All that glitters is gold for a Tinseltown writer.
The first commandment for authors: Write what you know.
In his fourth book, “The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood,” Matthew Specktor does exactly that. Being a show-business baby — his father remains a top agent and his mother was a one-time screenwriter, blackballed for crossing the picket line during a writers’ strike — Specktor celebrates Hollywood at its most glamorous and powerful apex. Having worked in the industry during the 1990s, he’s professionally equipped to tackle the subject of old-school movie moguls who once made magic.
Specktor opens his book with a prologue recalling his 13-year-old self attending a Sunday afternoon party in the Hollywood Hills with his parents. The party, he writes, is “afloat on … wine and dope.” Most of the guests are writers, directors, actors and actresses. “The mood is riotous, a little unhinged.” When he joins his mother, “She hands me her wineglass, so I can take a robust swallow.” (Pause here to consider Mom giving her underage son alcohol.)
Looking back at that 1979 party, the author sees it as “the golden hour,” when movies reigned at the center of American cultural life. To tell the story of that time — the era of Hollywood’s boom and bust — Specktor, a MacDowell Fellow, uses the techniques of fiction to present a nonfiction story, combining the personal upheaval of his family after his parents’ divorce with the tumultuous revolution in Tinseltown.
He states up front that, to tell this story, he will “occupy the minds of other people,” meaning he won’t attribute previously published material, which might jolt journalists. While roaming free-range through the pastures of others, he declares that he will “use an artist’s privileges” as he melds fact with fiction and jumps from first-person to third-person narration. Caveat emptor: This author is going to color outside the lines.
Shortly before the book was published, Specktor gave an interview in which he described himself as growing up “celebrity-adjacent,” meaning he knew people who knew celebrities. He wrote this “hybrid memoir” with just enough recognizable names to engage readers.
For example, he recounts Marlon Brando calling his father and leaving a long, rambling message on the family’s answering machine. That’s the first and last time Brando’s name surfaces here. Perhaps his overreaching gimmick is understandable, considering the competition from real celebrity memoirs published in the past few years, including Streisand’s “My Name Is Barbra”; “Inside Out” by Demi Moore; “Thicker Than Water” by Kerry Washington; “Finding Me” by Viola Davis; and “Making a Scene” by Constance Wu.
Specktor’s writing chops make this book catnip for anyone interested in old Hollywood, when the studio system ruled supreme and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer boasted “more stars than there are in heaven.” At that time, Lew Wasserman was enthroned at Music Corporation of America, an emperor heralded in Connie Bruck’s 2000 masterpiece “When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence.”
For Specktor, “the golden hour” seems to be when Wasserman was sovereign and young Turks led by the “hubris and ungodly ambition” of Creative Artists Agency’s Michael Ovitz conspired for CAA to topple the MCA monarch. “It’s good to be King,” Specktor writes, echoing Mel Brooks, “but would it be better to be Emperor?”
Here, the author suddenly interrupts narrating the approaching battle to tell readers that he personally identifies with Ovitz, because “this man, who is the conduit through which Hollywood will enter its period of imperial decline, is just like me. He loves art with a ferocity few people can equal.” That ferocity will eventually enable Ovitz to become one of the world’s most renowned art collectors (Picasso, Johns, de Kooning, Newman and Rothko).
Wasserman and Ovitz dominate this book like Iago and Cassio. When Spektor later sees Wasserman, now tottering in his 80s, the author feels “a wild urge to fall at this man’s feet and embrace him” because, to Specktor, Wasserman represents the golden era of Hollywood.
Alongside such idolatry for a mogul who never spoke to him, readers might be unsettled by Specktor’s dismissal of his screenwriting mother, now deceased, as a “professional failure.” Conversely, he lauds his 91-year-old father as a success because he represents a client roster of marquee stars like Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Barbra Streisand, Geoffrey Rush and Helen Mirren.
Shining through this kaleidoscope of false gods and famous names is a short chapter entitled “White Dancing” about a diminutive Black man of towering influence who teaches a graduate fiction workshop that Specktor feels fortunate to have taken years ago. “It is only through him (“Mr. Baldwin: We call him that …”), I am finally able to understand that writing is not some glamour profession, a gin and tonic and a cigarette as you slouch over your typewriter, bitching about the studio’s notes, but a moral one, in which you are tasked with failing again and again and again.”
God bless James Baldwin for trying to save a young man, now 58 years old, still bedazzled by Hollywood.
Georgetown resident Kitty Kelley has written several best-sellers, including “The Family: The Real Story Behind the Bush Dynasty.” Recent books include “Let Freedom Ring: Stanley Tretick’s Iconic Images of the March on Washington.” She serves on the board of BIO (Biographers International Organization) and Washington Independent Review of Books, where this review first appeared.
