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Sleuths in Love Montage Art, books, diverse creations 22 Open Book 23 Two Centuries of Sound 24 Underground Party 26 Off the Shelf 27 Freeing Speech 30 Solar Sculptor 32 Chapter and Verse Sleuths in Love Screenwriter turned novelist Eric Lerner finds his voice. In Pinkerton’s Secret, play ever again.” author Lerner creates Screenplays, he by CRAIG LAMBERT a romantic backstory for the famous detec- reports, “are enor- tive (above, at left). mously confining: lattened by a cold in 1998, me? She spends two years with him in the story is there, Eric Lerner ’71, then a Hollywood Washington, D.C., while he is away from but there is no voice in a movie. As a writer, I screenwriter, picked up a biogra- his family. He is at her bedside when she missed my own voice. I always loved the phy of Allan Pinkerton, founder of dies, and she is buried next to him. Rumors?” voice in a novel, the storyteller.” the first detective agency in the Within two days, Lerner was proposing So Lerner decided to “clear the decks, FUnited States. Three men were already a movie about Pinkerton and Warne to a close the blinds, and start writing a working for Pinkerton in Chicago in 1856 studio. “They bought it on a phone pitch,” novel.” He took the Pinkerton material, when he hired Kate Warne as perhaps the he says. He got paid to write the screenplay, did prodigious historical research—rang- first-ever female private eye. “The biogra- but, in one of Hollywood’s familiar pat- ing from Warne’s logbooks to details of pher dismissed rumors of a romantic rela- terns, “Before I finished the first draft, Abraham Lincoln’s childhood—and wrote tionship between Warne and Pinkerton,” everyone was fired. It sat in a drawer for Pinkerton’s Secret, his first novel, published says Lerner. “I literally dropped the book seven years before the rights reverted to me. by Henry Holt this spring. It’s styled as a and laughed out loud—are you kidding By that time I didn’t want to write a screen- memoir by Pinkerton, set in the period Portrait by Jim Harrison Harvard Magazine 21 Archival photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress MONTAGE around the Civil War, and narrates the de- A memoir can break tective’s work with the Underground OPEN BOOK your heart. An exquis- Railroad and John Brown’s radical anti- itely detailed new exam- slavery crusade. At the heart of the story is ple of the genre, The the clandestine love a≠air between A Scatter of Crowd Sounds Happy: A Pinkerton, a married family man, and Story of Love, Madness, Warne; in one climactic moment, the de- Acorns and Baseball (Pantheon, tective-lovers save Abraham Lincoln’s life. $24.95), by Nicholas Lerner has always loved history, and all Dawidoff ’85, describes a childhood of privation shadowed by his parents’ divorce the major events in his story are histori- and his father’s mental illness.The spare opening chapter sets the scene. cally accurate. But the narrator’s voice in Pinkerton’s Secret did not immediately de- grew up in a city of dying elms called familiar swelling murmur of onrushing clare itself. After drafting a few chapters the Elm City, on a street with no wil- rubber—it was like nearing a riverbank of a third-person narrative, “I looked at Ilows named Willow Street. Uncele- through parted woods—and…the night the stu≠ and said, ‘You’re writing a brated trees shaded our part of the detonated in a cry of brakes and tremen- screenplay—there’s no voice,’” Lerner road, sturdy oaks and mature maples, dous thudding impact.…I’d tug the blan- says. Shortly thereafter, one night at 3 their branches so thick with leaves that kets over my face as my bedroom filled a.m., he “sat bolt upright in bed and heard they created a blind curve just before with the hiss of punctured radiators and this voice, Pinkerton’s voice, speaking as an the intersection where the street revolving flashes of hot red light.…My older man; late in his career, he su≠ered a straightened past our house and made room felt remote, bigger than usual, and stroke and was paralyzed. ‘Most people its hard line for the highway. Cars trav- every shadow playing along the ceiling think being paralyzed doesn’t hurt be- eled at a clip down Willow Street, espe- terrified me. By morning, when I went cause when they stick pins in you, you cially at night, and because of the curve it outside for a look, all remnants of the ac- can’t feel anything,’ the voice said. ‘But as was impossible to see them until they’d cident would have been swept away so I’ve made abundantly clear, most people nearly reached the streetlight glowing that I might have doubted that anything are goddamn morons.’ Pinkerton was a out beyond my bedroom window. Yet had truly happened were it not for the combative lunatic. He kept talking to me: lying awake under the covers I could chips of headlight glass or the laciniated the voice didn’t go away. Once I let him tell hear those cars coming, and never more chunk of engine grille that I’d find in the the story, it started rolling.” distinctly than on rainy fall evenings gutter with the acorns. Holt editor Jack Macrae III ’54 (“One of when the wind had blown a scatter of But before any of those investigations, the few guys left in publishing who consid- acorns across the pavement. I’d be there were hours of the night still to go, ers himself a real text editor,” Lerner says) tensed against my pillow, listening to the and as I tried to calm myself with less up- pushed the author through multiple drafts. whoosh of tires closing fast over wet as- setting thoughts, invariably my mind “I felt like I was writing with invisible ink phalt, and then, an instant later, a brief, turned to my favorite baseball team, the when I worked in Hollywood, because be- vivid flurry of noise, the rapid, popping Boston Red Sox. There in the dark I eval- fore the words were dry on the page they eruptions of a dozen flattened acorns, uated the feats and virtues of the players would be changed—by me, at the request before the whoosh I liked best. This was and direction of others,” Lerner says. receded into trace- the early and mid- “When I moved to novels, I hoped to live less silence as some- 1970s…. We had no much more fully in an imaginative realm of one else hurried out television, did not my own, where I could plummet to a depth of town. Long be- subscribe to the that I knew existed. Ironically, my manu- fore I knew that I newspaper, and my script wound up in the hands of the first came from a place bedtime was not long genuine editor I had ever met, and it was my people wanted to after the evening Hollywood training that enabled me to leave, I saw how broadcasts of games work so closely with him.” eager they were to began on the radio, Today, Lerner views his two decades in get away. so I knew very little screenwriting as a detour of sorts, albeit a Every so often a about the Red Sox.… lucrative one, from his original literary call- car wouldn’t make it Yet my desire for fa- ing. At 16 he was writing fiction and plays to the highway. From miliarity with them in high school in White Plains, New York, my bed I’d hear the was intense, and I ar- and as a Harvard freshman, he saw one of Nicholas Dawidoff, rived at strong im- his dramas produced in the Loeb Experi- in uniform here with pressions, most of mental Theatre. Academically, he changed bat at the ready at which placed pecu- his concentration from History and Litera- the age of 11, des- liar emphasis on the ture to Sanskrit and Indian studies follow- cribes his devotion COURTESY OF NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF to the Red Sox in a players’ own boy- ing a year of travel in India, Burma, and new memoir. hoods. Nepal; after graduation, he spent several more years traveling and living in Buddhist 22 May - June 2008 MONTAGE monasteries in Asia and Some researchers suggest Mel Gibson. Yet, as Lerner notes, “I spent America: his 1976 book, that the figure standing the next decade trying to explain to peo- Jour- behind Pinkerton in this ney of Insight Meditation, de- image is Kate Warne. ple what I wrote, and what was dumped scribes these experiences. on top of what I wrote. Maybe my time in In 1978, he moved to the covered that I was in the monastery helped me develop the Mount Baldy Zen Center, possession of the key cast-iron stomach to deal with working located 8,000 feet above sea piece of currency for a conditions in Hollywood. Walking bare- level on Mount San Anto- Hollywood screen- foot through snow at three in the morn- nio in the San Gabriel writer: the ability to ing was nothing compared to a story Mountains outside Los An- quickly imagine a full- meeting at Paramount.” geles. “It was as rigorous as blown story with a Today, Lerner says he’s quite content you could get in the United beginning, middle, with the semi-solitary working routine of States, like a nineteenth- and end,” he says.
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