1st Novel a Look at the Wild Life in West Texas

A quick visit to Camilla Carr’s living room wall in Pacific Palisades goes a long way toward explaining her first novel, “Topsy Dingo Wild Dog.” The wall is covered almost entirely by a large Texas state flag, below which is a small cardboard box filled with yellowing school tablets, loosely bound in Manila--”books” that Carr wrote when she was a child in Kermit, Tex. in 1955.

“Lookit. Look. I illustrated them,” says Carr happily, opening one and revealing a pencil drawing on the title page. She reads the faint scrawl at the bottom of the page: “ ‘Carr and Carr Publishers Inc., 705 Hejupe Drive.’ That’s what I was doing when I was a little girl.”

Now, 34 years later, in the midst of an acting career, after detours into theater production and screen writing with her husband, Academy Award winner Edward Anhalt, Carr has finally done it for real.

While Birch Lane Press publisher Steve Schragis said he had “no illusions that (‘Topsy’) is going to be a best-seller the first time around for her as a novelist,” he added that early sales, particularly in smaller bookstores--where small numbers of copies have, in some cases, sold out largely because of word of mouth--were encouraging. And, said Fern Edison, a representative of the publishing company, early reviews have been favorable.

In “Topsy Dingo Wild Dog,” Carr has produced a wild, eccentric, earthy, risque and frequently troubling novel about a woman who is forced to face a horrible secret in her past when she returns to her hometown of Uncertain, Tex., for her 20th high school reunion. The title refers to that secret.

Written in three parts, like a play--intentional, says Carr--the book follows Mary Jane Shady, who after leaving Uncertain and becoming dubiously famous by hawking peanut butter in television commercials, encounters long-buried personal demons in the tiny West Texas town populated by the cream of Lone Star State loonies.

There is Baby Flowers, gorgeous but utterly vacant, who frequently strolls down the highway removing articles of clothing. There is Yvonne Henderson (known to all as Why-vonne), filthy rich, who wears Galanos, Chanel and Givenchy as mix ‘n’ match and rides in a convertible stretch limo with a coyote skull on the hood. There is Kay Widders, a grossly overweight screaming bigot and the mother of Siamese twin daughters, one of whom has been nominated for homecoming queen. And there is Irene Shady, Mary Jane’s mother, the co-owner with Lottie of the Uncertain Chapel of Memories, a local funeral home that sits on one corner of the region’s worst traffic hazard.

Carr was born in Chillicothe, Tex., population 800, where her aunt “was the librarian, ran the gas company, the telephone company and the funeral home, all from one desk. She was the city secretary of Chillicothe for almost 50 years. And at one time she was the society editor of the Chillicothe Valley News.”

Carr’s family moved to the West Texas town of Kermit when she was 5, “but we always seem to come back to Chillicothe. I just love it. The most wonderful things always happen there. My mother, who has since moved back to become the receptionist at the funeral home, can tell you a story a day.”

Once, said Carr, when a couple approached her mother at the funeral home with the ashes of a cremated relative in a plastic bag--no urn had been provided--her mother, also lacking a handy urn, took the ashes to the local drug store and had them gift-wrapped and tied up with a pink ribbon.

Those stories, she said, fueled her childhood love of writing. She gave up writing for acting at 15, she said, “because I didn’t know enough words. I decided to become an actress because they already have words.”

But two years after her marriage to Anhalt in 1979, she began pecking at the manuscript that became “Topsy Dingo Wild Dog.” She did this between acting jobs in films, theater and television, her work as producer of the long-running “Last Summer at Bluefish Cove,” and the screen adaptation of that play and another stage work, “Splendora,” written by her friend, Edward Swift.

Eventually, she said, “it became clear to me that I had to quit everything and just completely attach myself to that last draft (of the book). I knew I was never going to be taken seriously writing screenplays with Edward Anhalt.”

The first draft of “Topsy Dingo Wild Dog” was episodic, she said, “and eventually kind of wrote itself into a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. My writing is influenced by the theater, so there’s continuous action. I’m fortunate to have inhabited the plays of great writers on a daily basis and that’s helped me a lot with my writing.”

While the book is largely comic, Carr’s heroine, Mary Jane Shady, is a woefully tormented woman, the victim of a terrible sexual deception by her high school boyfriend. Faced with the prospect of returning to the place where her secret may have been revealed, she wanders through a true dark night of the soul.

“I’m a great fan of the ‘Poetics’ of Aristotle,” says Carr. “He said that anyone who reads the tale should thrill with horror and weep with pity. They’re supposed to be moved. I felt, though, that it would be too black a book, take on too dark an overtone, if it was just about Mary Jane Shady. I needed the other characters to bring a sense of lightness, to establish that this is a comedy.

“I hope that it is horrible and that it makes you shudder and your skin crawl. But I hope people cry till they laugh and laugh till they cry.

“I hope people laugh a lot on the way, because I sure did. It was the most fun I ever had in my life. I can hardly wait to do it again. I’m just dying to start on the next one.”