Chocolates for Breakfast (21 page)

 

 

 

P. S.
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About the author

Looking Back on Pamela Moore

by Robert Nedelkoff

An earlier version of this article appeared in the
Baffler
magazine in 1997

 

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1956, the hottest thing going in American (as well as western European) fiction was the slim oeuvre of a twenty-one-year-old Frenchwoman named Françoise Sagan. Her first book,
Bonjour Tristesse
, written at the age of eighteen, had caused a sensation in her native land in 1954 and had soon been translated into English, subsequently rocketing up the American and British bestseller lists the next year and settling in at number one. The title became such a catchphrase that not even Hollywood could bring itself to change the title of the 1958 film version, starring Jean Seberg, to
Hello Sorrow
.

It fell to Rinehart and Company, the publisher of Norman Mailer's first two books, to find the American Sagan. She turned out to be an obligatory adolescent—her book, in fact, was released three weeks before her nineteenth birthday. She was precocious in other ways as well, having begun college a month shy of sixteen and starting her senior year when her book came out. Her academic majors, rather than the expected English or creative writing, were ancient and medieval history (with an emphasis on military history) and, for her minors, Roman law and Greek—with straight A's. She had acted in summer stock and, as the daughter of a magazine editor, could be expected to handle publicity with aplomb. Her alma mater, Barnard College, struck just the right note of cutting-edge elitism. Best of all, her book was set in the world of the rich, spoiled haute monde—what had been called “café society” in the 1930s and had only just acquired the handle “jet set.” Her name was Pamela Moore, and her book was
Chocolates for Breakfast
.

Pamela was born on September 22, 1937, in New York, the daughter of two writers. Her parents, expressing what may have been an only partially facetious disappointment in the fact that the child was a girl, sent out a notice that read, “We wanted an editor, but we got a novelist.” Her father, Don Moore, was thirty-two at the time. He was the son of an Iowa newspaper publisher; in 1925, he had graduated second in his class at Dartmouth College. In the late 1920s, he edited Edgar Rice Burroughs and other pulp writers at
Argosy All-Story Weekly
, then signed on with Hearst's King Features Syndicate as writer for a new comic strip drawn by Alex Raymond (who'd just finished doing a G-man strip written by Dashiell Hammett). The strip was
Flash Gordon
, and Moore wrote it, as well as
Jungle Jim
, until 1954, occasionally making trips to Hollywood to work on the serial versions of the two strips.

Sometime in the 1930s, Don Moore married a young woman named Isabel Walsh. She already had a daughter, Elaine, who took her stepfather's name. Isabel was a writer as well, specializing in sensationalist stories and advice-filled articles for women's magazines, among them
Redbook
and
Cosmopolitan
. She also wrote three novels in the early 1940s for Rinehart, her daughter's future publisher, with titles like
The Other Woman
and
I'll Never Let You Go
. Just after World War II, Don and Isabel Moore split up. (In later years, Isabel devoted herself to supervising the show-horse riding career of her daughter Elaine, who won a number of championships in the 1940s before retiring to raise a family and run a horse farm in Cooperstown, New York.) Pamela shuttled back and forth between parents during this time: her mother's, in New York, where Isabel edited
Photoplay
for some years; her father's, mostly in Hollywood, where he supplemented his King Features earnings by working as a story editor for RKO and Warner Bros. Both of Pamela's parents moved in a world defined by columnists: Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen on one coast, and Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons on the other. It was a world where childhood had to be cultivated like an orchid in a greenhouse, if it were to happen at all. For Pamela Moore the situation was a tragic one: childhood succeeded maturity rather than preceding it. One of the most poignant aspects of her first novel is the curious perspective of age with which the narrator describes her protagonist: “Years later, when Courtney heard that music . . .” or “As a grown woman, Courtney would realize . . .” When Pamela wrote these words she was seventeen; the character ages from fifteen to sixteen in the course of the book. Through the fictive and narrative personas of
Chocolates
, its author essentially pleads, over and over:
I don't understand how one endures these things now, but someday, when I'm older and wiser . . .

