The Relentless has had its first outside reading. I am letting it sit for awhile so that I can do the next draft with fresher eyes. It is on to the next novel.

Writing during covid was so difficult because I could not go to any of the locations and get a feel for them. I set part of The Relentless in San Francisco since I have been many times. I have also been to the other settings in Washington D.C.  and Virginia. For Venezuela, I just had to do a lot of research. Ultimately, there is nothing like being there to get a feel for the place you are writing about or using as a setting.

My next novel is set in a single very small town. I really needed to get a sense of a small town like that, so it was off to Julian, California for a few days. They do have great apples, which is about the only thing they are currently known for. The population is around 1500.

It was named after one of the members of the Baily family, Mike Julian, who had been a confederate soldier. The family settled in 1869, aborting their plans to travel to Arizona. What made Julian was the discovery of gold that same year by A.E. “Fred” Coleman, a former slave. He started the Coleman Mining District as well as a gold rush.

Expansion of the town was limited by the lack of water and frequent drought. It also stays small because that is how the town wants it. There was a huge controversy when they built a Subway sandwich store and a Dairy Queen. Both quickly went out of business.

The town is gloriously quirky. Almost every shop was open from 10 am to 4 pm. A very old woman said to Belle about the short hours “Well, you city folk just like to get started earlier than us up here.” Many of the restaurants closed at 6 pm. A couple of them stayed open all the way to 7 pm, at least on weekends. This is in a town that, other than apples, really only has tourism going for it.

We attended the Christmas parade. I joked to Belle that I bet they had at least one tractor covered in lights. The parade was actually led by Santa Claus, driving a tractor festooned with lights. A few cars decorated with lights drove by, and that was the parade. It was a bit different from our local Hollywood Christmas Parade that we are used to.

We went into the town hall, which had their main auditorium, which will become a setting in my story. Being in the place really helped me soak up the feel for it. I also did a lot of listening to get the rhythm of the way people there spoke.

A lot of new elements in the story were developed just from observing. We went to a small Italian restaurant. We had to wait at the bar for our table. Belle kept asking for different types of wine until they found something they actually had (and we are not talking specific vintages but just generic categories like Pinot Noir and Chablis.) They were proud to announce that they now had Diet Coke by the can, as for some reason that is hard to get there and he did warn us that they might not have more the next time we came. The owner worked the floor while his son handled the front of the house.  I reimagined these people with a bit of exaggeration and now they play a major role in the story that I would never have come up with had I not gone to this restaurant.

Another scene was inspired by the local but tiny grocery store. The selections were quite limited, and we wanted some crackers. They had two options and the one we selected cost eight dollars, a lot for just a box of Triscuits and more than double the cost at home. It inspired a scene where a local man is pursuing an out-of-town woman and has offered her cheese and she wants some crackers to go with it. When the only two options at the small store are Saltines and Ritz, she goes for the very expensive Ritz crackers. He tells her “Don’t worry about the price, the fancy stuff just costs more here.”

There is an awesome diner where a model railroad traverses the entire ceiling. A tiny train continually rolled over our heads while we heard the distant booms from the Candy Mine. This was an old basement decorated to look like a mine and filled with old style candy. I bought a couple that I remembered from very early childhood. They tasted like that was about when they were made. One was Cup o Gold, created by the Hoffman Candy Company in the 1950s here in Los Angeles. It was primarily a West Coast candy. Later after we returned to civilization Belle got me one fresh from the factory. Still not as good as I remembered from childhood. My tastes may have gotten a little more sophisticated.

As a journalist I did a lot of coverage of events. It is not just a recitation of who was there and what happens. You wander around and observe, looking for interesting stories. Listening and observing are where you get some of your best information and ideas. You also need to talk to as many people as you can and get them to tell you their story.

It is very similar for fiction, except you get to make up a lot more stuff and you don’t have to worry about getting every detail right. Being on the ground and observing can be one of your best sources of ideas, ideas that come from other people’s experiences rather than just your own.

The girl about to make her way into the maw of the monster is Mimi Gibson. This is from the 1957 film The Monster that Challenged the World. She was one of the hardest working child actors in show business in the 1950s and 1960s. I knew very little about her and her career. This despite the fact that I personally knew her. She was my aunt.

Her career had pretty much wound down by the time I came along and was old enough to understand what an acting career was. It was barely spoken of. We never watched movies or television shows she was in. Until the Internet came along, I knew virtually nothing about her career.

