by Jane Allen
Writing I Lost My Girlish Laughter was a risky venture. Brand was so recognizably Selznick (right down to the producer’s “Southern” film production and crisis over getting MGM to loan Gable), and Selznick was MGM cofounder Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law. Going after Selznick was tantamount to going after MGM, Hollywood’s richest, glitziest studio. But there was no way of telling whether the book’s popularity and box office potential would mitigate its controversy. Other studio heads might gleefully option the material to the detriment of a rival, or they might close ranks and blackball it. If the press got wind of Shore’s involvement in the novel, her Hollywood career would be truly over. The stakes were higher for Schulman. Although by the time the manuscript was finished, she had quit her job with Selznick, become Silvia Lardner, and was expecting her first child, she still had hopes of going back to work as a screenwriter. If she used her own name in publishing I Lost My Girlish Laughter, she would, as the saying goes, “never have lunch in that town again.” Her husband’s new career as a writer would also be at stake. Admittedly, there were other possibilities: the novel could be so popular that she would make more money than they could spend, reboot her career as a screenwriter like her husband, or simply take a leaf out of her famous father-in-law’s book (Ring Lardner Sr.) and become the next great American humorist. Schulman duly concocted the pen name, Jane Allen, with Shore. But all her life, Schulman had been a fun-loving risk-taker. After all, once upon a time she came out to Hollywood just like Madge—without knowing a soul. On a certain level, she didn’t care if the press discovered her identity.
When the book neared completion, they quietly contacted Margaret Mitchell’s agent, Annie Laurie Williams, whom Schulman had met during Selznick’s negotiations for Gone with the Wind. Williams recognized that she had the publishing sensation of 1938 in her hands and negotiated serialization with popular magazine Cosmopolitan before Random House printed the novel in the spring of 1938. When Schulman collected her $1,125 serialization check and the advance on the novel (about $20,000 in today’s currency), Lardner acknowledged she “shows signs of becoming the leading breadwinner in our ménage.” Her original idea paid off. New York critics raved that the book had “a laugh on every page” and that Madge’s comments on the industry were “masterpieces in humor and irony.” Margaret Mitchell loved the book so much that she read it twice. But, as she confided to friend Susan Myrick (technical advisor on Selznick’s adaptation of Gone with the Wind), she “got a great deal more out of it” from her second reading. Myrick had sent Mitchell a letter describing a chaotic GWTW script meeting involving Ben Hecht and John Van Druten. The situation “was identical with one in [I Lost My Girlish Laughter]” and sent her “into gales of laughter.” The national press gleefully pointed out the satirical portrait of Selznick, drew unflattering comparisons between Sarya Tarn and the latest haughty foreign import to Hollywood, Hedy Lamarr, and made guesses about the identities of the other cast members. No other Hollywood novel had ever been quite so defiantly transparent about naming names. The buzz increased when journalists broke Schulman’s cover and identified her as the author. Curiously, Jane Shore’s name did not appear in these articles—perhaps because her authorial contribution was superficial compared to Schulman’s, or perhaps because Shore still hoped to revive her Hollywood career once the film rights were secured and believed anonymity would eventually work in her favor.
The novel generated still more headlines when Orson Welles, already known for sensation-making stunts like the notorious October 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, bought the radio rights. Much to Selznick’s chagrin, Welles’s Campbell Playhouse adaptation aired on CBS in January 1939—devilishly timed to coincide with principal photography on Gone with the Wind. In addition to Welles’s own slick portrayal of the self-obsessed Brand, audiences were teased with a purported interview with the book’s author, “Jane Allen.” In his version, however, neither Madge nor her pseudonymous creators were the stars of the show. The radio adaptation replaced Madge as first-person narrator (played by Ilka Chase) with Brand. In Welles’s view, male geniuses were more important than lowly secretaries.
Movie-minded columnists were divided over actresses Joan Blondell or Jean Arthur in the lead role (both had played versions of the plucky secretary on-screen in the 1930s), but, sadly, a film version never materialized, thanks in part to Selznick’s pull with his father-in-law and, as Schulman put it in a letter to her mother-in-law Ellis Lardner, “a great reluctance on the part of producers here to buy a property blasting one of the boys.” At one point early on, it had looked as though MGM would buy it—but very likely to prevent other studios from making it. Schulman went on to reveal that the story editor at MGM (very likely Lillie Messenger, formerly at RKO) “has threatened to wring my neck and…is swearing by all the stars that Metro will buy the book over her dead body.” So much for female solidarity! When the Hollywood offers failed to materialize, Schulman and her husband pursued the idea of cowriting a Broadway adaptation. Producer Jed Harris had expressed interest. Private letters in the Lardner family indicate that Shore balked at developing the stage version and relations soured between the two writers. Any idea of a future partnership likely broke down when Schulman discovered Shore had only put her own name down as author in the novel’s U.S. copyright filing following the book’s publication in May 1938.
