Meg Waite Clayton’s riveting ninth novel, Typewriter Beach, shifts from the European settings she has created for earlier novels like The Postmistress of Paris, The Last Train to London, Beautiful Exiles, and The Race for Paris, to Hollywood at the height of the blacklist era, and the enchanting seaside village of Carmel-by-the-Sea. Why the change? 

“This novel that has (I hope) an ending that leaves you laughing and crying at the same time came out of a weird combination of my fascination with Hollywood in the 1950s—stars like Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor all making their way under the studio system that gave men so much control over their lives, and in the shadow of the blacklist—and my own grief,” the author explains.

I first put pen to page for Typewriter Beach in my weekly writing time with the ‘JEMS’ (Jenn, Ellie, Meg, and Sheryl)—on Friday, February 11, 2022—eight months after my dad died and three weeks before we lost Mom. I’d stalled on a new novel, and to be honest my writing that winter except for that hour with friends was mostly as executor of Dad’s estate. So I told my friends I was going to set my novel-in-progress aside and try to get a few words on the page for a novel about the blacklist I’d long been fascinated by. Leo, a blacklisted writer with Dad’s middle name, splashed onto my page and offered me a glass of Dad’s scotch. It was 9 a.m. and I hate scotch, but hey, it was a fictional drink, so I downed it. Gemma—that comes from my name backwards. Her mom’s legs are my mom’s, as is the typewriter Leo was sitting at. Typewriter Beach isn’t our story, except that it comes from the shreds of my heart, and is full of gobs of my parents’ love.

Our email conversation spanned California from Carmel to Sonoma County. 

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Jane Ciabattari: Has your sense of its timeliness changed since you started writing?

Meg Waite Clayton: My sense of its timeliness has absolutely changed. I knew its exploration of the particular challenges women face would be timely; sadly, I wonder if that will ever cease to be. The silencing of voices through government intimidation and prosecution—the timeliness of that is a surprise even to me.

JC: How long did you work on this novel? Did it shift shapes or forms as you wrote it? 

MWC: I’ve been researching this one in some sense my whole life, or at least since I was old enough to watch old Hitchcock films with my mom. The actual writing of Typewriter Beach took three tough years during which, in addition to handling my parents’ complicated estates and dealing with my grief, I saw my husband through cancer treatment. Never mind the pandemic, and all the chaos in the country and the world. It feels like a bit of a miracle to have it actually be on bookstore shelves.

JC: I’m curious to know where you got this title? Was it your first choice? 

MWC: The title was given to me long years ago by my friend Laird Koenig, who has since passed away. I like the contradiction—these two things that don’t go together. And I love typewriters and I love the beach here in Carmel. It’s all dramatic rock formations and white sand. Rarely warm enough to swim. Often shrouded in a fog that makes it mysterious.

So much of history looks different in hindsight, yet my characters don’t have the benefit of what is going to happen.

JC: In the novel you toggle between 1957, when Isabella Giori, aka Iz, who has just started a seven-year studio contract, auditions for Alfred Hitchcock, and shortly thereafter is taken by a studio “fixer” to a secret Carmel-by-the-Sea cottage where she meets Leo Chazan, and 2018, when young screenwriter Gemma Chazan is in Carmel to sort through her late grandfather’s possessions and sell his cottage, and discovers secrets that reach back into Leo’s past. She also gets involved with Sam, a video game designer. How did you decide to structure the novel with these time shifts? 

MWC: I’d had in mind a story set in 1957, but the first words on the page were Gemma cleaning out her grandfather’s cottage. Sometimes that’s just a way into a story I strip out later. But Iz would never own up to her past if not confronted with it, and Leo would never make her do so. And Leo had secrets to keep too. If I left the story in their hands, it would still be hidden in that safe in Leo’s closet. 

Through Gemma’s and Sam’s story (with Nyx, Sam’s golden retriever puppy) I could also more easily explore contemporary Carmel-by-the-Sea as well—and contemporary Hollywood and the #MeToo movement.

JC: Your 1957 narrative is set ten years after the Hollywood Ten were imprisoned for refusing to tell Congress’s House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, headed by junior Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, what political party they favored, as part of his campaign to root out “communists and homosexuals.” During this period Hollywood has aligned with McCarthy’s agenda, with loyalty oaths, secret testimonies and hearings in which studio directors, writers and actors “name names” or face the end of their careers. What sort of research was involved in writing about Iz and about the neighbor she befriends in Carmel, Leo Chazan, a blacklisted screenwriter who has found a way to stay in business by writing scripts under the names of other writers, some even being nominated for Oscars, for a tiny percentage of what he would have been paid had there been no blacklist? 

MWC: For starters, this novel was also a great excuse to watch movies in the afternoon and call it “work”! I watched ones written by blacklisted writers—like “Roman Holiday”—and every Hitchcock movie I could get my hands on, as well as every Grace Kelly film! When I could find them, I often watched with a copy of the screenplay in hand.

One of the things I love most about writing is the opportunity it provides to explore what fascinate me. And so much of history looks different in hindsight, yet my characters don’t have the benefit of what is going to happen. So I pay close attention to the contemporaneous reporting, and to personal narratives.

I knew a lot about the blacklist before I starting imagining Typewriter Beach. Still, I started with a documentary, “Hollywood on Trial,” and Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time. Stanley Dyrector’s the books Shedding Light on the Hollywood Blacklist: Conversations with Participants was terrific; the stories people tell him are so personal, and it is those personal details that allow me to make fiction feel real.

