A Whole New World by Donis Casey

For the past dozen years, I’ve been writing a historical series set in Oklahoma that features Alafair Tucker, a 40ish farm wife with ten children. The first book, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, took place in 1912, and the most recent, Forty Dead Men, took place in 1919 and dealt with the aftermath of World War I on her and her family.  Alafair fits into her life perfectly and finds deep meaning in it. She’s content with her place in the universe. I admire her immensely, but I could never live like she does. Yet she is me. How could she not be? You can base every character you write about on a real person, or you can make somebody up out of whole cloth, but the truth is that every character you create has to be somewhere inside of you. Yes, every little girl or knight in shining armor or housewife or serial killer is in you, and somehow you have to find that living place inside that you share.

Alafair and I have been raising her children for a long time, through the entire decade of the 1910s. But now the world is changing. World War I has played havoc with everything. The 1920s have dawned. Alafair’s children are mostly grown. And as I was considering where to take the story next, it occurred to me that I’d like to see a little farther into the future. I’ve gotten several of her older children settled, but what is going to happen to the younger ones, who are coming of age in a very different era?

Besides, children don’t necessarily grow into the people you wish they would. What would happen to someone who was raised in a secure, loving environment if she grew to lust after adventure and excitement? So in order to satisfy my own curiosity and shake things up a bit, I decided to follow one of the children into the Roaring Twenties and see what became of her. As it turns out, she left Oklahoma altogether and had a really exciting life. What would I be thinking if I were Blanche Tucker, a teenaged girl who had grown up on a remote farm in the middle of nowhere, the eighth of ten children, who saw her mother and older sisters settled happily into domestic life when according to the movies and the magazines, the whole world is exploding with glamor and adventure – just not here in my little hometown of Boynton Oklahoma?

I didn’t have to imagine how she feels. I remember how I felt as a teen, watching my 1950‘s-era mother’s life revolve around her children and husband to the exclusion of all else, including her own talents and desires. I loved my mother, but I was desperate not to be her. And I wasn’t. But my liberated life didn’t turn out to be quite as idyllic as I thought it would, either.

So just like 1960s Donis, 1920s Blanche totally rejects her family’s old-fashioned values and recklessly plunges headlong into the brave new world of the Jazz Age. But she doesn’t do it without applying a whole lot of the good old-fashioned creativity and bootstrap self-sufficiency she learned by growing up in early 20th century Oklahoma. She was raised to know that you can’t count on having your fat pulled out of the fire every time. No matter how much you reject the values you were raised with, you are shaped by them.

Blanche is longing to escape her dull, small-town life – and then she meets dashing Graham Peyton, who poses as a Hollywood film producer just passing through on his way to California. He persuades the naive girl to run away with him, but instead of making her a star, he has a nefarious end in mind for her. Fortunately, with wit and grit and luck  and a lot of help, Blanche escapes and makes it to Hollywood on her own. Six years later, Blanche Tucker, sheltered farm girl, has become Bianca LaBelle, cock-sure, headstrong and headlong, adventurous, a silent movie queen and one of the most famous and admired women in the world – and Graham Peyton’s skeleton is found buried on the beach in Santa Monica. Is there a connection?

My new series is set in Hollywood in the 1920s and features a glamorous, young, up-to-date woman. I’m in a whole new world, and in trying to portray a realistic picture of what Bianca’s life is like, I find myself doing research on the strangest and most interesting things.

Bianca is a silent movie actress, so I had to learn about Hollywood in the silent era, with all it’s glamor and decadence. How people lived, how California looked at the time. How movies were made, including movie makeup as well as the daily makeup routine of a modern young twenties-era woman. In the age of the Flapper, even nice girls wore makeup on the street, and young women were very much influenced by the glamorous ladies in the movies – pale complexions, dark red “bee stung” lips, and a ton of kohl eyeshadow.

There was a reason that movie queens sported that particular look, and it had more to do with lighting and film quality in the early silents than any particular idea of female pulchritude. In the 1910s and early part of the 1920s, film was orthochromatic, or blue-sensitive. Red appeared to be black and light blue filmed as white. In fact, blue-eyed actors had trouble finding work because their eyes basically disappeared. Imagine a movie full of characters as blank-eyed as Little Orphan Annie. Actors’ skin would appear dark gray, and their facial features tended to disappear and look fuzzy. Flaws were magnified tenfold. Studio lighting was harsh. Special makeup was necessary to make actors look like real people with eyes and mouths. White chalk was sometimes added to hands to match the whitened faces. Eyes were nearly always lined with kohl and darkened with grey or purple eyeshadow to help them stand out. By 1923, the movie industry started using better studio lighting and panchromatic film, which registered colors more naturally. Actors could cultivate a much more natural look on film. But by that time, all the smart young things were sporting smoky eyes and bow lips.

A new series set in a new location and era also means that I have to get to know a whole bunch of new characters. A good plot is an excellent thing, but memorable characters are the most important thing. I hope the mysterious Bianca LaBelle and her cadre of colorful friends will keep readers coming back for more.

Donis Casey, December 2, 2019

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Donis Casey is the author of The Wrong Girl, the first in a new series starring Bianca LaBelle, star of the silent screen action serial, The Adventures of Bianca Dangereuse. In addition to this girl’s coming-of-age tale set in the glamorous 1920s, Donis Casey is also the author of the Alafair Tucker Mysteries, an award-winning series featuring the sleuthing mother of ten children, set in Oklahoma during the booming 1910s. Donis is a former teacher, academic librarian, and entrepreneur, and lives in Tempe, Arizona.