The reason was that my aunt had a lot of simmering anger over her forced career in show business as a child actor, so she would not talk about it, and my mother to this day has a pathological jealousy of her sister’s career, so she would never talk about it. I do cover some of Mimi’s remarkable career in more detail in my book, The Greatest Adventure. When my mother skimmed through an early draft of my book and saw that her sister was mentioned, she went into a screaming rage and I did not talk to her for a year. I assume it wound up in the trash unread as we never spoke about the book again. That’s a shame because it is quite a good read, and she comes across much better in the book than in real life.

I just discovered that Mimi had recently published an autobiography called Working Kid. I bought a copy and it filled in a lot of the gaps I was missing. Though Mimi makes frequent trips to Los Angeles, we have not spoken in maybe 20 years. Our family is dysfunctional that way.

I learned a number of things. I already knew that she started doing calendars at 22 months, but I had no idea of the extent of her print work in advertising where she was in magazines and on billboards. She rode in many parades. She was the very last of the Hollywood USO Mascots, which she did for many years. She was the Tonette Girl. She had a doll produced with her likeness. I knew none of this until I read her book.

She did film and television, and a lot of both. There is no official complete record, but there were some 34 movies and over 200 television shows, along with countless commercials. She worked with a number of legendary directors such as Anthony Quinn, Cecil B. DeMille, and William Wyler. She performed in productions with actors including Joanne Woodward,  John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Jack Benny (my personal inspiration for comedy as a child), Red Skelton, Danny Thomas, Doris Day, Mickey Rooney, Ricardo Montalban, Ida Lupino, Van Johnson, Joel McCrea, Barbara Hale, James Darren, Anthony Quinn, Angie Dickinson, Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, Tony Randall, Charles Coburn, James Garner and countless other big name actors.

She still has some resentment about her life in show business, along with a lot of appreciation. Besides being absolutely adorable, she was also quite a talented child actor. As an adult, I have been able to watch a lot of the things she was in. Being burdened from infancy with being the family’s sole breadwinner, with my grandmother spending every penny she made, did not sit well with her. Even so, she had an amazing career working with some of the top directors and a roster of almost every major A-list actor of the time.

Going through her book, I was amused that we had worked with some of the same people. I tell stories about many of them in my book, not knowing when I wrote it that my aunt had also worked with them. By the time I worked with them, though, they were quite old.

She played the daughter of Cary Grant in the 1958 film Houseboat. I first met Cary Grant when I was directing awards shows. Amazing man. Hanging out backstage with him is something I will always remember. Even at 80 he had amazing charisma.

She was in the 1956 The Ten Commandments directed by Cecil B. De Mille. Despite my being involved in theater since high school and taking directing classes, no one in my family ever bothered to mention that she worked with one of the most legendary directors of all time (and many other legendary directors). My mother’s only comment when I found out Mimi was in it was “You can hardly even see her.” Actually, she is hard to miss.  While I never worked with Charlton Heston, my wife Belle did when she was organizing the Screen Actors Guild commercial strike. She liked him more than she thought she would.

She was in the 1954 Ethel Merman film There’s No Business Like Show Business. It also featured Johnnie Ray, and I have a rather long and humorous story about both Belle and I working with him in my book.

She was on Leave it to Beaver a couple of times. I never worked with Tony Dow, who played Beaver’s older brother and who recently passed away, but I did know him socially. I never knew to ask him about working with my aunt.

She appeared on Johnny Carson’s daytime show. I never made it to the Carson show (several friends did), but as described in my book, I did spend a lot of time on the Carson Tonight Show set.

Her final film was in 1968 titled If He Hollers, Let Him Go. It was one of the earlier blaxsploitation films, albeit not a well-reviewed one. It features Kevin McCarthy, who Belle had to deal with in a live production of a Christmas Carol when she was a rep working for Actor’s Equity. Kevin’s well-known problem with alcoholism led him not to just chewing up the scenery, but to literally knocking it over. It is the only film in which Mimi appeared topless, and I was on national television in the nude, so we both had more exposure than we ever imagined we’d have in show business.

I think that she would agree that her most significant accomplishment was her work on a committee for child actors at the Screen Actors Guild that led to major legislation to protect child actors. This led to articles in the Los Angeles Times where my grandmother’s abuses were made public. Those articles and the Internet are where I learned about my family. Interestingly, Belle was working at SAG at the time and would see her come in, but there was just no interest in any type of relationship. While Belle fought hard every day on behalf of the actors, I think Mimi saw SAG as the enemy.

In some ways I followed in my Aunt’s footsteps, although she had a far more successful career as an actor. The irony was that she was forced into it as a child and I desperately wanted it as a child.  Because of Mimi, my mother did not allow me to act in shows until after I graduated high school when she had little say. People often get into show business because they have a working relative, but I got into show business despite having had a relative in the business.