Hollywood, too often, renders novels into sausage, but with the other way around – Hollywood into novels – things sometimes turn out more refined.
Think of Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run?” and Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust.” More recent noteworthy novels dealing with Hollywood and the entertainment world are Jerry Stahl’s “I, Fatty,” about Roscoe Arbuckle, and Joe Heller’s “Funnymen” and Rupert Holmes’ “Where the Truth Lies,” both about Martin and Lewis-style duos (the latter of which completed the circle by being made into a movie a few months ago).
Now joining this happy company is screenwriter Wesley Strick’s debut novel, whose title is taken from Gloria Swanson’s/Nora Desmond’s description (in “Sunset Boulevard”) of spellbound moviegoers sitting “out there in the dark.” The truest compliment for this novel: It does for 1940s movies what Thomas Mallon’s “Bandox” did for the 1920s magazine scene; it has about it some of the same authentic feel.
Just as the real magazine behind “Bandbox” was The New Yorker, the real figures behind actor Harley Hayden and director Derek Sykes in “Out There in the Dark” are Ronald Reagan and Douglas Sirk. Sykes’ original name is Dieter Seife, and like Sirk (born Detlef Sierck in Hamburg), Sykes is a refugee from Nazi Germany with a past closely resembling that of his real-life model.
As for Hayden, his resemblance to Reagan is in every look, characteristic and career step that Strick gives him. Not your average stuck-on-himself actor, Hayden is earnest and self-effacing, puppy-dog amiable.
He has “a look of not-quite-getting-it mixed with wanting-to-get-it-real-badly-but-preferably-at-no-one-else’s-expense,” and “gravity seemed to exert so little force on him.”
The two men, after slogging away separately on B-movies in the 1930s, cross paths on a large-budget wartime movie, “The Big Betrayal.” Sykes thinks little of Hayden as an actor and harasses and humiliates him on the set to get rid of him. Hayden hires a cashiered L.A. policeman named Roarke to look into Sykes’ carefully cloaked background.
Interestingly, Hayden the American and Sykes the European interpret Hayden’s role of the main character, Tony, diametrically differently. Hayden sees Tony representing America before Pearl Harbor, sunk in moral complacency and betraying itself; Sykes sees Tony as Europe, seducing and betraying all that is idealistic in America. These differing interpretations echo in later actions.
At this point, it is not melodramatic to say, the plot thickens. Who is Jasper Ridley and why does he have such control over Sykes and Al Lustig, the head of Superior and a boor in the mold of Columbia’s Harry Cohn?
Why is Lustig’s wife in a “high-priced nuthouse”? Is Sykes a German spy? What is the meaning of the loathsome Nazi-themed films he views?
In finding the answers to those questions we are treated to movie history woven into the narrative. For instance, Hayden, exempt from military service because of poor eyesight, works (as did Reagan) at “Fumpoo,” the Army’s First Motion Picture Unit, producing training films at Hal Roach’s studio, a.k.a. Fort Roach.
The end comes in the late ’40s with Hayden wowing ’em with his testimony to Congress on communist influence in the film industry. We find that fundamentally decent Hayden, with an eye on a political future, has not been above misrepresenting the secrets of Sykes’ past. The truth of Sykes’ secrets, as with Douglas Sirk’s, is strange, and heartbreaking.
The point of it all is captured in Sykes’ comment to his housekeeper, also a German immigrant: “Have you noticed, Hilda, how this country is full of do-gooders, men and women who are absolutely certain that everything they carry out and believe in is for the best, even though it’s only for their benefit?”
If the reader wanted to apply the observation to the U.S. today, the author probably would not argue.
The novel’s worst fault is a wandering point of view or shifting narrator. Apparently the perspective is that of Chester Dowling, Superior’s retired chief of production, recounting in 1988 what he has learned of the past, but this is not consistent, and narration occasionally seems to adhere to Roarke and elsewhere.
That and a few melodramatic snatches of speech are the only flaws worth mentioning in this clever and thought-provoking entertainment.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
Out There in the Dark
By Wesley Strick
St. Martin’s, 323 pages, $23.95
