The woman behind Erin McGraw’s Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard

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Erin McGraw, who grew up in Redondo Beach, based her new novel, ‘The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard,’ on her own grandmother’s fairly incredible life. She answers questions about the book and its background.

Jacket Copy: The protagonist of your novel, Nell Plat, leaves Kansas for Los Angeles, abandoning her family. Is this what your grandmother did?

Erin McGraw:

That is exactly what my grandmother did. I don’t think my grandmother was quite as single-minded as Nell -- there were some lost years, and my grandmother Bessie apparently went to Oregon before she wound up in LA. But yes, at age 17, she took her two young children over to her mother’s place, said, ‘Look after them,’ got on the train and skedaddled out of Kansas. I heard the story over and over when I was growing up, and I loved the idea of getting out and starting fresh. A person could change her name, change what people knew about her or thought they knew -- imagine the possibilities! Any kid who’d gotten off on the wrong foot in junior high would love this story.

JC: When she arrives in L.A. around 1900, Nell finds some good friends, a boarding house and a job as a shop girl. What kind of research did you do to bring turn-of-the-last-century Los Angeles to life?

Erin McGraw:

Hooray for the 21st century, when so much wonderful scholarship is easy to find. There are a number of excellent books about Los Angeles in this period, particularly Kevin Starr’s superb work, and about the evolution of shop girls, which was a step that would eventually lead to feminism that we could recognize. Cultural histories talk about the new working class of young women and the complicated ways that these women were simultaneously liberated and restrained.

A big issue at the time involved keys to the rooming houses. By and large, ‘girls’ (I would call them young women) were not allowed to have their own keys as an issue of propriety, since women who had keys to their own lodging houses had been thought of as prostitutes. But some girls who proved themselves sufficiently mature were allowed keys of their own. How did they prove their maturity? Often by having sex with the owner of the rooming house.

Since most skirts of the day didn’t have pockets and the girls didn’t carry handbags, the lucky ones with keys wore them in their shoes. Those were big keys. They couldn’t have been comfortable.

JC: The title, ‘The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard,’ is kind of a joke between Nell and her new husband in L.A.; she spends more time sewing for the city’s social elite than for Hollywood. Was it important to you to use real historical figures? And does this follow the arc of your grandmother’s life?

The answer -- and more -- after the jump.

Erin McGraw: I tried to use real people to the extent that they would have existed in Nell’s frame of consciousness. She might think, briefly, of President Coolidge or of Babe Ruth, in the same way that I think about Michael Phelps right now but probably won’t in six months. Nell would have been more likely to think about the actress Clara Bow because Nell was seeing Clara Bow in the pictures and would have been around people who talked about actresses. I didn’t want to use anything that wasn’t specific to Nell’s perspective. Historical novels that stink of their own research are not the most pleasant things in the world to read, even though I’m now more sympathetic to the impulse, after a writer has spent three days tracking down a fact about, say, streetcar lines, to put a bunch of streetcar information in the book. Trying to stay true to what Nell really would have been thinking was a pact with myself to stay artistically on track.

It’s true that the sewing my grandmother did was almost entirely for the social elite of L.A. The city’s old guard was not one bit happy with this new, crass industry, and capital-S Society closed its gates against the Hollywood crowd. The attitude fit my grandmother perfectly. After her own scandalous start in life, she wanted nothing so much as to be respectable, and some of her crowning achievements included joining the Redondo Beach Ladies’ Society and being head of the Altar Society at her church.

Her two oldest daughters, however -- my father’s half-sisters [the ones she left back in Kansas - ed] -- did have small careers as starlets at the edge of Hollywood. One of them, Barbara, was an extra in a few extravaganzas before she married the screenwriter Vincent Lawrence, and the other, Inez, used to sing at the Paramount Theater while reels were being changed. Later she toured the country singing with swing bands. She could really sing.

JC: Nell reinvents herself, more than once. One of her creations is Madame Annelle, a French dressmaker, one whose critical eye and disapproving demeanor endear her to her high-class clientele. Did you know this side of your grandmother?

Erin McGraw: As far as I know, my grandmother never tried to pull off anything as grand as Madame Annelle. That persona, the haughty dressmaker, is completely made up -- and she was huge fun to create. Madame Annelle is an image of a certain kind of artist, the one who is able to demand perfection from those around her because she produces perfection in her own work.

My grandmother didn’t aspire to haute couture. She worked in tailoring and alterations for fancy department stores like I. Magnin, the kinds of places where the seamstresses would pluck a thread from the fabric of a gown in order to create an invisible hem. She was a good seamstress, miles better than any of her descendents, but not as good as Nell.

Still, I did tap into a certain hauteur on Grandma’s part. She didn’t have a lot of patience for children, and she would only put up with me so long as I kept her entertained. She talked to me as if I were a grownup and expected me to hold up my end of the conversation. As a result, I adored her. If I came home from school chattering about some scandal on the playground, she would interrupt me. ‘That’s not interesting,’ she would say. ‘Tell me something interesting or go outside.’ I would do my best to find something interesting, and if Grandma liked it, she would let me stay. Good training for novel writing, now that I think about it.

JC: Throughout the novel, Nell’s experience with her work -- fabric, stitches, a bias cut -- is almost transcendent. But almost no one in her life sees her ambition or absorption in that work as a positive thing. How hard was it for your grandmother, or other women of her generation, to find fulfillment outside of the home?