JC: Another narrative thread traces the steps in which studio actresses are able to avoid career-ending circumstances and gossip. What were your best sources for this element of the novel?

MWC: I watched documentaries and read biography after biography of 1950s actresses: Grace Kelly. Audrey Hepburn. Marilyn Monroe. Ingrid Bergman. Elizabeth Taylor. (Do they make movie stars like that anymore?) So much of what I learned surprised me. I didn’t know, for example, that there was such a thing as plastic surgery back then, much less that the Hollywood contracts often had provisions allowing them to require actors have work done. There was also a book titled The Fixers by E. J. Fleming about Eddie Mannix and the MGM publicity machine. And Jeanine Basinger has written books on the treatment of women in Hollywood that were very helpful.

JC: Your back story about Leo Chazan involves a complicated story of a young man who faces multiple challenges on the way to success, only to be blacklisted. Did you have real-life models for this character? 

MWC:What I did for Leo—and Iz too—is absorb everything I could learn in terms of what real actors and writers of the time experienced, and then set it aside and write.

For the character of Leo, those experiences I researched inform how he moves through his world. But Leo is at his core my dad. He has my dad’s big, generous heart. He cares for Iz like my dad cared for so many people. 

Gemma is who she is because Leo was always there for her, encouraging and applauding her, helping her believe in herself. She’s never had a father, so he’s her dad. And that was the way my dad was. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for me. I was so lucky to have him in my life for so many years, and I will carry him inside me forever, the way Gemma carries Leo.

JC: How long have you lived in Carmel? You capture the setting so well—Hidden Beach, China Cove, Carmel Point, Tor House, Hawk Tower Robinson Jeffers’ tower, Memory Bench (is the journal there where passersby write their responses to each other real?). How were you able to weave the fictional into the real? 

MWC: Memory Bench is real! (Although I don’t think anyone but Mac and I call it that.) The journals are real. I write in them sometimes myself. It’s incredibly moving. There is something about writing something down anonymously in a journal that…I don’t know…allows you to let go of it, or begin to let go, or imagine you can. And the view there, to Carmel Point in one direction and Point Lobos in the other—where they really did film scenes from Hitchcock’s Rebecca—is never less than amazing, even when it is so foggy you can barely see your own hands.

We moved here in the first months of the pandemic, when I couldn’t get to, say, Paris, to check out whatever particulars I needed to know to set a novel anywhere else. So I just explored Carmel, which was so much fun.

I do spend my days stepping in to other people’s shoes as a writer….But I shape those lives with my words, and in some sense every one of them is part me.

Lucky for me, the Carmel Pine Cone, our local paper, is archived online going back forever. The columns Iz reads really did run in the paper, which is full of news like the fact that Bing Crosby was back from wherever he’d been, or Mrs. So-and-So has a new telephone in Big Sur so you can call ahead to make sure she will be home when you visit. And the ads! Whenever I get annoyed at ads now, I remind myself that they will be a great source for future historical fiction novelists.

JC: What was the most complicated part about portraying Hollywood in these two eras, with the studio system, the scandals and political statements (Ingrid Bergman became pregnant with director Roberto Rossellini’s’s child when they were both married to others, leading to a brutal scandal; Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller and others resisting HUAC), Iz having trouble landing roles as she grows out of her twenties. 

MWC: I suppose the hardest part for me was imagining Iz when she was young, because she longs to be something I would never want to be. I don’t like cameras on me; I like to be looking through them from the other side. I do spend my days stepping in to other people’s shoes as a writer, like she would do as an actor. But I shape those lives with my words, and in some sense every one of them is part me. A life where every single thing you do is public, or might become public and scrutinized…ugh. I am too private to enjoy that. But she’s Iz.

JC: What are you working on now/next? 

MWC: I’ve become too superstitious to give any kind of straightforward answer to this question. After The Wednesday Sisters was a lovely success, I kept saying my next would be a novel based on the real experiences of the female journalists who covered the liberation of Paris in WWII. But it was only after I stopped talking about that book being next that it was published as my fifth novel, The Race for Paris, three books later. 

So even my editor isn’t sure which of a few ideas I’ve kicked around with her will be next.

Maybe it will be based in London. Or Paris. Or again in Carmel-by-the-Sea. I’ll be surprised if it’s not historical or dual timeline. I’m in a bit of a 1960s phase right now. That was the era The Wednesday Sisters explores, although somehow that was marketed as contemporary fiction. But there was so much chaos and change then—a lot to explore.

For me, the first draft is always daunting. And this next one…as someone pointed out to me recently, the next one will be double digits: #10! And each book has its own path and each its own challenges. There are a lot of long walks and journaling and scratched out words between me and whatever is next. Maybe some travel. Certainly lots of reading to be inspired.

Honestly, when I started writing, I would have sold my soul to have a first novel, much less a ninth, with books published all over the world, reaching people I would not know how to say hello to in their language. I so appreciate all the hard work that has gone in to that: by my publishing teams and booksellers, librarians, reviewers and others all over the world—and especially by readers. That is how most of us decide what to pull off a bookstore or library shelf next: by one friend telling another “You have to read this.” So I hope everyone reading this interview will read Typewriter Beach and, when they’ve finished it, hand it to a friend.

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Typewriter Beach by Meg Waite Clayton is available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.