Shore would continue to use the “Jane Allen” pseudonym when she sold “A Girl’s Best Friend Is Wall Street” to Cosmopolitan and secured the film deal with Columbia Pictures in 1940. But if the studio thought it was buying material from Schulman, they were wrong: She Knew All the Answers (1941) was no I Lost My Girlish Laughter. Nor was Thanks God! I’ll Take It From Here, Shore’s second Hollywood novel, cowritten by May Livingstone (Faber, 1946), which, as another film historian has noted, was surprisingly lifeless and pedestrian, despite some tacked-on memos toward the end of the story reminiscent of I Lost My Girlish Laughter’s format. But Shore at least scored another film deal: RKO transformed her novel about a novelist’s foray into the motion picture business into Without Reservations (1946). The film was notable only for pairing Claudette Colbert and John Wayne.
Schulman’s royalty checks dwindled, but her husband had writing stints at Warner Bros. and RKO. Things were tough for the couple at first; few were interested in buying the work of the husband of an infamous Hollywood turncoat like Silvia Schulman. For her part, Schulman tinkered with short stories and the dramatization of the novel with Lardner but concentrated on raising her two children, Peter and Ann. She was not nostalgic about her Hollywood career. As she remarked: “For years I put on a good show as a glorified hired hand.” She preferred being in charge, even if the paychecks weren’t as steady, and contemplated turning her skill with interior design into a paying career. Like her heroine Madge, she was petite, vivacious, and a survivor. “My mind’s alive,” she wrote to her mother-in-law, and, as she put it simply, “I’ve started growing up.” The family finances improved after MGM bought Lardner’s script with Michael Kanin, Woman of the Year (1942), but by then the Schulman-Lardner marriage had already fallen apart. They divorced in 1945, and Schulman kept the children and the family home.
Ironically, it was Irene and David Selznick who had initially urged her not to marry a non-Jewish man, stating that mixed marriages never worked. But the marriage didn’t fail over religious reasons. Schulman was never a drinker and felt out of place and slightly skeptical among Lardner’s hard-drinking, far-left writing cronies. She and her former spouse remained friends, and she occasionally sent Lardner suggestions for stories to develop. She would go back to work as an interior designer and building contractor, establishing a successful business. She was the only woman on the masthead of the California-based Hale Company Builders during the 1950s and loved building houses as much as she had loved writing her novel. She married again in 1955 and divorced in 1960 but kept working, slyly remarking to her first husband, “I seem to ha
ve the talent for being a self-supporting ex-wife.” With the exception of Sylvia Jarrico (wife of screenwriter Paul Jarrico) and Annie Laurie Williams, her Hollywood friends had melted away long ago, and as time passed, she rarely discussed the old days. But Schulman’s house was always full of books, and it must have been a bittersweet day when her kids were old enough to take the copy of I Lost My Girlish Laughter down from the shelf and read it for themselves. Schulman lived to see Peter and Ann become academics and publish their own books. She died of cancer in 1993.
Looking back eighty years later, it’s hard not to regret that I Lost My Girlish Laughter never made it to the big screen. The novel was published in an era when women still had some power in Hollywood and is a testimony to the myths and realities of the “female angle” of the motion picture business during Hollywood’s golden age. It is a shame Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures (famous for courting controversy and hiring women filmmakers) didn’t option it for his star Jean Arthur; she would have been superb as Madge. And if he hired Schulman to write the script with his onetime contract writer Mary C. McCall Jr.—and Dorothy Arzner (herself once a lowly Hollywood secretary) to direct; Columbia editor Viola Lawrence to cut; and Cohn’s favorite executive, Virginia Van Upp, in charge of production—what could have been better? I Lost My Girlish Laughter is one of Hollywood’s tragic lost opportunities.
Although the novel was reprinted in the 1950s in cheap paperback editions, with cover art exaggerating the lurid sexual escapades of the motion picture people, few literary critics took notice of what was inside the covers. “Jane Allen” and I Lost My Girlish Laughter vanished from cultural consciousness. Instead, Hollywood novels written by men—Nathanael West, F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Last Tycoon, 1941), and Budd Schulberg (What Makes Sammy Run?, 1941)—became the canonical standards of the great Hollywood novel of this period. Madge Lawrence was completely upstaged by Fitzgerald’s doomed mogul Monroe Stahr (based on MGM’s boy-genius, Irving Thalberg) and Schulberg’s double-crossing screenwriter Sammy Glick. These novels had cultural afterlives as films (The Day of the Locust, dir. John Schlesinger, 1975; The Last Tycoon, dir. Elia Kazan, 1976), musicals (What Makes Sammy Run?, 1964–65, 2006), and television series (What Makes Sammy Run?, Philco Television Playhouse, 1949, NBC Sunday Showcase, 1959; The Last Tycoon, Amazon Prime Video, 2016–17). Ironically, Selznick’s A Star Is Born has now been through four big-budget film versions (1937, 1954, 1976, and 2018), a testimony in part to the enduringly popular view of Svengali-esque men molding a pretty face into a star.
Perhaps now, with renewed interest in women in Hollywood, it’s time to take notice of Madge Lawrence and what she had to say about the women who ran Hollywood behind the scenes so many years ago.
