Book Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a novel by Quentin Tarantino (2021)

 

The paperback cover of Quentin Tarantino's novel Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, 2021. I love that it's supposed to look like a 1970's paperback.

Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a bonanza for those of us, like myself, who are mildly obsessed with mid-century American pop culture. There have been rumors that Tarantino filmed way more footage than could have fit into a theatrically released motion picture, even with Hollywood running 2 hours and 40 minutes. The first evidence of that comes with the release of Tarantino’s novel of the same title, which greatly expands the story that the movie shows us.

The novel Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tells us way more about the lives of actor Rick Dalton and his stuntman and gofer, Cliff Booth. (Played in the movie by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, respectively.) We also get additional chapters focusing on Sharon Tate, Charles Manson, and the backstory behind Lancer, the TV pilot that Rick Dalton films during the movie. Personally, I found Rick to be a more compelling character than Cliff, in both the novel and the movie. In the movie, I’m pretty sure the only direction Tarantino had to give Brad Pitt was “Look cool in this scene.” Cause that’s all Cliff does. Even when kicking ass, the guy never breaks a sweat. Cliff has none of the self-doubts that plague Rick Dalton—and that makes Cliff far less interesting to me. In the novel, we learn a lot of terrible things about Cliff—he’s a murderer who was involved in illegal dogfights.

The time structure of the novel is odd, and non-linear, as the climax of the film is revealed to us in dialogue about a quarter of the way through the book. There’s also a weird digressive chapter late in the novel about the actor Aldo Ray. But the novel is filled with little eccentricities like that. Also, be on the lookout for all the times women go barefoot in the novel—it seems to be an obsession of Tarantino’s.

There were a couple of little errors I noticed in the novel, such as the mention of “platinum albums” on page 163. Platinum albums were not introduced as a certification until 1976, 7 years after the main action of the film and novel. A tiny detail, sure, but the sort of thing that I’d think a pop culture nut like Tarantino would notice. A more noticeable error is the discrepancy in the number of seasons of Bounty Law, the TV show that catapulted Rick Dalton to stardom. On page 23, Rick says, “I totally pissed away a fourth season of Bounty Law,” meaning that the show ended before the fourth season. Yet on page 11, we learn that Bounty Law went on the air in the fall of the 1959-60 TV season and went off the air in the middle of the 1963-64 season—that would be the middle of the 5^th season. Again, it’s a tiny detail, but in a universe as fully thought out as the one that Rick Dalton inhabits, a noticeable detail.

Sharon Tate plays a slightly larger role in the novel than she does in the movie, but I would have vastly preferred more Sharon and less Cliff Booth. Tarantino is obsessed with the macho world that Cliff inhabits, so that dominates the novel. It could also be that Tarantino finds it easier to inhabit totally fictional characters like Cliff and Rick rather than a real historical person like Sharon Tate.

The novel is steeped in misogyny. It’s tough to say how much of this is Tarantino being “true to the time period” and how much it reflects his own thoughts and attitudes about women. Whatever the case, readers may find it off-putting. There are odd moments that are just jarring, like when Trudi Frazer, the 8-year-old actress who plays Mirabella Lancer on the Lancer TV pilot, tells Rick that she thinks his bad guy character would marry Mirabella, whom he has kidnapped. Rick is appalled by the idea and tells Trudi this. Sure, for Trudi some of this is an acting exercise to think outside of the boundaries of the script, but it’s just creepy.

Cliff Booth is a misogynist through and through. (The novel clears up the mysterious circumstances surrounding his wife’s death.) Cliff likes sleeping with women, but really has little use for them other than sexually. Sample text: “To Cliff, pussy was pussy, but he did have a real fondness for Italian pussy.” Cool, bro. Two paragraphs later, Cliff tells his friends about Rick’s new wife, an Italian actress: “Out of the fucking blue, he fucking married the bitch.” (p.341)

One of the funnier moments of the novel deals with Roman Polanski’s paranoia that Sharon Tate may have slept with Steve McQueen before she was married to Roman. “He’s never confirmed this with Sharon…but McQueen makes a point of it by the way he smirks at Roman. Every glance of those blue eyes and grin of that little mouth seems to say, I fucked your wife.” (p.129) I can see Steve McQueen making that face. Steve McQueen would be a really intimidating guy to be friends with. Because unless you’re Paul Newman, Steve McQueen is always going to be way cooler than you are. Steve McQueen races motorcycles and cars in his spare time. Steve McQueen has piercing blue eyes. Steve McQueen is strong and silent and stoic. Steve McQueen always gets to play the coolest parts in ensemble movies: The Magnificent Seven? He’s the coolest one. The Great Escape? He’s the coolest one. Oh, and when he’s not in an ensemble movie, he’s being cool as hell in movies like Le Mans and Bullitt, where he does his own stunt driving! Or The Thomas Crown Affair, where he even looks cool playing polo. Trust me, you don’t really want your wife spending a lot of time around Steve McQueen. Or Roman Polanski, for that matter.

