Book Review: The Big Laugh, a Hollywood novel by John O'Hara (1962)

The simple but elegant cover of The Big Laugh, by John O'Hara, 1962.

John O'Hara at his desk, circa 1960. Can you tell from his sweater vest that he never went to college?

After reading John O’Hara’s short story collection, John O’Hara’s Hollywood earlier this year, I decided to dive into his novel about Hollywood, 1962’s The Big Laugh. O’Hara was one of the most successful American writers of his generation, coming to prominence with his masterpiece of a first novel, Appointment in Samarra, published in 1934. O’Hara remained a best-selling author until his death in 1970. O’Hara is well-known for his superb short stories, and he holds what is probably an unbreakable record for the most short stories published in The New Yorker: 247. 

The Big Laugh is not one of John O’Hara’s major books. It’s well-written, but the narrative isn’t that compelling. Like his short stories about Hollywood from the 1960’s, it is set in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and is heavily dialogue-driven, with a somewhat meandering plot. In 1961 O’Hara published a book of five plays, unimaginatively titled Five Plays, which might help explain his love of dialogue-heavy stories from around this time. Much like Tom Wolfe, O’Hara was an avid chronicler of the social status signifiers of his era. O’Hara would be able to tell you exactly what it said about a man if he wore an Arrow shirt with a Phi Beta Kappa key. Because of his keen eye for telling details and social behavior, I think O’Hara would have excelled at the same sort of non-fiction that Tom Wolfe wrote: profiles of notable people, or examinations of trends in popular culture. But O’Hara remained firmly in the fiction camp, and as far as I know, never dove into long-form non-fiction. O’Hara did have a newspaper column at various times in the 1950’s and 1960’s, in which he held forth on the issues of the day. In a column from 1964, O’Hara expressed his opinion that Martin Luther King Jr. should not have received the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s not a column that anyone will be rushing to reprint anytime soon.

Because so many of O’Hara’s greatest works were written during the 1930’s, it feels a bit sad to read a book like The Big Laugh, which is set thirty years in the past. It’s as though O’Hara knows that the 1930’s were really his decade, and rather than analyze the current state of America, he continues to rush into the past to reexamine the time that he knew the best. It makes O’Hara seem out of touch. Which he probably was, judging from his opinion of Martin Luther King Jr. 

The Big Laugh tells the story of Hubert Ward, a young man drifting through life who happens to discover that he is good at acting, or at least good enough to become a movie star. The novel follows Hubert’s rise to the top of the film industry. Hubert is an unsympathetic character who is often described as a son of a bitch, which seems about right to me. I never really cared if Hubert was successful or not because he’s so unlikable. I don’t need my leading characters to be paragons of virtue, but they need to at least be interesting, and Hubert really isn’t that interesting. Like a glass of champagne, The Big Laugh goes down smoothly, but doesn’t leave much of an aftertaste. 

As I read John O’Hara’s Hollywood, I was intrigued by how O’Hara would use the same characters in different stories. In that book, the actress Doris Arlington appeared in three short stories, and I was glad to find her making an appearance in The Big Laugh as a supporting character. In The Big Laugh she’s given more of a distinct personality, as a savvy, career-driven actress who is a blunt dispenser of truths. She’s more interesting and more likable than Hubert, so maybe O’Hara should have made her the main character of The Big Laugh.

Book Review: John O'Hara's Hollywood, short stories by John O'Hara (2007)

Cover of John O'Hara's Hollywood, 2007.

John O'Hara at work, circa 1960. He's looking you over to figure out which brand of shirt you're wearing and what that says about you.

John O’Hara was one of the most successful American authors of his generation. O’Hara rose to fame during the 1930’s through his short stories in The New Yorker, and from his first two novels, Appointment in Samarra, and BUtterfield 8. O’Hara spent varying amounts of time in Hollywood from 1934 to 1955 as a screenwriter, and his time in California informed the short stories in the 2007 collection John O’Hara’s Hollywood. The book collects all of O’Hara’s 22 stories about Hollywood and the movies. It’s an excellent collection for fans of O’Hara’s writing, but it’s not without its faults. 