—J. E. Smyth
Principal Characters
MADGE LAWRENCE
Her ambition was to get into movies—she did—but not the way you think!
SIDNEY BRAND
High-pressure producer to whom figures mean nothing—except those of girls.
MYRTLE STANDISH
A blonde, china-blue eyes, lovely; still a bit-player until—
JIM PALMER
Works in publicity, plays at being a Hollywood “wolf.”
SARYA TARN
Beautiful Viennese actress who is in danger of sleeping her way out of stardom.
BRUCE ANDERS
“Gorgeous” male who goes to Hollywood to star—but he “goes Hollywood,” too!
1
I Become a Proletarian
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA OCTOBER 10
MISS AGNES LAWRENCE
KANSAS CITY MO
ARRIVED SAFELY STOP STAYING AT GIRLS CLUB STOP KNOW YOU WILL BE DELIGHTED HEAR WE ARE PUT TO BED AT TEN OCLOCK STOP LOVE
MADGE
GIRLS’ COMMUNITY CLUB HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA
October 10
Mr. Marc Freeman,
National Studios,
Hollywood, California.
Dear Mr. Freeman:
I am enclosing a letter of introduction which was given to me by Robert James.
May I hope for an interview?
Very truly yours,
Madge Lawrence
October 20
Liz, my pet:
Your letter, dog-eared and worn, limped in from Kansas City and contacted me here. It served as a sweetly steadying anchor to the wind after ten white-hot days of dizzying sunshine and abruptly chilled nights. I’m beginning to understand why the hot, hot tropics can do a white woman in. That interesting New York pallor of mine is a cute rosy red except in places where a large fat brown freckle is parked. My hair has degenerated into a stringy frenzy which no amount of brushing will curb. My svelte, not-an-ounce-overweight-size-twelve chassis has developed suddenly bumptious symptoms that are definitely alarming and altogether I don’t seem to coordinate physically. There is nothing about me, in fact, that is familiar and reassuring any longer and over all, that glaring, searing white sun. God, how I yearn for a clean rain-swept afternoon around Washington Square!
The club where I am stopping temporarily is merely a sop to Aunt Agnes’s concern over her orphan niece. She knew someone who knew someone who met someone else who told her that all the nice girls stay here in this friendly, homey atmosphere which is cheap, safe and secure. At that, it’s not a bad little hostelry although it simply crawls with femmes and wherever a mob of femmes gather there is something depressing about the atmosphere. I wouldn’t for the world admit that to a gentleman, because I still have something in me of the old guard feminists who broke out in bloomers and smashed windows.
This little refuge which was built on the largesse of movie money to make Hollywood safe for stray girls is ever so Spanish, with white stucco walls and patios and cells glaringly clean and equally cheerless. There are ninety of us here, all career-bound in pictures but in the tadpole stage. The majority are extra girls on the break for the big chance, frighteningly young for the most part and devastatingly pretty. There is an odd sprinkling of stenographers, script girls, assistant cutters, designers, a librarian or two and one honest-to-goodness writer who has actually had her name on screen credits but is very Scotch in makeup and is saving her money against a rainy day. I’d like to know her better but she walks in a little aura of her own, so very aloof and grand, for I’ve discovered that socially, as the picture colony evaluation goes, she is worlds away from us. I’m panting to ask her how it feels up there but she no speaka the English to us.
I have sent out my letters of introduction but apparently no one has taken time out to recognize that fact.
My love to Momma and Poppa Rocco and all the little Roccos of Rocco’s Grotto. How is Tony doing on the violin?
Ever,
Maggie
October 21
Dear Aunt Agnes:
Thanks for your wire, but your worries are needless. I’m very fat and sassy. Would have written you sooner but rather hoped to have good news for you and didn’t want to write until I did.
Nothing so far has turned up. I had several letters of introduction from people back in New York and sent them all off to studios but I haven’t had so much as a nibble. The studio people must be so busy.
The club is charming and they take ever so good care of us. It’s perfectly scrumptious to look at, Spanish in architecture with darling patios and beautiful flowers, though they don’t smell very much.
The girls here are very chummy and helpful. They just adore that green sports outfit you gave me and several of them have worn it for important engagements. It was too snug for one of them but she didn’t mind at all. She just let out the seams and dropped the hem. It is too bad I haven’t an assortment of evening clothes for there is a definite need of them here. It seems a lot of business engagements take place in the evening. However,
I’m doing my humble best with what I have to donate to the cause.
They’re awfully jolly about letting you run a bill here, so I don’t have to worry for a while yet.
Enjoyed so much my short visit with you. Write soon.
Your loving niece,
Madge
October 22
Miss Madge Lawrence,
Girls’ Community Club,
Hollywood, California.
Dear Miss Lawrence:
Mr. Freeman has asked me to acknowledge your letter and to advise you he regrets there is no opening at the present in which he could place you. I would suggest you apply to our Employment Department. I am sure they will show you every courtesy.
Yours very truly,
Ellen Flagg
SECRETARY TO MARC FREEMAN
October 22