Making of a Writer (9780307820464) (6 page)

I had to choose an elective, and somehow I found myself in journalism class. Mrs. Edna Ammons was our teacher and sponsor, and she soon discovered how much I loved to write. At the end of the first week she appointed me assistant editor of the school newspaper, then set about teaching me the rules of journalism.

“Begin each story with the most important fact,” she said. “Get your readers’ attention. Grab their interest. Then proceed to tell them the rest of the story—who, what, when, where, why, and how.”

I gave what she had said a great deal of thought. Grab your readers. Get their attention. I knew this worked for writing fiction. Apparently it was the key to writing news stories, too.

I had read in a magazine feature story that Ernest Hemingway rewrote the beginning paragraphs of his stories as many as fifty times before he was satisfied.

I knew I could be satisfied with a lot fewer than fifty rewrites, but I began to see the importance of the opening sentences of a story and the equal importance of polishing and perfecting those sentences to capture readers.

I took the lesson to heart and, with strong, intriguing beginning sentences that had been written and rewritten, the stories I wrote for my own enjoyment began to improve.

That year, one of the teachers at LeConte, Mrs. Fern Jones, celebrated a contract from a publisher for a book she had written called
Friday, Thank God!
The publisher was G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York, and her book was scheduled to be published in 1943 under a pen name, Fern Rives.

Some of the other teachers teased her good-naturedly about her future fame as an author. Some teased her about writing under a pen name. But Mrs. Jones had won my total awe and admiration. She had written what would become a real hardcover book. It would be published by a New York publisher. Mrs. Jones would even earn money for what she had written.

She wasn’t a famous author. She hadn’t lived a hundred years ago. She was a real person, like me. If she could get paid for what she had written, someday so could I.

Another friend in my
homeroom of newcomers was a girl named Betsy Mills, whose father was Felix Mills, an orchestra leader for a Hollywood studio.

When Betsy asked about my interests, I told her that I liked to write poems and stories and that someday I was going to be a writer.

Betsy said, “And someday I’m going to compose music. Let me see some of your poems.”

She read a few of them, then said, “Let’s collaborate and write the senior class song.”

A notice had been posted, to which I had paid little attention, aside from making sure that it was included in the school newspaper: One of the English teachers was judging
the annual contest among ninth grade seniors for the class song, which would be printed in the spring yearbook.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.” And Betsy and I got busy.

For the next few days she’d hum bits of the melody, which had a great beat, and I’d write lines to fit. Finally we had what we thought was a terrific song.

We performed our song for Mrs. Ammons, who beamed as she heard us sing it. “That’s the best class song I’ve ever heard,” she said. “It deserves to win.” She told us to visit immediately the teacher who was judging the contest and present our song to her. “Come back and tell me how you did,” she added.

The judge didn’t exactly scowl at us, but with a look as though she’d tasted something bad, she said, “I think we already have our winner. And
she’s
not a new student. This is her third year as a straight-A student at LeConte.”

“We can’t help it that we’re new to Hollywood,” Betsy said.

“And the deadline for the contest isn’t until after school today,” I reminded her.

“Mrs. Ammons told us to sing our song for you. She’s waiting to hear about it,” Betsy insisted.

Before the teacher had a chance to object, Betsy and I went into our song. A few people stopped outside the open classroom door, listened, and began to clap in rhythm.

When we had finished, the teacher looked grim, but she said, “I’ll deliberate and announce my decision tomorrow.”

I don’t know with whom the judge deliberated, but the next day we were told that she had decided in favor of
two
senior songs.

When an assembly was held and the school orchestra played both songs, everyone liked Betsy’s and mine better.
We weren’t surprised. We didn’t even mind that there were two senior school songs. We didn’t mind competition. We were preparing for futures in which there would always be competition. Writers have to keep trying. They have to compete.

When the yearbooks came out, however, we couldn’t help feeling extra proud of our accomplishment. The straight-A student’s song was published on the back page of the yearbook. The song Betsy and I had written was published on the front page.

During the first part of the semester Mrs. Ammons had told me, “A writer must always have faith in herself. If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will.”

I took to heart what she said and never forgot it.

After graduating from LeConte
, Mary Lou and I attended Hollywood High, taking with us all our teenage insecurities and worries and joys and excitement and fears and hopes and dreams.

The administrators at Hollywood High used an unusual system of registration for classes. Each student signed up for one of three programs, academic, secretarial, or vocational, and was given a list of the classes required for that particular course for graduation.

On the first day of each semester, newspaper-sized sheets were handed out, and we sat on the grass, the steps of the buildings, or the benches in the quad—wherever we could find a seat—and made out our schedules.

When the first bell rang, we walked—
“Do not run,”
the voice over the loudspeaker warned—to the first class on our list and took a seat. If a student arrived and found that the seats were filled, he either looked for a similar class at the same time or rearranged his schedule.

Not knowing one teacher from another, I assigned myself to a tenth-grade English class taught by Miss Bertha Standfast. At the time I saw only a smiling, middle-aged woman with short, wavy blond hair and round glasses perched on a pug nose. I had no idea that I had just met someone who would make a gigantic difference in my life.

At that time the requirement for students in all English classes at Hollywood High was to write ten themes a semester. This was fine with me, since my favorite class assignment was to write.

Miss Standfast double-graded: one grade for spelling and punctuation and one for writing style. I usually received double A’s, but occasionally we had a difference of opinion concerning my choice of verbs.

I have always loved action verbs and thought of them as better descriptive words than adverbs and adjectives, since one well-chosen verb can paint a complete mental picture.

On occasion, though, no one had invented the verb I wanted, so I invented one myself. Someone had to create the language. Why couldn’t I do a little of it myself?

In my themes someone would
squeegle
through the mud under a fence, or a harsh laugh would
rackel
in someone’s throat.

