Carmel-by-the-Sea, full of whimsical, thatched-roof cottages overlooking white sands, is the fairy-tale-like setting for Meg Waite Clayton’s fascinating and relevant new novel, Typewriter Beach, in which a Hollywood ingenue and a world-weary screenwriter find themselves neighbors. The book even contains fairy-tale elements of its own (cottages, unrequited love, hidden identity) and serves as a kind of paean to our nation’s favorite fairy tales: the movies. The ingenue, Isabella Giori, is an actress; her neighbor Léon Chazan is a screenwriter; and in 2018, Léon’s granddaughter, Gemma, is also a screenwriter.
Despite their hours-long remove from Los Angeles, these characters remain acutely aware of everything that goes on in Tinseltown. It’s 1957, and Isabella, or Iz, hopes to be Alfred Hitchcock’s next star. She already has a couple of secrets and knows why her studio has parked her in Carmel. Although she’s under a sort of house arrest, Iz deliberately brings along the stunning gown she’d bought for the Academy Awards: “It was the most elegant thing she’d ever seen, designed just for her and fitted precisely, with a white tulle skirt and navy blue velvet top, as elegant as black but more innocent.” It sounds like a frock for that ultimate American fairy-tale fantasy: a Disney princess.
Léon seems an unlikely Prince Charming. He’s been blacklisted for refusing to provide names of colleagues to J. Edgar Hoover’s henchmen during the recent Red Scare, in which Senator Joseph McCarthy’s supposed aim was to root out active Communist Party members—but underlying it all was the goal of instilling fear in anyone who didn’t hew to the prevailing norms in creativity and sexuality. His Oscar-nominated first few screenplays behind him, Léon now writes scripts credited to others, typing so furiously that he meets the new woman next door when Iz complains about the “damned clack and ding.”
They become friends, and the action takes a jump cut, landing readers in 2018 as Léon’s granddaughter, Gemma, arrives at his cottage, appropriately named the Fade Inn. Gemma has already written a couple of lauded scripts when she sets up her own typewriter on the beach, mourning Léon, her beloved Gran, dead at 94. On the morning she meets Iz, along comes another neighbor, young video game designer Sam Kenneally, a kind of deus ex machina for Gemma’s story arc.
A discursion about Robinson Jeffers, the illustrious poet who also made a home on Carmel Beach, will be joined by passages about Garbo, Bogart, hot chocolate made with honey, then–Vice President Nixon, back-alley abortions, a late-career comeback à la Julie Andrews, and so much more that this smart and elegantly written story threatens to deteriorate into a sort of commonplace book about the pitfalls in each era for women who want to succeed in a treacherous industry.
But while there’s a lot of detail, Clayton is using it to paint a specific picture of issues that many of us hoped, fruitlessly, would resolve back in the 20th century. No matter how talented an actress was in 1957, studios found ways her wings could be clipped. No matter how talented a female screenwriter is in 2018, societal expectations still threaten to clip her wings. No wonder Jeffers’s hand-built Hawk Tower, a place made specifically for the peace and solitude of his wife, Una, resonates throughout Typewriter Beach, with a video game called The Hawk Tower playing a significant role.
Typewriter Beach is at times too internecine; Iz’s and Gemma’s stories almost cannibalize each other. Just as one chapter leaves you longing to learn more about Iz’s past, the next makes you wonder if Gemma can have a real future. However, there is a method to this overresearched madness, and it’s one that Clayton stalwarts will recognize. Iz and Gemma, at points 60 years apart in the film business, both experience the overt and covert misogyny innate to the moviemaking machine.
If Gemma, as both a screenwriter and a younger woman, is saved from the studio-dictated humiliations Iz experiences, it’s not because the machine has improved; it’s because women have gained strength by joining forces. As Iz and Gemma watch the 2018 Oscars, then-two-time winner Frances McDormand accepts her award and asks “every female nominee in every category to stand. All night, almost no women of any age have taken the stage.”
Iz applauds along with the TV audience and considers her choices, which include a 1957 pact with Léon. “She ought to have done better, she ought to have brought other women along. Maybe she couldn’t have made a difference.… But if she had tried to do more, maybe young women like Gemma would have an easier time now.”
To paraphrase Joan Didion, another chronicler of the California dream, we tell ourselves fairy tales in order to live. Sadly, there’s no way to predict whether Iz alone could have effected change. However, through her long and complicated friendship with Léon, she finds the strength to share the truth—or some of it—with Gemma. There’s not necessarily a happily-ever-after, but there is enough hope—that thing with feathers—to go around.•
Bethanne Patrick is a writer, a book critic, and an author who tweets @TheBookMaven.
