Rhys Bowen | Hollywood, Fantasies, and Scandals

One of the biggest disappointments of my life was the first time I saw Hollywood. I thought I knew what to expect, after all I had seen all those movies with stars driving their convertibles down Sunset Boulevard. Incredibly glamorous and chic. The place of dreams. But when I turned onto Sunset Boulevard for the first time in real life I couldn’t believe it. This couldn’t be the place I had dreamed about: dirty, tacky motels, cheap stores, certainly no stars in convertibles. The Hollywood of those old movies is sadly no more.

So I was very glad when I wrote my new Royal Spyness novel, QUEEN OF HEARTS, to have a chance to visit Hollywood as it once was.

Most of my Royal Spyness novels, featuring Lady Georgiana, 35th in line to the throne but penniless, take place in the safe and genteel environment of English country houses and royal palaces. So it was a big departure for me to decide to set my new book in Hollywood. I had received many requests from fans to set one book in the series in America and when I thought about Hollywood at the time, how could I resist?

Hollywood in the Thirties was a place of both glamor and scandal. In a world still in the grips of depression, Hollywood was a place of excess. A place of fairy tale. And a place of dark secrets. Clark Gable was busy seducing all his co-stars. Charlie Chaplin was busy running after everything in skirts. There were mysterious suicides and mobster connections. So it was not hard to come up with a good murder scenario that had a touch of them all.

Most of my characters are fictional, although you might recognize some of them with changed names. But I used a real scandal as inspiration for my fictional murder. I’m thinking of the story of Thomas Ince. He was one of the most important producers of early Hollywood, making his name with Westerns. But by the 1920s, Ince’s power was fading, and he was asking his friend William Randolph Hearst for a little help. Hearst didn’t really want to help him, but in a token show of support he decided to throw Ince a birthday party on his yacht. On November 15th, the guests boarded the boat. Among the guests were Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies, Charles Chaplin, novelist Elinor Glyn, columnist Louella Parsons, and Ince’s mistress Margaret Livingston.

Nobody knows what happened on that yacht, but two days later Ince was dead. Hearst claimed that Ince had fallen down stairs. Gossip hinted that Marion Davies was having a fling with Charlie Chaplin and that Hearst fired his gun, thinking he was killing Chaplin, but mortally wounding Ince instead. Ince was rushed to shore by water taxi. He died and his body was instantly cremated and his widow sailed for Europe.

The case was never investigated and we’ll never know what happened. But this kind of story gave me free rein to create my own Hollywood legends—a movie impresario who owns a property remarkably similar to Heart Castle—complete with dismantled Spanish chapels and African animals roaming the grounds. A lovely English movie star with a dark past. A gossip columnist remarkably similar to Louella Parsons and Charlie Chaplin, playing himself and attempting to seduce my heroine, Lady Georgiana. It was all such fun! I am so happy that I finally got to see the Hollywood of my fantasies, even if I did also visit its dark under side.