 

Rinehart, as noted, snapped up
Chocolates for Breakfast
and, following a careful publicity campaign, unleashed it on the world in September 1956. It attracted attention at once, and no wonder: The first chapter depicts Janet Parker, heroine Courtney Farrell's best friend, “lying with her clothes off” (as the book's second paragraph pointedly informs the reader) in their prep-school dorm, while arguing over whether Courtney is stumbling into a lesbian relationship with her English teacher. Before many pages have passed, Courtney is attempting to lose her virginity to a pretty-boy acquaintance of her fading movie-star mother at the Garden of Allah in Hollywood—the onetime home of F. Scott Fitzgerald, as the author notes. True, Pamela does prudently postpone the deflowering until Courtney has safely reached sixteen, but the book's impact was still enormous, given the moral climate of 1956.

“[N]ot very long ago, it would have been regarded as shocking to find girls in their teens
reading
the kind of books they're now writing,” observed Robert Clurman in the
New York Times Book Review
's literary-news column—and that was before publication.
Newsweek
's reviewer presciently observed: “[Moore] may well be also a part of a trend among publishers to start a new cycle of youth problem novels, as told by the young—a kind of literary parallel to the more overt delinquencies of the switch-blade hoodlums.”

The novel went through two printings before publication and scraped onto the bottom of some hardcover bestseller lists for a few weeks in September and October 1956. The comparisons to Françoise Sagan continued, though William Hogan of the
San Francisco Chronicle
noted that the book “dabbles in sex, if not so blatantly” as the French writer's. He also remarked: “It would appear that Miss Moore had hoped . . . to become the female J. D. Salinger.” This was one of the very first instances of a comparison made countless times since for a number of writers.

In the weeks prior to the appearance of her book, Pamela had, in fortuitously Salingerian fashion, traveled to Paris for her senior year of study and made herself unavailable for interviews with the American press. Instead, she busied herself studying the strategy and tactics of European warfare in a tour of battlefields, which struck the journalists of that time as an entertaining eccentricity in a young woman. But after publication, she juggled her studies with being, in her words, “caught between the American public and journalists who wanted to know about my love life, and my college friends studying creative writing who condemned me as ‘commercial.' ”

Publishers were deluged by manuscripts by young women seeking to imitate her, as she had been thought to be imitating Sagan (though Fitzgerald's
This Side of Paradise
was more likely the model she had in mind). Even in the 1980s, she was as much a star as her best-known counterparts. And all over the country young mothers and fathers began naming their daughters Courtney. (It seems worthwhile to note here that Pamela Moore's one permanent contribution to American culture was in the area of nomenclature. In all the baby-name books published before 1960 that I've seen, Courtney appears exclusively as a male name of French or Norman origin; prior to 1956, it was a common Christian name for men in England and the southern United States. But every female Courtney that this writer has known or heard of, in fact, was born in 1958 or afterward—that is, during or immediately after the period that
Chocolates
began to sell in paperback. In high school and college I encountered a number of Courtneys born between 1958 and 1960; thereafter, for four years—a time when the book was out of print—the name seemed to drop off in frequency, then reappeared, with a vengeance, in 1964 when a new printing of
Chocolates
arrived. The name has maintained its popularity since then, as Courteney Cox, Kourtney Kardashian, and Courtney Love can all attest. In fact, Courtney Love has stated in interviews that her mother named her specifically after the heroine of
Chocolates
, and that she read the book while staying in the same room as Courtney Farrell had at the Garden of Allah.
The Guinness Book of Names
includes a survey showing that through the 1990s Courtney has consistently ranked among the twenty names most frequently given to female infants in America.)

