COAST TO COAST

Novelist/memoirist Johnson (Perfect Together, 1991, etc.) revisits Century City, Culver City, and New York City in the days when bicoastal travel meant riding The Chief or The Twentieth Century and the movies starred quick-witted women and well-groomed men speaking clever dialogue.

A lot of that dialogue was scripted by Nunnally Johnson, a dominant Hollywood writer/producer as well as the author’s father. So what would it be like, you ask, coming of age in Hollywood’s Golden Age? In glorious black and white, Johnson recalls little Shirley Temple and Roddy McDowell, the pools, the croquet games, the gossip of The Business in the summers with Pop. Winters in New York with Mom involved the Gorgon School with Tony Perkins, Old Golds, cocktail shakers, Peck & Peck, and “coming out”—in a more innocent time when that had nothing to do with your sexual orientation and everything to do with debutante balls. East or West, once the war was over, Johnson endured teenage parties and the rigors of dating. She sailed to Europe on the Queen Mary and flew home into Idlewild. Johnson’s flashback includes friends like frosty Gregory, anorexic Julie, and Don Sweetheart (yes, that’s his real name). The cast includes Betty and Bogey, Smith classmate Sylvia Plath, and colorful stepparents. Her memory piece’s best-drawn portraits are Hollywood Pop, he of three wives and four children, and New York Mom. It’s all terribly dramatic, but why not? Nunnally advised his daughter to think of herself “not as Schrafft’s but as ‘21’,”and so she does. She trots out the grand old motifs of teenage angst, money, and sex—the latter problem temporarily solved when she finally does it. The book ends with Nora’s marriage and the prospect of settlement in an Aramco post in the Arabian desert. It seems more installments are due.

Not John O’Hara, but not Judith Krantz either: girl talk somewhere in between, suitable for YA readers aged 14 to 84 and good company on the red-eye or the beach.