Miss Standfast would write on my papers, “You can’t
make up verbs. Look in the dictionary. There are plenty of very good verbs to choose from.”

There were. She was right. I looked for verbs. Action verbs. I realized, even then, that good, strong action verbs made my stories and themes come alive.

I didn’t completely give up the idea of making up words, however. One day, as we ate lunch on the lawn in front of the administration building, I brought up a puzzling question to a friend named Nancy Monegan.

“Who makes up slang?” I asked. “Suddenly everyone’s saying some new slang word, and before long we read it in our magazines. Then, just as quickly as it comes, it disappears, and new slang takes its place.”

Nancy and I looked at each other. “Somebody has to make up slang,” Nancy said.

“Why not us?” I asked. “Want to try it?”

Nancy grinned. “Okay. We’ll call it our own jabberwocky.”

Together we organized our plan. We’d make up a new word or expression for something and use it around campus. We’d then see if others would use it and how long it would take to spread.

I don’t remember what our first attempt was, but I do remember that it caught on quickly. It was fun hearing other kids use it, and when Nancy and I later read it in a movie magazine gossip column, we celebrated with a hot fudge sundae at Brown’s on Hollywood Boulevard.

We tried other words and expressions and watched them enter the vocabulary of teenagers and magazine writers across the country.

But our days of jabberwocky were soon over. We now knew who invented slang.
We
did. We had proved our point
and had influenced the world of our peers. But slang was only a word game. There were more exciting things to do with words, more demanding directions, more complicated challenges. Satisfied that our plan had worked, we quit the game covered in glory.

Over the next three
years at Hollywood High, Mary Lou and I went on double dates together, enjoyed the same movies, sighed over the same handsome male movie stars, rode the Santa Monica streetcar to afternoons at the beach, and listened to each other’s problems.

But in our first year of high school, during the Sunday afternoon of December 7, 1941, we were shocked and horrified as we listened to the radio and heard President Franklin D. Roosevelt tell us about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Our country was at war.

Mary Lou and I did everything we could to help the war effort. Frustrated that we weren’t old enough to work at the Hollywood USO or join the navy’s WAVES (Women
Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) or the army’s WACs (Women’s Army Corps), we found other ways to become involved.

On Sunday mornings, after early Mass, we sometimes helped serve breakfast to the countless soldiers, sailors, and marines—many of them not much older than we were—who had come to Hollywood on weekend leave. To give them a safe place to stay, cots were set up on Saturday nights in our school’s gym, and the girls in the home ec classes, under their teachers’ supervision, prepared and served hot breakfasts.

Mary Lou and I often worked in the Red Cross hut on campus after school, cutting cartoons out of donated magazines and pasting them into scrapbooks for the servicemen who were wounded and in hospitals.

We took the Red Cross safety course so that we could help wounded victims if Los Angeles was attacked.

During our first citywide blackout, all those who could remained in their homes. Mother had sewn blackout curtains for all the windows that needed them, but that night, as the sirens sounded their alarm, we turned off all our lights and gathered together on our open upstairs sun porch.

We saw and heard a gigantic metropolis shudder to a stop. All city lights suddenly disappeared, as if a giant had snuffed them out. Automobiles pulled to the side of streets, lights turned off. Not a cigarette glowed, not a house light appeared. Air raid block wardens patrolled the streets, prepared to cite anyone who broke the lights-out order.

A strange thing happened as the metropolis went to sleep. Stars overhead seemed as large and bright as those
viewed from darkened mountaintops. They shone over a city that was totally silent. We spoke to each other in whispers, awed by the change we had just experienced.

Almost before we were ready, the sirens sounded again. The blackout was over. We had successfully closed our city, preparing it for possible attack. This was just practice. Sometime in the near future a blackout might mean invasion.

Before I went to bed that night I slipped a long butcher knife from the kitchen under my bed. Maybe we would never be invaded or attacked. But, on the other hand, maybe we would. And if we were, I wouldn’t go down without a fight.

Mary Lou and I comforted the girls at school who lost brothers or cousins or friends in battle, and we kept in touch with some of the boys in our classes who enlisted in the navy or marines as soon as they reached the age of seventeen. Mary Lou’s father joined the army and, because of his age, was assigned to be a driver for one of the officers. We were grateful he was not fighting on the front lines, but he was away from home, and Mary Lou worried about him.

Los Angeles officials, concerned about the number of men who swarmed to the city on weekend leave, begged the citizens to take the servicemen into their homes for Sunday dinners.

My parents responded immediately. Mother decided that a boy who would go to church while away from home must be a good boy. So she and Daddy would go to Blessed Sacrament Church on Sunset Boulevard after Mass and invite servicemen to come home to be with a family.

Many of the young men who eagerly accepted the invitation were not much older than I, so I’d invite Mary Lou
and a few other girlfriends to come to the house. Daddy had painted a shuffleboard court on the driveway and had created an open area at the bottom of our property for tetherball. Inside our house were a Ping-Pong table, a pool table, and a pinball machine that had been fixed so that it didn’t require coins.

Often the sailors, soldiers, and marines would come back each weekend until they shipped out, and we’d entertain them by riding the Hollywood streetcar to Los Angeles’s historic Olvera Street, with its booths and shops selling spicy taquitos, fragrant homemade candles, and cactus candy. We’d eat lo mein in Chinatown, compete in teams at the huge bowling alley on Sunset Boulevard, and take in a movie.

“Will you write to me?” most of the servicemen would ask before they left for assignment in the Pacific.

“Of course,” I’d promise, and I’d dutifully write each week, even though the list grew to eighteen, nineteen, then twenty. Mary Lou did the same.

We weren’t alone. Most of the girls we knew wrote stacks of letters to lonely servicemen away from home.