Pamela Moore was still in Paris (“to find my identity,” she later wrote in her
Contemporary Authors
entry) when Bantam issued
Chocolates
in paperback in July 1957. That edition sold nearly six hundred thousand copies by the end of the year and, had Pamela returned to America at that point, might have consolidated her celebrity. Another thing that might have completed her fame would have been a movie version of the book, but no such film was made, perhaps because the studio moguls were wary of her unsentimental view of Hollywood. Pamela's reasons for going to Europe were clear: like the heroine of her book, she wanted to be taken seriously, not only as a writer but as a person. In Europe,
Chocolates
not only made the bestseller lists but was favorably reviewed in both Italy and France, whose pundits warmed unexpectedly to a novel in which Pamela had added scathing attacks on American society. In America, the public wanted to know about Pamela's boyfriends and eating habits; “in Paris,” she observed, “they wanted to know my politics and metaphysics.”

Her timing was fortuitous; the first stirrings of the Beat movement—in the form of “Howl,”
On the Road
, and contraband chapters of
Naked Lunch
—were already before the public, and the “alternative” culture that continues to beguile aging columnists and sell running shoes was in its nascent stages. In Europe, where all subsequent translations of her book were based on the French
nouvelle édition
, Pamela Moore was perceived as part of this culture. She spent 1957 and the first months of 1958 explaining herself in the press and on radio and television in France and Italy. She was even listed in a multivolume literary encyclopedia published by the prestigious Milan house Mondadori in 1961. The entry includes a photograph of her posing in a coffeehouse that was probably in Paris but could have just as easily passed for Greenwich Village, complete with guitarist, mazes of cigarette smoke, flattened paperbacks, and black-clad denizens.

In the spring of 1958 she returned to America. But she was not interested in resuming her career as a celebrity. She got married instead. Her husband, Adam Kanarek, was of Polish-Jewish origin and had very little in common with the residents of Beverly Hills, the Westchester horse set, or the habitués of the 21 Club and the Stork Club. The couple settled down in New York, where he enrolled in law school.

By early 1959, Pamela, with her husband's encouragement, had resumed writing. She completed her second novel quickly; the use of a diary in the book's final pages suggests one source for her facility as a stylist. It was submitted to American publishers and rejected—unsurprisingly, since in terms of theme, style, and characterization, it was very different from
Chocolates
, and none but the most understanding publisher or editor is keen on such a step from a writer, especially when the earlier book has been the bonanza that Pamela's was. Instead, it was issued by her French publisher, Julliard, as
Les Pigeons de Saint Marc
in 1960 to favorable reviews. Similarly her third book,
East Side Story
, was issued by the London-based publisher Longmans in 1961; however, the book received a one-paragraph notice in the
Times Literary Supplement
and scarce notice elsewhere.

Still, she was a writer, so she kept on writing. In 1962,
L'Exil de Suzy-Coeur
appeared, only in France, and she traveled there with her husband and gave some interviews to
Paris Match
and
Le Figaro Littéraire
. Soon after this came what must have been hopeful news: Simon and Schuster accepted her fifth book,
The Horsy Set
. At the very end of the year she became pregnant. Things were going well, and given that Pamela Moore appears to have been suffering from bipolar disorder (her description of Courtney Farrell's mood swings in
Chocolates
is precise enough that a psychiatrist reading the book today might find it difficult to refrain from a long-distance diagnosis), it would have been preferable for things to stay that way, given the absence of meaningful therapy for such a condition in that era.

But things did not continue to go well.
The Horsy Set
, a story set in the wealthy, decadent world of show-horse racing in which her sister was such a prominent figure, received no notice in the
New York Times
, nor in any of the major news magazines or literary and cultural weeklies. What few reviews it received appeared in daily papers in those cities on the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines where show horses were big news, presumably to let the locals know that they might figure as characters in a book. Hardcover sales were minimal. Dell issued a paperback edition at the end of 1963, in what must have been a large printing—it shows up in secondhand stores about as often as
Chocolates
. But that one printing remained in stock for nearly five years. (Also in 1963, Doubleday reprinted it, bound with a war novel by another writer, as part of a book-club series called Stories for Men.) Pamela's bid for recognition as a serious writer had failed utterly; the publication of her fourth novel as
The Exile of Suzy-Q
in April 1964 by the second-rate house Paperback Library served only to underline this fact. The birth of a son, Kevin, and her husband's admission to the bar were all the compensation for this misfortune that she received.