Mark B. Perry is the author of the novel And Introducing Dexter Gaines: A Novel of Old Hollywood. Also a screenwriter and producer, he lives in Los Angeles.
Q: What inspired you to write And Introducing Dexter Gaines?
A: First and foremost, I’m one of those people who absolutely love Los Angeles, both the actual city and the celestial mystique of Hollywood, both present and past. Ever since discovering classic films from the Golden Age as a child thanks to NBC Saturday Night at the Movies, I’ve wanted to be a writer. So the first draw was Old Hollywood.
Second, I’m fascinated by abandoned places, ruins, and the parallels with growing older. The story behind Grey Gardens fascinates me as it explores on all of those, and I was drawn to the bittersweet romance of the twilight of Tinseltown’s heyday in the early 1950s, and a fading industry unwelcoming to aging.
And third, on a very personal note, when I first moved to Los Angeles to pursue a screenwriting career, while I was working temp jobs by day and getting up at 4 a.m. and staying up into the wee hours to write before and after work, I found a community of friends and colleagues all chasing some dream or other in the entertainment business.
We had aspiring writers like me, but also actors and directors. And most of them gradually grew discouraged and abandoned their dreams. Maybe I felt some survivor’s guilt because my big break came three years after relocating here, but in any case, I think there are rich stories in the dreams that don’t come true, and wanted to write about that.
Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: For pleasure reading, my go to is historical fiction. I’m fascinated by time travel and a good HF book is the next best thing. My second favorite genre is celebrity memoirs, biographies, and books about the making of movies in Hollywood’s golden age. So the research for Dexter Gaines was more like recreational reading.
I also discovered an invaluable, friendly, and very helpful resource at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ library and the UCLA Film & Television Archives.
The most surprising thing was learning more about 20th Century Fox studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck. Prolific director Jean Negulesco (Titanic [1953], How to Marry a Millionaire) wrote a delightful memoir of his time in Hollywood entitled Things I Did and Things I Think I Did.
In it, he humanizes Zanuck who loved to host lavish Saturday afternoon croquet parties at his estate in Palm Springs. He also writes about a fancy dress dinner party where the guests all ended up in the pool...in their evening clothes! That was too good not to “adapt” for my story.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you wrote the book?
A: Verisimilitude is one of my favorite words and a quality I always look for in fiction. Whatever the genre, if the author conjures an internal logic and realism, I’m all in. Especially when incorporating real history as a backdrop.
This was my goal with Dexter Gaines, to have just enough reality both with the 1994 set pieces and, of course, the early 1950s. I wanted to put my characters alongside such legends as Tallulah Bankhead and Rock Hudson and Barbara Stanwyck to create the illusion Dexter, Milly, and Lilly could have been real.
I strove to capture the spirit of the real figures’ voices and attitudes. Still, the bottom line is the novel is about my characters and the world they live in, and I didn’t want the real historical characters and events to steal the spotlight, just support it.
Q: This book was originally published in 2014--can you tell us how it came to be reissued?
A: In 2014, my agent submitted the book to two or three of the biggest publishers in the business, all of whom passed quite respectfully. The agent, who I suspect may have been uncomfortable with my novel’s subject matter, then didn’t really keep at it.
I grew frustrated and decided to self-publish. I thought I was doing everything right, but as it turns out I knew absolutely nothing about book marketing and promotion, and despite some amazing reviews (Kirkus called it “Truman Capote-like”), that didn’t translate into sales and the book fizzled and died on the vine.
I chalked it up as an expensive life lesson until some years later, a wonderful writer and now great friend, Patricia V. Davis, read the book and fell in love with it. She told me she didn’t want to be presumptuous, but she had some thoughts on revisions and said she believed it could be “snatched up” despite having been self-published.
Her notes were whip smart and insightful, and when I happily worked them into the text, the improvements were palpable. She also strongly suggested I change the original title, City of Whores, because that suggested a book about the back-biting and maneuvering of behind-the-scenes Hollywood, and wasn’t representative of my “lovely” story at all.
To this day, I happy to say she was right about everything. Once I had the new title and submitted it to Amble Press (thanks to introductions from Patricia and author Georgia Kolias), then managing editor Eric Peterson responded very enthusiastically and, just as Patricia had predicted, snatched it up.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A total change of pace and genre, though I’m still very much in the historical fiction arena. I’m writing a trilogy of cozy murder mystery novellas I’m calling The Murder Darling Mysteryellas.
Here’s my logline in progress: Imagine a world of mid-20th-century sophistication, spanning the 1940s through the early ’80s. Now picture two unconventional friends who both love and loathe one another. He’s a gay, world famous bestselling author of fact and fiction. She’s a proud pansexual and a glamorous and outrageously unpredictable legend of stage and screen.
Together, they are both five-foot-three-inch tall giants in their professions as well as occasional amateur sleuths who’ve cracked open as many mysteries as they have cases of champagne. After all, who doesn’t love a good murder, darling?!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m deeply honored and humbled by the attention my novel is getting thus far, and cannot thank you enough for your interest!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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