A Word on Words; 2703; Laura Van Wormer

A word on words, a program delving into the world of books and their authors. Your host, Mr. John Siegenthaler, chairman of the Freedom Forum, First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. Hello, I'm John Siegenthaler, and once again, welcome to a word on words. Laura Van Warmer, you're a best-selling artist over and again, and now you've done it again with talk. And talk is a romance mystery, a thriller. It will absolutely hold you on the edge of your chair or keep you in bed for another two hours because after you get involved with your heroine, this wonderful TV personality, you want to find out whether she lives or dies and whether she gets the guy on the end or he turns out to be a villain.

John, I know that you're married already. If you weren't, I would just take you home and keep yours mine for the rest of my life. Then every time I was working on a new book and I was depressed, I'd say, John, could you talk to me again about how great talk was? Talk to me about talk. Yeah, help me get inspired for the next one. What talk is terrific? I mean, you know you... Thank you. It's a compliment, particularly when a very, well, a very smart guy reads a book. You know, you have all kinds of readers and you hear from all different kinds, but there's only... I think I'll take you home with me and every time I get discouraged to down the dumps, I'll say, Laura, come tell me what a wonderful human being I am. People will be the mutual admiration society. I'm not sure the TV people will be very interested in this after that. We'll call the Narcissist show. That's right. Well, that's the next book, Narcissism. That's it. He was a talk show host in the deep south. Let's talk about her.

Jessica, right? The revival of the revival of Jessica once a drunk, once a very loose woman. Yes, the terror of Tucson. Yeah, and you brought her back and put her in another venue, sober, stable, heroic. Some what? Yeah. Some what? Well, yes, she is. Well, because also there's at one point, you know, Jessica has stopped drinking for several years and at one point in the book, she's talking to her AA sponsor and her AA sponsor. Yeah, and Sam agrees that not everybody who stops drinking becomes a millionaire and the best love talk show host is about to publish her autobiography. So she has been fortunate to a certain degree, but she is a great character. I love her. She was her 1989 in a book called West End and I had created Jessica really to contrast

the personality of a news woman as opposed to a talk show host and that was how she originally developed. And then in this day and age with all the different talk shows going on, I knew it was time to bring Jessica back because all these years later, being talented, but also being almost weller than well, if you know what I mean. A young woman who had everything really threw it all away and now to make sure she doesn't ever drink or start doing drugs again or get into, you know, messed up relationships again, she really has to be quite diligent about maintaining an even keel. So when a person I like this has like a psychostocker, she may not react like the normal TV personnel. So let me tell you what I like most about this book and I like a lot about it. That was not just introductory hype. What I like most about this book is the directness of its opening.

Anybody who reads the review, anybody who reads the book flap is going to know in general terms that Jessica is the victim of a stalker. So much more than that. Now as somebody who reads a lot and also reads a lot of mysteries and romance through us, usually you get a long pro long that's off the subject. You're introduced to three characters before you get to the hero of the heroine. And then you go through another chapter for the real plot. I can almost hear you, John, yelling, cut to the chase, cut to the chase, right? But you know, you find out right away that Dirk, her guard, had a security at the network who wants her to be protected because she's getting these letters, the letters of threatening

and she must be careful. And there is no dressing on the cake in that first chapter. Very brief pro long and then boom, this is what it is. And I thought, my God, where is she going to go from here when you went a long way from there? I have to ask you, because of who Jessica is, takes you inside the television industry as it now exists in different and unique ways. I have a son who's in television and so I'm fascinated by that. But how much internal research did you have to do? Oh, gosh, a lot. And this is where it was very helpful that Jessica actually came from an earlier book. In 1989, when I was writing West End, I was living in New York City full time, which

was wonderful, because then I could be a fake temp, a friend of mine who was a producer got me into CBS in New York where I was able to hang out. I was a, quote, temp at ABC, you know, where they were doing certain tapings and things. Because you can research the mechanical parts of television, you know, the production. How does it work? What's the technology and all of that? But to make a novel real, you know, John, you have to get behind the scenes and see how people treat each other. For example, I did refresh my research for this book by going to, you know, a couple of tapings, you know, to go to Oprah and the tonight show and we had a show up in Hartford that was taping that's now canceled the Gale King show. But there were various talk shows that I could go in and watch. But what's really good is when you are able to be a fly on the wall, no one knows who you are.

They certainly don't know you're about to write a novel about the talk show industry. And so when the talent leaves the stage, you can hear what the cameraman has to say about him or her. You can hear what the technical director says, you know, like, oh my God, how late were they up last night? It looks like hell, you know, and they go on things like that. And it's the relationships of the people on the set, you know, and it's funny because you can get all the factual details right. But if you miss hit a note on the emotional keel, if somebody in television will jump all over you or in a review, they'll never, they'll never let go. So it's, it's almost, you do the research in the studio, but really it's also the listening to sort of watching human nature unfold in certain circumstances. Well, this network, Darren Brook, DBS, yes, DBS, DBS is a family institution. And it's a sort of son-in-law, daughter-in-law, up family institutions.