There’s a very funny scene where Rick Dalton breaks down in detail why he wouldn’t have gotten Steve McQueen’s role in The Great Escape. The rumor around Hollywood is that had McQueen turned down the part, Rick’s name was on a list with “the three Georges.” That would be George Peppard, George Maharis, and George Chakiris. (If you know who those guys are without Googling them, this is the book for you.) Rick tells actor Jim Stacy exactly why each of the three Georges would have been cast ahead of him. For the sake of argument, Rick raises the possibility that horrific accidents might have befallen the three Georges, leaving him as the last name on the list. “Do I get it now?” Rick asks Jim Stacy.

“Of course you get it, you’re the last guy on the fuckin’ list!”

“That’s just my point, Jim. When the fuck do they hire the last guy on the fucking list? When you get to the last guy on the fuckin’ list, you throw out the fuckin’ list and start a new fuckin’ list!” (p.376-7)

In that same scene, look for a cameo appearance by Tarantino’s stepdad, Curt Zastoupil. Supposedly, Tarantino has written a second novel detailing the film career of Rick Dalton. I’m looking forward to reading it. If you’re fascinated by Old Hollywood, and you enjoyed the movie, you’ll love the novel of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Dave Parker, "The Cobra at Twilight"

 

Proof that Dave Parker was a serious badass.

Dave Parker winning the MVP Award for the 1979 All-Star Game.

Dave Parker with his hometown Cincinnati Reds.

I’ve liked Dave Parker for a long time. I wasn’t around for the Cobra’s 1975-1980 heyday, but by the time I started following baseball in 1986-87, he was one of those cool veteran players who seemed larger than life. You know, one of those players whose stat line filled the whole back of the baseball card, leaving no room for extra nuggets of information.

I recently watched the 2019 MLB documentary “The Cobra at Twilight,” an excellent look at Parker’s life and career. Parker was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2013, and the film shows Parker going to the gym and doctor’s appointments. The contrast between Parker’s imposing strength during his prime and how tough it is for him to get around now is sad. However, it’s obvious from the film that Parker’s spirit remains strong.

When I was a kid staring at the back of his baseball cards, Dave Parker’s stats seemed enormous to me: 339 home runs! 1,493 RBI’s! Wow! At the time Parker retired after the 1991 season, he was 32^nd on the all-time list in RBI’s and tied for 47^th on the home run list. He’s now 58^th in RBI’s and tied for 102^nd in home runs.

As I started to follow the Hall of Fame voting more closely, I always thought that Parker was underappreciated by the BBWAA. For the 15 years Parker was on the BBWAA ballot, his highest vote total was 24.5% in 1998, his second year on the ballot. Parker was a player who was regarded as an elite power hitter during his career, but by the time he hit the Hall of Fame ballot, 339 home runs didn’t seem as amazing.

Because Parker didn’t walk a lot, sabermetric stats haven’t helped his Hall of Fame case. Parker’s excellence is captured in the main hitting stats found on the back of his baseball card. Sabermetrics aren’t kind to Parker’s fielding, despite his reputation during his career as an excellent right fielder. The sabermetric community hasn’t taken up Parker’s case with the same fervor that they’ve adopted Tim Raines and Bert Blyleven, to name two contemporaries of Parker’s who saw their vote totals soar and were eventually elected by the BBWAA.

Looking at Parker’s WAR you can see some of the limitations of WAR as a statistic. Look at Parker’s 1986 season. He appeared in all 162 games for the Reds, smacked 174 hits, with 31 doubles, 31 home runs, 116 RBIs, and a .273 batting average. Parker’s OPS+ was 117, and he led the league in total bases with 304. He was 10^th in the NL in slugging, 7^th in hits, tied for 2^nd in home runs, 2^nd in RBIs, and 4^th in extra base hits. According to WAR, that season was worth 0.3 WAR. Parker’s offensive WAR for the year was 2.1, but his defensive WAR was -2.5, which negated most of his value. So, 0.3 WAR means that you could have taken any schlub off the bench at AAA, plugged him into the lineup and he would have produced as well as Parker would have. Okay, I’ll take the leading slugger from the 1986 Denver Zephyrs, Lloyd McClendon. Did McClendon ever hit 30 home runs and have 100 RBIs in the majors? Well, Lloyd did hit 35 home runs and drive in 154 runs, but that was over his entire 570 game major league career. It’s not that easy to replace the Cobra, WAR!

