Do not run,” the voice over the loudspeaker warned—to the first class on our list and took a seat. If a student arrived and found that the seats were filled, he either looked for a similar class at the same time or rearranged his schedule.

  Not knowing one teacher from another, I assigned myself to a tenth-grade English class taught by Miss Bertha Standfast. At the time I saw only a smiling, middle-aged woman with short, wavy blond hair and round glasses perched on a pug nose. I had no idea that I had just met someone who would make a gigantic difference in my life.