Yes. If you marry well, you're liable to be a president or a co-CEO of one of the companies, sure. And, and, and so we have Cassie, Cassie, who is the president, married to, uh, end of the family. Uh, you have Alexandra, who's not married in the family, but strong anchor, Jessica's best friend, uh, they're not competitive at all. Uh, she's lesbian, right? She has a love, right? Uh, a Hollywood love, who is a dominant personality in her own right. Right. Uh, the two of them have a farm. Uh, then you have a lot of behind the scenes stuff is what you're saying. Then you have, yeah. On the surface, everyone at this network looks good. Then you get behind the scenes, you realize the president of the network.

It's not her first tub, it's her second husband who happens to own the whole Shabang, the anchor woman who's the most perfect woman in America as a closet lesbian, you know, and Jessica, who is the most successful talk show host, is, you know, limping off to R.A. Meeting. That's right. And, and, uh, and Alexandra's producer will, uh, who turns out to be Jessica's love interest. I mean, I thought he was the most solid, stable, strong, downright, upright human being. All of a sudden you make him sort of a closet suspect, then a strong suspect of writing these threatening letters of kidnapping or of being a killer, uh, and then there comes a moment when he reveals to Jessica, uh, his life as a child, when you know my God behind that veil, there are real horror stories. Right.

Well, you know, I mean, I'm not going to say that everybody who's in mass media had a horror story in their childhood, but I will tell you, as the father of a television anchor, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you saying that. Oh, yeah, right. Yes, exactly. And my wife at home right now is saying, thank God, thank God. Oh, no, no, no. We've got, we've got, uh, we've got a lot of solid, you know, there's, there's always Jane Polly that was always alive when I was doing research and people talk about, you know, well, this one's father died when she was a kid and that one's mother died and everybody had something and then they said, but there's always Jane Polly, you know, saying that there's always kind of the light at, um, you know, somebody who really just seems to be very normal. Long as you don't know that her husband draws that cartoon strip, yeah, she's very normal and long as you don't know that she and her children and husband live on an island in Melbourne, England, London, yeah, but that's true. So, um, well, let's talk about, let's talk about Leopold, let's talk about the villain in the piece.

I must say though, very quickly that one of the great joys of writing novels is that not only can you take a reader behind the scenes of a medium like TV in this particular book, but after a person puts the book down, you've left them with almost a third medium, meaning they never quite watch TV the same way again. They begin to speculate about the person they're watching on TV, which almost creates a whole another entertainment form. Well, it does, that's right, um, which is fun. Of course, the mystery, the thing you do so well is, uh, trick us. I mean, you trick us again and again and again. I mean, there is one Leopold and there may be two, then there are two, but there's really only one. Uh, it doesn't sound very convoluted, yeah, well, it's not convoluted, but I must say all the way through, it's right, it's right straight up, shoulder high. And it's, I mean, I, well, see, I adore a good mystery.

I mean, I was brought up on the, on the classics, you know, it was Agatha Christie, John Dixon Carr, um, Nile Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, you know, um, Rex Stout in, in this day and age, there's so many wonderful mystery writers, um, that are so good that if I'm writing a mystery and I, I better be interested myself and it also better be kind of clever in a simple way, meaning that, you know, most people read before they go to sleep at night, just the way it is. So, let me, uh, let me spring a surprise, would you read the last sentence on page 39? And then what, and then what, and then what follows on page 140, I think there is a surprise, maybe a surprise in the book for you, page 139, the last sentence on page 139. Uh-oh. And then see what you've done, the last thing that you've done, yeah. At any rate, after the original party date had been postponed, new invitations had been sent out.

Now, look at, look who made the invitations. Oh, Lord of Hand, Lord of Hand, that's what I, I must confess, I was doing a TV show down at Phoenix. And this guy kept staring at me, he said, now you even put yourself as a fictional character in your own book. Well, what it is to explain to your viewers, there is an invitation, it's Alexander Wehran, the anchor woman, Georgia, Georgiana Hamilton, heirs, the actress or lover, and Benedict Fitzallan and co, Jessica's publisher, and the Darren Brooke Broadcasting System, right? Well, the thing is, is that we have a header on the page, every page in the book says, every other page in the book. Lord of Hand, Warmer on the right, says this talk, so when you turn the page, the invitation, the invitation is from Lord of Hand, Warmer, Alexander Wehran, Georgiana Hamilton, heirs, my god, but this man, I thought he was absolutely mad. He kept saying, how could you possibly, you know, he was the fiction, it's been so altered with reality, and I thought, is this man doing drugs off stage, I had no idea what he was