Since his final appearance on the BBWAA ballot in 2011, Parker has appeared on several Era Committee ballots, and I’ve written about Parker in 2017 and 2019. Parker hasn’t been elected to the Hall of Fame yet, but in 2019 he was named on 7 of 16 ballots, falling just 5 votes short of election. For as much as these small committees have been criticized over the years, they’ve also made some excellent selections recently: Ron Santo, Alan Trammell and Ted Simmons, three players who were wrongly overlooked by the BBWAA.

Much like Steve Garvey, Dave Parker has the “fame” part of the Hall of Fame covered. Parker was a 7-time All-Star, won 2 batting titles, was the 1978 NL MVP, won 3 Gold Gloves, had an amazing 1979 All-Star Game, where he threw out two baserunners and was voted MVP, and played on 2 World Series Champion teams a decade apart—the 1979 Pirates and the 1989 Oakland A’s.

At his peak, from 1975-1980, Dave Parker was one of the best players in baseball. As a measure of how contemporary baseball writers viewed him, Parker was listed in the 1981 edition of The 100 Greatest Baseball Players of All Time, by Lawrence Ritter and Donald Honig. Ritter and Honig were taking a huge gamble when they chose players who were not even halfway through their careers for the 1981 edition of the book, but it says something about Parker’s stature in the game that he was viewed as an all-time great by two very respected baseball writers and historians. When Ritter and Honig updated their book in 1986, Parker was one of the players who was removed from the book. Other players who Ritter and Honig had second thoughts about were George Foster, Fred Lynn, and Tony Oliva. It also says something about how far Parker’s star had fallen that he didn’t make the 1986 edition.

In the early 1980’s, Dave Parker was clearly a star in decline. Injuries cost him much of the 1982 season, and it seemed like much of the power had been drained from the Cobra’s bat. What we later learned was that Parker had a cocaine problem during the early 80’s. After the 1983 season, Parker signed as a free agent with his hometown Cincinnati Reds, and he came roaring back with a terrific year in 1985. As his drug problems made headlines, Parker was able to maintain focus on the game, and led the NL in doubles, RBI, and total bases, finishing 2^nd in the MVP voting behind Willie McGee.

Dave Parker was a hugely self-confident player, and the film likens him to Muhammad Ali. Whereas now Parker’s braggadocio might look less out of place, in the 1970’s, it was still something of a rarity for a Black player to be so outspoken. Did that influence how the media of the time covered Parker? I’m sure it did.

Parker was very different from the Pirates’ other Black superstars. Roberto Clemente was the humble, graceful, quiet star. (Even so, the press of the time often portrayed him as a hypochondriac.) And Willie Stargell was the chubby and loveable clubhouse leader. Parker was more in the Reggie Jackson mold, telling reporters, “When the leaves turn brown, I’ll be wearing the batting crown.”

“The Cobra at Twilight” tells us that things really changed for Parker after he signed a huge contract during the 1978-79 off-season. The deal averaged out to a little more than a million dollars a year, although some of that was deferred. Adjusted for inflation, that would be like paying Parker $3.6 million a year in 2021 dollars, which would be a steal. Once a player gets a huge contract, it’s easy for the fans to resent them. Especially when Parker gained a bunch of weight. Then it’s easy to paint that player as “lazy” and “unmotivated.” Fans threw batteries and even a bullet at Parker in right field. I was shocked to see some of the editorial cartoons of Parker that ran in Pittsburgh papers at the time. The drawings were racist and insulting.

It’s hard not to want just a little more from Dave Parker’s stats. He was such a great player that you can’t help but want the numbers to be a little bigger. According to Baseball-Reference, over 162 games, Parker averaged 178 hits, 22 home runs, and 98 RBI’s. So, what would happen if we gave Parker his 162-game average for his mid-career decline? I know, this is getting into speculative territory, but stay with me here. I’m not giving Parker extra seasons or theorizing what his stats would be if he could have hit 40 home runs every season he played. Let’s just look at his seasons from 1980-84, plus 1976, the one off-year during his peak. These stats assume that Parker doesn’t get injured, and that there’s no players strike in 1981, so a full season would have been played that year.