Most of O’Hara’s early short stories from the 1930’s and 1940’s were very short, with many being under 1,000 words. O’Hara was a master at creating a mood in just a few words in these super short stories. O’Hara’s stories don’t really have endings that resolve the story; they just suddenly come to a halt. In this way, they capture the rhythm of real life. 

Personally, I found the early short stories in John O’Hara’s Hollywood to be the most interesting. I thought that some of his later stories from the 1960’s were just too long and lacked narrative drive. The longest stories in the book are “Yucca Knolls,” “James Francis and the Star,” and “Natica Jackson,” and those are the three stories I found most disposable. They range from 50-80 pages in length, and they’re overly reliant on dialogue. Not much happens in them, and it seems that the only reason they are so long is just because they could be. O’Hara also seems stuck in the past in these stories, as they re-hash the 1920’s and 1930’s, the decades which he was most comfortable writing about. 

The last piece in the book is one of the most fascinating; it’s a non-fiction piece titled “Hello Hollywood Goodbye,” that O’Hara wrote in 1968 for the magazine Holiday. Unfortunately, the introduction doesn’t mention it at all, so we don’t get much context for this piece. From what I know about O’Hara’s writings, it was fairly unusual for him to write an autobiographical non-fiction essay. 

John O’Hara’s Hollywood was edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the leading scholar of John O’Hara and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bruccoli’s introduction is excellent, but someone in the proof reading department was asleep at the wheel, as the introduction states that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote What Makes Sammy Run? and The Disenchanted, while Budd Schulberg wrote The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, when it’s actually the other way around. 

I noticed some interesting things as I read John O’Hara’s Hollywood, and one of them is that O’Hara really had a thing for fake movie titles with the word “strange” in them. In “The Magical Numbers” the fake biopic of President John Tyler is called Strange President. (p.22) Strange Courage is the movie the actor in “Adventure on the Set” has just finished. (p.27) Strange Virgin is the name of the movie that Kenyon Littlejohn is making a test for in “Drawing Room B,” (p.49), and it’s also the name of the movie, adapted from a novel, being made in “The Industry and the Professor.” (p.62) I wondered if all these fake movies with “strange” in the title was supposed to be an in-joke for movie fans. Were there a lot of movies with “strange” in the title being made in the 1930’s and 1940’s? 

O’Hara might be making some in-jokes as he re-uses some character names in different stories. “The Answer Depends” name checks Sidney Gainsborough, who appears in the first story in the book, “Mr. Sidney Gainsborough: Quality Pictures.” The fictional actress Doris Arlington is mentioned in “The Answer Depends,” “Yucca Knolls,” and “James Francis and the Star.” 

John O’Hara was a very interesting writer. He was clearly gifted with superb and sensitive abilities to capture the way people talked, thought, and felt, but yet in his personal life he had a knack for pissing off nearly everyone he met. Of course, he’s not the only great writer who also had a difficult personality. O’Hara had a keen sense of class and status in America, and he had a large inferiority complex about having never attended college. Ernest Hemingway supposedly once made the joke that he was collecting funds to send O’Hara to Yale. The sad part is, O’Hara might have taken Hemingway up on his offer. Obsessed with Yale life, O’Hara badgered the university to give him an honorary degree. Yale declined, because O’Hara was graceless enough to ask for the degree. O’Hara also made no secret of his desire to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Of course, he never got it. 

O’Hara finally quit drinking in the mid 1950’s, and he became a much more prolific author, publishing 10 novels and 7 short story collections between 1955 and his death in 1970. He became a famous and wealthy author, and he gloried in the social signifiers that his status afforded him, as he drove a Rolls-Royce and an MG convertible with his monogram on the door.

O’Hara still holds the record for the most short stories published in The New Yorker, with an incredible 247! Along with those two other Johns, Cheever and Updike, O’Hara became synonymous with The New Yorker and the sophisticated short stories found between its covers. 

At his best, John O’Hara was a superb chronicler of American life and culture, and John O’Hara’s Hollywood presents some of his best work.