talking about. Now you know. There I am, so he thought I just wrote myself in. Into the invitation, that's right, you don't show up again in the book. I haven't, you told me that, talking just now at least, was I, isn't that weird? Look at them. You know, when I was in the news, I've been this occasionally I would write a story. Oh, no. Occasionally. And, but occasionally I'd write a story with a paragraph that ended with a paragraph that ended with the colon. Uh-huh. The memo included the following colon, and in the composing room, you get it cut off right there. Right. So that's the way the story would end, and you look so bad, and then you run into people say that that day, what came after the colon? Well, what came after the invitation? I mean, they did you, they did you, that is so fun. Um. I wish you could have seen this fellow, he was terribly excited over this, that I would tear right myself in, and I just, you know, you're doing TV, so you just smile, uh-huh. Well, gee, I don't know.

One of the things you do, uh, and I have to ask you about this, you've got this great mystery here. I mean, you've got these letters, and then you've got an investigation that demonstrates, maybe all the letters didn't come from the same person. But all of them have a threatening tone to them. Yes. If you take them in context, uh, you know she's in jeopardy, you know she's in danger. Uh, and then, uh, you have to create, uh, suspects. Uh-huh. Uh, and at one point, there are 34 suspects, including, as I've already said, will. Uh-huh. But I mean, you dredged up poor Eric, she divorced Eric in 1989. Years ago. Now, Eric, uh, we don't even know whether he's in jail to very late. Everybody she's ever known, everybody she's ever had a relationship with, everything. And as you point out, she's been in bed with a lot of people during her alcohol. Let's give her some rest. During her alcoholic years. She was drinking and drugging Eric her former husband was actually a drug dealer. That's right.

And, uh, and he's a suspect. Sure. Because, well, that really came from the sort of research part on stalkers themselves in celebrities. And when you've got a questionable person out there, most people in media make pretty good money. So, there's always the question whether there's somebody out there who's trying to make a dollar office in some way. So whenever money's involved, they'll always go back and look at the people who traditionally have been trying to fleece that particular person. Um, but yeah, everybody's suspect. Everybody was suspect and I can understand in a case of a stalker. Hmm. I must confess, you know, John, when I did this, I, you know, I've been on the talk show circuit for a while. Every time, you know, novel comes out, you go out and try to promote them. And people have told me stalking stories that, you know, people don't like to talk about them publicly because it's very uncomfortable. And then I myself had one. Oh, did you? Two years ago.

Yeah. And what it was basically is this person then showed up on my parent's doorstep because he couldn't find me. He found my parents on Christmas Eve. You know, my mother opens the door and she's like, oh boy, you know, she knew, here's this guy just laden with presence, you know, in those days, looking at his eye, you know, I've come a long way. And my mother, cut, he's probably watching right now when I do now. My mother very wisely just very quickly said, oh, I'm so sorry, Laura's on the West Coast. Meanwhile, I was expected any minute from New York, but you know, and it worked out, but I felt so angry. You got the first plane for the coast. Oh, yeah. Right. Oh, you know, he's he's out there right now. He's going to come see my poor mother again, but down there in Jackson. No, but the thing was, I was just furious because it wasn't me. It's like pick up, pick on me, but don't go see my parents. You know, like this is a low blow, you know, this isn't about them.

And, you know, and so when it strikes home, you know, first you get a little nervous, but then you get angry, you know, at the, at the intrusion. Sure. You know you, because you know, 99.9% of the people you meet on the road and your fans and readers are so wonderful. I mean, being a writer is unlike being a television personality in that. People who read a lot tend to be a lot like myself in ways. You know, we tend to get along, you know. I said she was heroic and Jessica. Yeah. And what I was talking about was she performed in captivity. Once she's kidnapped and put away, once she discovers her man, first of all, she is, she's a, she's a nightly flower and I'm not sure how she got to be so duplicitous. But the way she deals with Leopold, once he reveals himself and once the way she keeps

the hurt man hidden and the way she nurtures the hurt man who has done her harm. Right. And yet he's so vulnerable and he's clearly dying. She, she knows she has to help him. That's what was so fascinating, John, because by picking a character who had let a life, you know, of the prodigal son as it were and come back, you know, she was a sneak drinker alcoholic. She had done a lot of line, a lot of two-faced stuff because she was always in trouble. Well, I was going to ask you whether her ability to deceive Leopold? Comes from a lifetime of deceiving herself until she got honest. And so that's what was fun because I knew that Jessica would not react like a normal person. I mean, a normal person who basically tries to tell the truth as much as they can, yes, who would be saying, why is this person behaving like this? On some level, Jessica identifies with insanity because she herself thinks she was crazy for a number of years.