Erin McGraw:

My grandmother came to adulthood at an interesting time. The Industrial Revolution had gotten a grip, so cities needed a labor force. At the same time, retail shopping was enlarging, and department stores, a new invention then, needed young women to do everything from sorting out stock in the back rooms to standing behind the counters, selling handkerchiefs or umbrellas or hats. As farm life became less tenable, more and more young women -- from age 15 on up -- left to go to the cities. A whole new class of women emerged, living without chaperones in big rooming houses and earning their own admittedly measly incomes.

This kind of work generally wasn’t personally fulfilling, and it isn’t what you’re talking about, but it’s a step toward what you’re talking about. Women were gaining a measure of independence, and that would open the door to outside fulfillment. As I thought about Nell’s sewing, I thought a lot about any kind of artistic creation. When a person is engaged with art, there’s no guarantee that anyone will ever appreciate the beauty of a line of music, or the balance of light to dark in a painting. Still, there is pleasure in making something beautiful that comes from the desire to see that thing made. I know how much Nell loved to see that perfect dart because I know how much I love to see an elegant transition from one paragraph to another, or a completely perfect metaphor.

When I talk to high school classes and tell them things like that, they look at me with a combination of pity and horror.

JC: Did you ever feel constrained by history or research? What fictional opportunities did you find within those constraints?

Erin McGraw: Every once in a while, in small ways, I would bump into an intractable fact. No matter how inconvenient it was for me, I couldn’t make the perfectly named train the California Zephyr start its run from Chicago to Emeryville any sooner than 1949. Roadblocks like this made me sigh and fuss for a day or two until I found some other way to get the chapter going again. On the other hand, I found dozens of details and ideas I couldn’t have created for myself. As soon as I found out that using forceps for childbirth was a new technology in rural America around 1900, I was off and running.

JC: In your acknowledgments, you thank Bret Lott, whose new novel, ‘Ancient Highway,’ is also a fictionalized account of his family’s history, set in Los Angeles in the early decades of the 20th century. Could you talk a little bit about your working relationship?

Erin McGraw:

In this case, the shout-out went to Bret because he edited the issue of the Southern Review that ran a portion of ‘Seamstress.’ But he and I have known each other for a long time, and we like to swap stories of growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s -- he in Long Beach, I in Redondo Beach. I had no idea, until ‘Ancient Highway’ came out, that he was working territory so close to what I was doing. When I see him again, I will tease him, then ask him to sign my copy of his book, which is wonderful.

JC: What was your favorite aspect of writing a book set in historic Los Angeles?
Erin McGraw: I love this question. When I was a little girl, Redondo Beach was a mostly blue-collar backwater. Except in July and August, the beach was usually pretty quiet, and the community was distinctly downscale. It wasn’t uncommon to see shoppers in bathing suits and flip-flops at the Safeway, and most stores in town had a little sand on the floor. It was a ramshackle kind of place, endearingly down at the heels.

If you’ve been to Redondo Beach lately, you know that the place I’m describing is gone. The community is a lot more beautiful, a lot more careful, a lot, lot, lot more wealthy. In any number of ways, this is a change for the good -- certainly the city government has prospered and is able to benefit the citizens. But I mourn the place where I grew up, with its beach rats tanned within an inch of their lives. God only knows where they got money to eat.

I started looking at pictures of Redondo in those days out of nostalgia, and then curiosity had me looking back further. My father’s family was living on Redondo Beach when he was born -- really living there, in one of the old wooden houses on stilts, now long gone. The more I looked at the old beach communities and then, increasingly, old L.A., and the more I saw what used to be here, the more I longed for that landscape I’ve never seen. Whole fields of carnations! Cauliflower growing on what is now Wilshire Boulevard! I looked at thousands of photographs and couldn’t help seeing them as a rebuke to our strip malls and -- well, our strip malls. So there’s a big element of the book that’s a love song to the place I never saw but long for.

JC: In imagining her life, did you discover anything about your grandmother that you didn’t expect?
Erin McGraw: This is an answer in two parts. First, in researching her life, I found out all kinds of things that surprised me. It turns out that she wasn’t the only young mother to abandon her husband and kids and jump on a train out of town. Around the end of the 19th century, a lot of young women were doing just that. Bailing out on the family wasn’t presented as a career option, and people didn’t talk about it, but it makes sense. In rural areas, the death rate for mothers in childbirth was well over 50%. Daily life was hard, hard, hard -- an enormous amount of physical labor (think about hauling all the water for a household as much as half a mile every day), plus isolation, plus, as Nell and my grandmother experienced, abusive treatment. Young women of a certain kind of imagination and temperament were bound to leave if they saw the chance.

This brings me to the second part. As I imagined my way into Nell’s existence, I discovered not only the hardened sections of her personality, but the soft ones, the youthful ones that didn’t have a chance to be expressed when she was young and fighting for survival. She’s a prickly character -- I love that about her -- but as the book goes on, she carefully, slowly, uneasily softens. She wants happiness, but her life has taught her not to trust it, a combination of traits that makes me want to take her in my arms. Not that she would ever permit such a thing.

She’s a starchy character, not unlike my grandmother. Writing her showed me a whole new way to love my grandmother and, I hope, to honor her.

JC: And our favorite final question: What’s your favorite bookstore and why?
Erin McGraw: Any book lover in L.A. should make a point of going to Book Soup over and over and over. They have everything, their staff is fun to talk to, and it’s a lovely place to be.

And then, in the middle of the night, there’s Amazon, where I can shop in my pajamas. That is not a point to be taken lightly.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: A publicity stil for 1929’s ‘The Saturday Night Kid,’ with Jean Arthur, Clara Bow, Jean Harlow and Alice Adair.