So, if Parker could have just played to his 162-game average during those 6 seasons, what career numbers would he have ended up with?

Hits: move from 2,712 to 3,004

HR: move from 339 to 399

RBI: move from 1,493 to 1,686

Obviously, if Parker had those numbers, he’d be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. And really, we can forget about homers and RBIs: once he moves over the 3,000-hit threshold, he would have been in. And you probably don’t have to mess with 6 seasons like I did to get Parker in the Hall. If there’s no players strike in 1981, and he has a decent 1982 season and doesn’t get hurt, let’s add 100 hits to each of those seasons. Now he’s at 2,912 hits. Let’s not even adjust his other numbers. Okay, we’ll give him 10 more RBI, so he gets over 1,500. Does he get into the Hall of Fame with 2,912 hits, 339 home runs, and 1,503 RBI? I would think so.

I know that’s all speculation, but to me it shows how close to being a first-ballot Hall of Famer Dave Parker was. And personally, I would just like to see Dave Parker in the Hall of Fame. Dave Parker was cool. He was a 6’5” badass who had a pierced ear and wore a Star of David. His answer to why he wore it was simple: “My name’s David and I’m a star.” The Hall of Fame would simply be a little cooler if Dave Parker were in it.

Book Review: The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain (2011)

 

Paperback cover of The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, 2011. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Hadley and Ernest Hemingway

Author Paula McLain

When I started my latest Ernest Hemingway kick by reading A Moveable Feast, I knew I’d have to read 5 books: the 1964 version of A Moveable Feast, the 2009 “restored” edition of A Moveable Feast, A.E. Hotchner’s Hemingway in Love, Scott Donaldson’s The Paris Husband, and Paula McLain’s 2011 novel The Paris Wife. Now I’ve finished all 5 books, and I can move on with my life and continue reading about my other obsessions, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe, Dick Tracy, and baseball.

The Paris Wife tells the story of Ernest Hemingway’s relationship with Hadley Richardson, his first wife, from their first meeting in 1920 to their divorce in 1927. It’s written in the first person, from Hadley’s point of view, and Paula McLain does a terrific job of capturing Hadley’s spirit.

McLain never attempts to imitate Hemingway’s distinctive writing style, and that’s a wise decision. There are a few short sections written from Ernest’s point of view, but they’re all written in the third person, not the first person, and they work well as part of the novel.

A challenge about writing about this time in Hemingway’s life is that almost all his friends were famous writers as well. How do you render realistic dialogue for Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald? McLain doesn’t exactly imitate these writers, but she does an excellent job of capturing their essence as she describes them and presents us with dialogue they could realistically have spoken. At their first meeting, McLain has Fitzgerald say to Hemingway about Jay Gatsby, “I know him so well, it’s as if he’s my child. He’s dead and I’m still worried about him.” (p.202) I think it would be very much in Fitzgerald’s character to feel that way about Gatsby.

The Paris Wife offers a convincing portrayal of the young Ernest Hemingway, with all of his charisma and all of his faults on display. Hemingway had a habit throughout his life of breaking off friendships, and McLain nails this tendency in several passages. Early in the novel, McLain writes of Hemingway “sacrificing {a} friendship as if it meant nothing.” (p.67) Hemingway’s own exacting standards for other people meant that “Once you were tarnished for him, he could never see you any other way.” (p.149) This becomes a problem for Hadley in late 1922, when she leaves Paris to meet Ernest in Switzerland and a valise she had filled with his writings gets stolen at the train station. On this same journey, Hadley also inadvertently left her diaphragm behind in Paris. Needless to say, Ernest was not thrilled about either of these developments.

Hadley is attuned to Ernest’s strong individualism, as McLain writes “It was so hard to watch Ernest pushing these mentors away, as if striking deep blows was the only way to prove to himself (and everyone else) that he’d never really needed them in the first place.” (p.241) Exactly! This is the tone that Hemingway takes throughout A Moveable Feast, one of arrogant superiority towards every other artist. It comes across in Hemingway’s accounts of his early encounters with Fitzgerald, with Hemingway denigrating Fitzgerald’s working habits, when at the time—Spring 1925—Fitzgerald had published three novels, two books of short stories, and a play, and Hemingway had published two very short books with a tiny independent press, and no books in the United States.

The Paris Wife is a beautiful novel, and a tribute to those often unknown people who stand beside and behind great artists, and oftentimes take a lot of abuse in the process. Finally, in The Paris Wife, Hadley gets her proper due.