‘In Cahoots’ Conjures Up Boy’s Kingdom

As a Newsweek correspondent in the 1970s, Malcolm Cook MacPherson lived in exotic locales around the globe. But no place he’s been during the past three decades evokes such fond memories for him as growing up in Orange County in the ‘40s and early ‘50s.

MacPherson, 50, remembers his family going to the public square dances held each year in the giant blimp hangars in Tustin, his mother taking him and his two sisters to the beach in Corona del Mar nearly every day during the summer, and joining his pals at Saturday matinees at the Gem Theater in Garden Grove, where the air would be thick with flattened popcorn boxes flying at the screen and the manager would have to stop the movie when the cherry bombs were lit: “We went there not for the movie, but for the chaos.”

But most of all, MacPherson remembers the orange groves that flourished near his boyhood home in Garden Grove.

“As a kid we used to haunt the orchards--four or five buddies and a couple of dogs--from June until September,” he recalled. “We’d shoot possums with slingshots and have orange fights. We wore no shirts and no shoes--just a pair of shorts--and your feet were like leather at the end of summer.”

It’s a bygone Orange County that MacPherson, who now lives in Greensboro, N.C., conjures up in his new book, “In Cahoots: A Novel of Southern California, 1953” (Random House; $21).

The book grew out of one of MacPherson’s most vivid Orange County memories: the summer of 1954, when he and his buddies were attracted by the sights and sounds of giant bulldozers at work in an Anaheim orange grove, a 20-minute bike ride from home.

“They were plowing up orange trees and stacking them in these enormous mountains and setting them on fire,” he recalled.

As the months went by, MacPherson and his pals watched as Walt Disney’s vision of a Magic Kingdom--a wondrous land boasting everything from a 19th-Century railroad to a 20th-Century rocket ship--took shape on the former 160-acre orange grove.

“It was,” MacPherson said, “right out of a dream.”

Dreams--the kind that have lured millions of Americans to California since the Gold Rush--are at the heart of what Kirkus Reviews calls “an entertaining evocation of a sunny world in which poverty never pinches too sharply and Disney is treated like royalty.”

Set among the post-World War II suburban tract houses the year before the bulldozers, “In Cahoots” tells the tale of a struggling Garden Grove family man--a soda-truck driver named Bud--who rallies his friends and neighbors around his latest get-rich plan.

Bud is a man of vision, a dreamer and a schemer who figures out that Disney is secretly planning to build the mother of all amusement parks. If he and his friends can only find out where Disney plans to build his “fun park,” they can buy a small parcel of the land before the deal is finalized, and Disney will be forced to buy their controlling portion, thus making them all rich.

The book, which Publishers Weekly calls a “deceptively light, engaging novel,” is full of the kind of eccentric characters for which Southern California is famous.

There’s a religious fanatic named Roland, a former Hollywood costume designer who “wanted to get his feet back on the ground,” so he got into shoes: He’s a Buster Brown shoe salesman in Santa Ana. And there’s Bud’s brother-in-law Milton, who rigs up an elaborate crystal set, wrapping himself in the coils, so he can communicate with the universe.

The family in the novel, not surprisingly, resembles MacPherson’s.

Like Bud, his father was a transplanted New Englander who drove a soda truck. MacPherson, of course, is the model for Bud’s lovable and strong-willed 10-year-old son, Callum. (“Callum is Gaelic for Malcolm.”)

“Callum is very curious, and he’d much prefer the kind of zany unpredictability of adults in terms of his friends and company than he would the company of his own peers,” MacPherson said. “For him, nothing is better than hanging out with adults when the adults are children, and dreamers are children. Not one of those men in the book is older than Callum in many respects.”

MacPherson, who views the Orange County of his childhood as being no less than “paradise,” turned 12 shortly after Disneyland opened in July 1955.

“It (1955) was a really significant summer for me,” he said. “That’s why I wrote ‘In Cahoots.’ It was the last summer of my childhood. I grew up pretty fast after that.”

One foggy evening in October 1955, he and his parents were driving through an Anaheim orange grove when another car ran through an intersection two blocks south of Disneyland.

Both of his parents were killed.

MacPherson, who was seriously injured, spent four months in the hospital and was not able to attend his parents’ funeral. When he got out of the hospital, he and his two older sisters, who were home at the time of the accident, went to live with family friends in Connecticut.

MacPherson hasn’t lived in Orange County since then, but he returns every five years or so to visit his parents’ graves.

“It’s always been a place I’ve gone back to because of them,” he said. “The memories of that time and place are very strong.”

His novel, he said, “is obviously an evocation of fantasy and dreams and the fondness of memories of those days.

“Nothing stops time nearly so forcefully as the death of two parents when you’re 12 years old. It freezes the imagination in that era. As it turns out, part of the true pleasure of writing ‘In Cahoots’ was that every day for two years I was able to be with the people I was separated from by that” tragedy.

And in creating fictional parents, he said, “there was no chance that they could be killed because I controlled them, and you can’t beat that kind of power.” With a chuckle, he added: “That’s the novelist’s power: the power of life and death.”

MacPherson, who still occasionally free-lances for Premiere, Readers Digest and other magazines, left Newsweek in 1980 after 11 years. As a general assignment reporter, he said, he found that “I was repeating myself.”

As he phased out journalism, he began writing books--thrillers at first, then nonfiction, including “Time Bomb,” a history of the atomic bomb, and “The Blood of His Servants,” a critically acclaimed narrative history of the Holocaust based on the experiences of a man who identified and tracked down the man who had destroyed his family in the war.

MacPherson said he prefers writing books--he’s done eight--to journalism.

“First of all, you can pick and chose your subjects, and you can go on to whatever length you want,” he said. “Journalism is maddening because you can only stay with something for a day or two, particularly if you’re in general assignment like (I was) with Newsweek. It’s very superficial, and journalism really does not teach you how to write. If you’re really practicing serious textbook journalism, you have to erase yourself from the writing--emotionally, certainly--and your presence as an observer.

“The wonderful thing about fiction is you are forced to put yourself into it emotionally, and the central presence really is you, your voice.”

It took him a long time, he said, to discover his own voice.

“What I did initially, of course, was I ducked behind the the kinds of books other people were doing, thrillers. Then I ducked behind narrative histories, which is journalism essentially in a book form. All of a sudden I said, ‘I can’t do this any more. I will not write that kind of book. I will write what comes out of me, even if it’s a crashing failure.’ ”

Out of that cry of creative liberation came “In Cahoots.”

“It was a big risk for me writing with the voice I have,” he said. “This book represents what I am and who I’ve been for the last 50 years.”

But writing “In Cahoots,” he said, “has opened windows and doors for me in terms of whatever books I want to write. I just have this wonderful kind of fresh air.”

And as a fiction writer, MacPherson said, he can’t imagine leaving the Southern California of the 1950s.

“It’s an era and a place I want to be in for the rest of my life,” he said. “It is so rich in people and eccentricity and fantasy and dreams. I mean, culturally everything happened in Southern California in the 1950s--music, jazz, the beach culture, the whole culture of the highway, the tract-house culture, the new individual: the sort of eccentric, crazy guy.”

MacPherson, in fact, is halfway through his next book--a Southern California-set novel that purports “to tell the truth” about an alien visit in 1955.

“Why is it almost every alien movie from the ‘50s was set in Southern California? There has to be a reason.” It’s because, he added with a chuckle, “it’s believable that it would be set there.”