Inside Hollywood

My first novel American Beauties had been published by Bantam in 1980 and both my agent and editor pushed me to write another book about women's struggle for major positions in the male bastion of Hollywood. I was given strict instructions on how to present the protagonist. Besides being extraordinarily beautiful, she had to be both a drug addict and the ultimate bitch everyone loathed who ends up losing everything. This did not sound to me like a salable book but I was in awe of these powerful people and so obeyed. Titled Winners and Losers, it was auctioned with five major houses bidding, won by Penguin, and made the LA Times bestseller list its first week in print. Mace Neufeld, Hollywood's most prominent producer, invited me to lunch and offered me a position with his production company. I often wonder what my life would have been had I accepted. My book was still on the LA Times bestseller list a second week with every bookstore in Los Angeles sold out of copies and begging Penguin to send more. For reasons I'll never understand, Penguin never sent out a single copy and the book died. When a writer recently emailed me she'd just read it, I started to flip through an old copy I had and was horrified by the bilge I'd written, contacted Penguin and got the rights back, then dug into the major task of completely rewriting it. Only novel to prominently feature a black man as the guiding support for the beautiful main character Erin Connolly as she fights Hollywood to produce Oscar winning films.