Trigger warning to references to sexual assault.
Before the studio system was broken up by the Supreme Court, film studios would sign actors up to multi-year contracts. Actors under contract would not only be told which films they would appear in but also told which parties to go to, when to go to rehab, and sometimes placed into fictional relationships. Show business wasn’t just what the audience saw on the screen. It continued in the newspapers and magazines and, perhaps especially, in the gossip columns. Edie O’Dare, the protagonist of Lindsay Lynch’s novel Do Tell, is rapidly approaching the end of her seven-year contract and is unlikely to see a renewal. In 1938, there weren’t many legitimate ways for an unconventional woman to make a living.
Do Tell takes us underneath the glamour of Hollywood’s veneer to tell a story of betrayal, strained ethics, and lots of gossip. Actress Edie O’Dare had a brief chance of becoming a success at FWM Studios until the Hays Code put the kibosh on the kinds of risqué movies she was good in. She hung on with supporting roles and supplemented her salary by selling juicy bits of information to the reining queen of gossip. Edie’s chance to reinvent herself as her contract runs out when a scandal lands in her lap in the form of a teenager, freshly arrived in Hollywoods, who accuses one of FWM’s leading men of sexually assaulting her. The girl tells Edie everything. Edie’s bosses very much want to make the scandal go away but Edie sees an opportunity to do something good and benefit herself.
Edie will wrestle to balance doing the right thing or benefiting herself for the rest of the novel because nothing is simple. Not only are the decisions far from simple but everything Edie does intentionally or unintentionally hurts someone. She blows up people’s lives. She knuckles under when pressured. She trades favors. And yet, even though Edie made mistake after mistake on her way to the top of the Hollywood gossip game, Edie hung onto my sympathies because Do Tell‘s close point of view shows us why Edie does what she does. Those studio bosses and newspaper editors absolutely could destroy her and exile her from Hollywood. The other actors at FWM and other studios are all (with one very notable exception) are all playing the same games as Edie. Lynch also keeps us sympathetic to Edie by showing us her regrets in the long years after World War II as the glimmer of Hollywood’s golden age fades away. I very much appreciated this book’s honesty as it portrayed Edie’s growth from opportunitist to powerful gossip columnist. Lynch never lets us forget the cost of Edie’s success.
I don’t want to leave you all with the impression that Do Tell is a noir story. Lynch has Edie rushing around the surreal backlots of FWM and drinking with her peers at glamorous parties. We even get to attend the Oscars with Edie and see Hattie McDaniel win her historic award. (McDaniel was the first African American to be nominated and win an Oscar, for her supporting role in Gone With the Wind.) Edie frequently mentions her costumes and the gowns she wears, which sent me to Wikipedia and Google to look at period photos more than once to get an idea of what Edie might have been wearing. Readers who enjoy reading about old Hollywood will love the rickly detailed settings.