06/29/2009 12:00 am
Culture
Crimes and Misdemeanors: A Conversation With Bestselling Author Jane Stanton Hitchcock
Vanity Fair writer-at-large Marie Brenner spars with the author of the new novel Mortal Friends, a riveting tale of murder, money and high society set in the nation's capital.
Image: Len DePas
Editor’s Note: Our dear friend Marie Brenner is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Apples and Oranges (read our coverage here). Jane Stanton Hitchcock is the author of Mortal Friends, just published by HarperCollins, and four other novels. Jane is the daughter of Joan Alexander Stanton, who was the voice of Lois Lane in the 1940 radio series "Superman." Married to syndicated foreign-affairs columnist Jim Hoagland, she lives in New York City and Washington, DC.
Marie Brenner: Mortal Friends is the hot summer read. I could not put it down. You have taken us inside a Washington that no one ever sees. Who would ever think that so many feverish plots are being hatched in those grand Georgetown houses? You have guts to write about so many characters who are recognizable to Washington insiders. What can you tell us about these so-called novelists’ imaginings?
| A whispering campaign started at a ladies’ lunch can be almost as dangerous as having Bob Woodward on your trail. |
Jane Stanton Hitchcock: I’m a fiction writer, so all the characters in my books are versions of me — including the murderers! But of course I draw from the life around me. I watch the parade until someone grabs my attention. Then I focus in on them and aim my pen at them for better or worse. It’s my experience that everybody recognizes someone else, and no one ever recognizes themselves. However, if I never eat lunch in this town again, I’ll just have to starve.
MB: You and I met soon after I moved to New York. I knew and admired your mother, Joan Alexander Stanton — the late, great dame and radio star who was the voice of Lois Lane in the 1940 radio series, "Superman" — and observed the intense loyalty and complexity of your very close relationship. Vivian Gornick once wrote a book called Fierce Attachment, which I think captured what you had with your mother. You had a childhood of fairy-tale glamour; who else would have had the chance to have Leonard Bernstein sing "Happy Birthday" on her 21st? And all this was orchestrated by your mother! Does your mother’s influence come into play in Mortal Friends?
JSH: My mother was unquestionably the most powerful force in my life. I probably write mysteries because of her. She was a beautiful and very complex woman, an enchantress, often a mystery to me. Mortal Friends is a book where everyone is wearing a mask of one sort or another. My mother wore a mask for much of her life.
MB: To me and your many fans, you are our Patricia Highsmith – the author who wrote, among many other superb mysteries, The Talented Mr. Ripley. You cut through the diabolical essence of your characters – and Mortal Friends is especially compelling. One of your gifts to your own friends is that dark, comic genius for seeing underneath surfaces. What was it about Washington and your first days there that inspired Mortal Friends?
JSH: When I first arrived in Washington, I knew very few people. It was pathetic how little I knew about my own government. I remember I was at a dinner at the British Embassy and I met a man who said, "Hello, I’m Warren Christopher." I said politely, "Your name sounds familiar to me. What do you do?" He looked at me in absolute awe, and said sweetly, "I’m the secretary of state." This happened to me several times, I have to admit. But once I got to know the players, I could go to a party and sense the undercurrents like a swimmer in an ocean. Social life here is where a lot of important business gets done — sometimes more than in Congress, or so it seems. Unlike other places, in Washington a friendship or a feud can affect national or even global events.
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Having been born and raised in the Washington Ms. Brenner is describing, I would agree with everything she says, minus one. That old Georgetown power had ended before Mrs. Graham. Granted, Mrs. Graham’s passing was the end of an era, but the power had shifted some time before.
I wound up with some of Mrs. Graham’s clothes hangers, oddly enough. Her family sold things off to various shops around town, and some friends of mine went and bought peach Dior padded hangers from the Graham estate sales and gave them to me as a symbol of the changing of "old" Washington society. Another friend, (living elsewhere now, but born and raised in Georgetown) gets into conversations with me about our dinosaur ways. Things we were taught to do as children that people wouldn’t even think about now. I had my own stationery and started writing thank you notes at a very young age, for example. Not crossing your legs in public. Not letting your back touch the chair. Being "dressed" properly in the city.
Sometimes I see one of those aged dames hit the street on a summer day (and it’s rare…they didn’t come by the name cave dweller for nothing.) They have on their print dress and crochet gloves and hat. They carry a parasol. Maybe they are wearing a long chiffon scarf trailing in the slight breeze. Their pace is slow and stately. Their posture is impeccable. It’s like watching the Queen Mary or Titanic sail down the brick and cobblestoned streets…or the very last of an extinct species.
I enjoyed the interview.
I was a child of the 1950s and a teen during the 1960s.When I was a child and teenager. We dressed to go shopping downtown. I remember my clothing ensemble ,stockings , handbag, hat and little white gloves. We dressed for the theater and going out to dinner. We were under a great deal of pressure. We had to represent our culture. So, we had to be perfect examples. We had to do our culture proud.
We had schools that taught etiquette.There was "The DeVore School" Girls were taught to be proper little ladies. We wrote thank you notes. My mother wore beautiful clothing and owned lovely shoes and handbags. I’ve never met anyone that had more style than she! Not even today!
She had the cloth hangers and beautiful handkerchiefs. Those were the days. Memories.