“Do Tell”: A Novel Ripe with Golden Age Hollywood Gossip https://ift.tt/wPeU6hg
At the beginning of Lindsay Lynch’s debut novel, Do Tell, narrator Edie O’Dare, a refugee from Depression-era working class Boston turned mediocre film actress turned gossip columnist and influential chronicler of Hollywood’s golden age, surveys a roomful of stars and studio players and states:
One of the best things I did for myself out here was become invisible. If you asked anyone in this room, they’d swear up and down that nobody knows their secrets. There are real benefits to being nobody.
Months before Edie’s contract as an actress with a Hollywood studio is about to run out, she receives a letter from an up-and-coming starlet alleging Hollywood’s most famous leading man raped her while Edie and most of the town’s A-listers partied downstairs. As Edie digs into the story and the popular actor goes on trial, she uncovers enough dirt in the tales of adjacent illicit liaisons, sham marriages, hidden pregnancies, and other salacious secrets to propel her to the top of that A-list: the woman invited to every premiere, every party, every celebrity’s home.
Though Edie often explicitly attributes her rise to her invisibility — “the real benefits to being nobody” — she less often acknowledges the profound loneliness that is the true cost of the same. Yet on every page, Lynch paints a picture of an ambitious, smart, witty, and tough woman who has made a place for herself among a glittering array of glamorous stars and studio execs — and paid the price: a life without family, true friends, or real and sustained human connections of any kind.
At one point, Edie is giving an actor she likes and admires the chance to explain away a vicious rumor, explaining:
‘I’m talking to you as a friend right now.’
Charles laughed and put his hat back on. ‘You have sources and you have enemies, Edie, but we all know you don’t have friends.’
What is most impressive is how Lynch manages to highlight Edie’s isolation and, at the same time, produce a book replete with characters — so many that she includes a cast list at the beginning of the novel, á la the opening credits of a golden age ensemble film. Some critics have dinged Lynch for that maneuver, as well the sheer number of players who jump in from page one, lying to each other, cheating on each other, sniping at each other, and gossiping, gossiping, gossiping. It is easy to get lost sometimes in the plots and subplots, major and minor characters, especially when Lynch reports snippets of dialogue from the vantage point of an unnoticed fly on the wall (aka Edie O’Dare). The comments fly fast, filled with inside jokes and unfamiliar name drops. It gives the feeling of being an alien in a crowded world, which is perhaps exactly what Lynch is going for and exactly the tragedy of Edie O’Dare’s success.
She’s so inside Hollywood, she’s outside. And alone.
Years had passed, and all I had to show for them was a gossip column with my name in bold letters on the top of it. Even that was tainted: Charles had told me I was wrong about everything. The one thing I’d managed to build for myself was predicated on falsehoods. It’s easy to fool oneself into thinking there’s a lot more control with a lie.
These thoughts come to Edie as she stands alone in a train station, watching soldiers depart for World War II, exchanging with their families “embraces and heartfelt goodbyes.” She considers the fact she’d never married though “by Hollywood standards, I should have been on husband number two at my age.” And she invents on the spot “a life with a husband and two children in Des Moines or Omaha” so as to have a story to tell a fellow passenger should one ask. But of course, no one does.
This complicated portrait of Edie O’Dare, conquering the cut-throat, man’s world of golden era Hollywood with grit and wit but at great personal cost, is what puts Do Tell as a novel closer to Larry McMurtry’s Somebody’s Darling or Stewart O’Nan’s West of Sunset than to the latest twisty, juicy, gossipy Hollywood tell-all (and O’Nan’s fictionalized Fitzgerald has to have been at least in part inspiration for Lynch’s characterization of Edie O Dare’s alcoholic novelist brother, whose artistic spirit is crushed by his stint as a studio screenwriter).
That said, Do Tell is also twisty, juicy, gossipy historic fiction, and a tremendously fun read, in a guilty pleasure sort of way. There are satisfying surprises—and some surprisingly satisfying happy endings — in the love angles, triangles, and quadrangles that Edie uncovers (and often re-covers). There are glamorous parties galore, with sumptuous gowns for the women, tuxes for the men, and the expectation that Cary Grant is waiting around every corner, ready to pop a fresh bottle of champagne. For classic movie buffs, there are the obvious parallels to real golden era scandals (Erol Flynn’s rape trial) and feuds (Edie’s competition with her mentor, gossip columnist Poppy St. John, is surely meant to suggest the rivalry between Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons).
Then there are the many sections in which Do Tell takes a fascinating look at 21st Century social movements through a 1940s lens. With the recent reversal of Harvey Weinstein’s conviction, the deflated “me too” moment at the center of the novel feels like it could have taken place this year. And it is easy to imagine Edie O’Dare tuning in with rapt attention to the New York criminal trial of the former president. She certainly understands the power of the press to change lives when it decides what gossip to pass on (and what to suppress).
“Funny and substantive, breezy and wise,” says Ann Patchett of Lindsay Lynch’s debut, Do Tell. “A wonderful provocative novel about the way time changes how we see the world.” Patchett works with Lynch at Parnassus Books, and they cohost a podcast together. Still Patchett’s comments, as inspired as they might be by friendship, are dead on. Lindsay Lynch gives us the kind of contradictions that make for the best sort of novel: An intimate, heart-breaking character study embedded in a crowd of engaging, chattering characters. A sparkling visit to a magical era in Hollywood and a deep dive into the dirty deceptions that made it appear so fine. A masterclass in how stories are told, then retold, and retold again, until perfect – and perfectly unrelated to anything resembling real human connection or life.
Towards the end of the novel, Edie muses, “I suppose it’s why I never left Hollywood for all those years—it was a city that promised reshoots. You could tell a lie over and over again, until every variable was accounted for. As I sat on the long train ride home, I’d told myself I’d try again.”
Do Tell By Lindsay Lynch
HarperCollins Publishers
Published July 11, 2023
Paperback June 18, 2024
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