She Was a Modern Woman During a Pre-Modern Time

When Richard de Mille was 33, his adoptive father, Cecil B. DeMille, told him that William de Mille--Cecil’s deceased older brother--was in fact Richard’s father, and that his mother had been a writer named Lorna Moon. All this was news to Richard, who knew he was adopted but had always assumed--along with most everyone else--that he was Cecil’s out-of-wedlock son. (This was not farfetched, given the extent of Cecil’s energetic, unconcealed extramarital activities.)

The news was somewhat disconcerting. “In a few seconds my whole family had stepped through the looking glass to the other side, where everything worked backwards,” De Mille recounts in this refreshingly wry memoir. “Father, whose boy I wanted to be . . . had now become my uncle, and Uncle William, whom I barely knew, was now my father. . . . [Choreographer] Agnes [de Mille] and Margaret, cousins for 33 years, were now my sisters, and I hadn’t even begun to reckon up my aunts.”

Disconcerting, but not shattering. One of the nice things about “My Secret Mother: Lorna Moon” is its author’s unusually down-to-earth attitude toward life’s vagaries. Growing up in the midst of a large, rich, creative, generally loving Hollywood family is not a great disaster, De Mille knows. Of his somewhat second-tier status in that family, he reasons, “Worse things could have happened. I, for example, could have been born the cherished, favored only son of Nicholas the Last and shot in a basement at 13. . . . A wise child does not look a gift life in the mouth.”

This does not mean that De Mille’s feelings toward his “secret” mother are--as a psychoanalyst would say--resolved. Indeed, De Mille offers a veritable field day to any analyst--or, for that matter, any lay reader--who cares to decipher the fascinatingly contradictory ways in which he describes Moon. At various times she is, for instance, a “tiny truant,” a “lawless baby maker,” a “rogue mother” and “my captivating mum.” Is it resentment or admiration that leads him to observe, “Whatever she wanted to do she did and took the consequences, unless they happened to be children, in which case she gave them away”?

In any case, in researching this memoir, De Mille clearly became beguiled by Moon, and the reader will, too. She was a self-made, modern woman in a slightly pre-modern time. Born Nora Low in a tiny, miserably poor Scottish town in 1886, she eventually made her way to Hollywood. There, she reinvented herself as “the mythical Lorna Moon, daughter of Highland chiefs, child bride, war widow, auburn-haired divorcee” and, in the 1920s, became a highly successful MGM screenwriter and best-selling novelist.

Moon was fiercely independent--financially, emotionally and sexually (“It is revolting to me that a woman’s virtue rests entirely upon her hymen,” she once wrote). She was talented and ambitious; a lover of good times who was a highly disciplined writer; a teller of tall tales who was staunchly honest; a femme fatale who lived an often solitary life. She gave birth to, and abandoned, three children (by three different men). One of her sisters likened her to “a bolt of lightning.”

She is also, ultimately, an enigma. For Moon, “an artist who didn’t want kids,” had a raging case of tuberculosis when she discovered her third pregnancy. Against her doctor’s advice, she risked death to give birth to Richard--although she never attempted to see either her son or his father again. She never regained her health, either, and she died, almost impoverished, after an eight-year-battle--”fierce, bloody, and grim”--with the disease.

Moon’s tumultuous life makes for a good tale. However, De Mille’s book is sometimes highly speculative, and it is way too long; few readers will be as interested in the labyrinthine history of Moon’s extended clan as De Mille obviously is. And despite De Mille’s understandable fascination with his mother, he never penetrates the central mysteries of her personality. But, one suspects, Moon wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.