The same critical scorn that deemed the work of us paperback writers unworthy of attention had also seemed to guarantee us privacy, the chance to explore and experiment, to say the unsayable, and to fade away peacefully from the publishing scene when the paperbacks finished their popular run. But some of us didn’t fade. After all these years, it is a rare blessing to have the public’s attention and support, but a mixed blessing all the same, just because of the disconcerting attention. There are times when I wish I had done enough living back then, when I was doing so much writing, to justify my grand generalizations, my cocksure assertions, my pronouncements on life and love. I was awfully damn young. But maybe it’s just as well that I didn’t have the advantage of maturity to temper Beebo’s outbursts and Laura’s emotional extremes. After all, that’s how it feels and goes down when you’re young.
So here are Beebo and Laura meeting for the first time. Where did the characters come from? The idea for Laura was based on my friendship with a sorority sister during my undergraduate days. She was two years younger than I and had many of the personality traits that make Laura both lovable and exasperating: shyness, lack of self-confidence, and hypersensitivity, but also warmth, sweetness of character, and, once she trusted you, a staunch friendship. She was slightly taller than average, with bright Scandinavian blonde hair and an engaging smile. After we got to be friends, she confided in me about her troubles with her tough-minded and abrupt father, who sounded to me like a man insensitive in reverse proportion to his daughter’s delicacy of feeling. The days when his letters arrived were downers for her, and they gave me a sort of scaffolding on which to embroider stories about her interior life. I recognized in “Laura” some of my own shaky sense of self. But unlike me, she rarely dated, seeming content to stay home most weekends and to shine academically. Whether or not she felt stirrings of romantic affection for women, I will never know, although I have my sympathetic suspicions. But I remember her as a sweetheart, with a shy warmth, and a prettiness and appeal she didn’t recognize in herself.
Beebo was another story. She was my own unrealized romantic phantom. There was another college friend, it is only fair to concede, who gave me the physical prototype. She was taller than the rest of us and strikingly handsome, with a crop of wavy, dark-blonde hair and an irresistible smile. Her nickname was one of those too-cute tomboy variations on a boy’s name. She hated it and made us promise never to use it, but her formal name didn’t seem to suit her. I remember running into her in the dorm bathroom—one of those gray marble affairs with rows of icy washbowls and green toilet stalls—in her skivvies, and trying not to admire her unduly. I think I made her a little squirmy, and she did seem to be in love with her serious beau, whom she married upon graduation. Well, we win a few and lose a few.
Actually, I didn’t quite know in that early period in my life which glamorous options to hang on the bare architecture of my fantasy hero. I just thought she needed to look like “Tommie” and to have the “heart and stomach of a king,” to quote Elizabeth I. It took me a few trips to Greenwich Village, and the reading of some of the then-current pulp paperbacks, to begin to recognize the qualities she required and to flesh them out. By that time, I was into the planning for this book and ruminating hard about my characters.
And so we come back to the roof of that Upper West Side apartment, looking down on the lights of the city. One night, staring across the twinkling horizon and seeing the character in my mind’s eye, I thought for the thousandth time, “If I could just find a name for her, she would come into focus for me.” For whatever blessed reason, it was at that moment that the childhood nickname of an old friend floated back into my mind: Beebo. I seized upon it and captured my Beebo whole, intact, entire. Never again was I the same, once Beebo began to breathe. The Beebo Brinker Chronicles were off and running, and so was their author. Thus it was that Beebo met Laura, and they began their passionate but rocky odyssey.
There is one other character whose genesis deserves attention for a moment. He is Jack Mann, that cynical, witty, sometimes prickly, but quite lovable gay man who makes his initial bow in this novel. He is shamelessly plucked, right down to his hair and fingernails, from an old hometown friend whom I met through my first serious beau—a “Jack,” too, but with a different last name. The original Jack, probably five or six years older than I, loved traditional jazz, and in my family, it was played a lot. My stepfather was a superb jazz piano player, and my mother, a one-woman cheering section. The rest of us were young, feisty, and crazy about the music, which was undergoing a revival of interest in the ’40s and ’50s. We worshiped Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, Sidney Bechet, Muggsy Spanier, and many less well known but excellent musicians playing in the genre. A lot of them came through the Chicago area, where we lived, and our informal weekend jam sessions became well enough recognized to draw some of them out to our suburban bungalow on an occasional Saturday night. We hosted Lil Hardin Armstrong (Louis’s first wife and a great jazz pianist herself), Johnny and Baby Dodds (clarinet and drum players par excellence), and others. Jack just gobbled it up.