So she, you know, just trying to almost get into his head and almost detach from her own feelings, you know, of horror, just a function, just to carry it through. Now, I don't know whether I'm right about, this is an estimate. I may be, I may be 290-300 pages in and I've got it all wrapped up. Oh, you do? I mean, you've pretty well let me know what the plot was and who the villain was and one bird after all and he didn't kill and he didn't kidnap and he's not conspiring to do it and he didn't give me the money, it was a secretary of the money, but then after I know, all of a sudden I don't know and there are about another 60, 70 pages in which you give me a new O'Henry ending.

It is almost like a new novel and I wondered when I read it. The answer is yes. I can hear it. I can hear your voice. Go ahead. That was where originally I was going to end the book. That's the very question. That's the very question. And now she read my mind. Well, you know I'm actually a witch, no, no, I have to explain to her. I'm just pretty obvious. Well, no, because my mother keeps saying, you know, darling, if you were like a tablecloth like thing on your head, you'd be on TV all the time. You know, she keeps saying it. Right. Now I just say, I'm a witch, nevermind, I'll have me on. But you know when you're writing a novel, you write for yourself, John, and originally that's where I thought it ended. But once you begin writing, one of the exercises you kind of race along in your first draft because you're trying to get to know the characters and then they kind of take on lives of their own. And then I realized, oh gosh, I was halfway through the first draft and I thought, you know, this one's not what he seems either, neither is this one, and then I realized the book

went on. There was more to this. And in fact, that the reader actually deserved a little trickier ride. Oh, well, the reader gets, I mean, he's on the rollercoaster twice or she is. And the real goal as John is that people have such little time these days to read that if they do spend that time with you, you want them to put down that book and you want them to feel an enormous satisfaction, you know, just that kind of thunk because not always it an ending that appeals to them in its resolution, but things make sense. You don't feel like, you know, something was pulled out of the air. You don't feel like there were no clues given. You don't feel like, I mean, I just hate that sometimes, you know, you pick up a book and I'm reading it and everything's going great and I get to the end, and I just want to throw the thing. I feel so betrayed. Welcome to my world. Yes, exactly. And so when I went on with that next list, because I knew there was more to this, there was a longer ride, a better ride, an action in some ways a more sophisticated ride than

you're run of the mill mystery. When you write, is it hard work? Part of it. Yes, the trying to make it make sense, you know, I usually run through a draft, then I will have the manuscript pages and then I'll do a lot of rewriting and correcting by hand. Then I'll go back. I go usually for drafts. For drafts? Yeah. And it's just some days you just don't feel like you have it in you, you know, you're just talked out, you know, you're in this room alone, you know, and you think, gosh, I really like to go somewhere and have some fun and talk to some real people as opposed to these made up people. I'm sick of sitting in this room for months at a time. And then it's tough, but you just do it. You just show up, you just keep writing and then those days you have to go back and revise a great deal. How many hours a day? In the beginning, it's usually short hours, maybe I'll do two hours actual writing and maybe six hours or eight hours of reading or research or it could be a couple months

in the city or in Los Angeles or somewhere doing actual research. Because the book progresses when I'm halfway through, I should be writing about eight hours a day. By the end of a book, I often, it's about a 16-hour day. It gets very manic, it gets because you almost have to write as an edit and revise as fast as you can because you see the book as a whole for this little brief window of time. So many characters, so many plot, you know, many people write outlines and things. And generally, by the time I finish, it's almost like I have like a godlike view from high above and it's a short window. And you can't go out, you know, on vacation, you can't go, you know, send a PTA meeting. You just can't. You got to just go through. And that's usually like a six to eight week window where I really am dreaming stuff. I don't know what's real. Now, what happens during that six to eight week period when that shaft of divine life is not beaming on you and it just goes out.

Yeah. But sometimes life will happen. Once was finishing a book and someone of my family had a terrible accident, you know, and it pulled me out of my world for a couple of months. And literally, it took me about six months to get back into, it wasn't even the writing. It was getting back into that place in my head. Now, I'm one of those people who believe that readers feel every single thing you feel while you're writing it. So if I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, oh, well, this is my seventh book, I'll be crafty. I can just bang this out, you know, and I read it and I say, gee, it sounds like she thinks she's crafty and she's just going to bang this out, you know, you just cannot let a reader for one minute think, oh, this is make believe, you know, I should be reading something more educational. Now, you want me to pick up a book and get into it and suspend that disbelief and just have them like, this is where I want to be, this is where I want to go, I want to see what's happening, I want to feel it, see it, taste it, experience it, and then when it's

over, they're allowed to go back.