The Lavender Bride
Hollywood, 1951. Audrey Wade works as a secretary at the Dirk Stone Talent Agency. A legacy has enabled her to escape dreary postwar Britain, her emotionally abusive father, and those who laughed at her California dreams.
When one of Dirk’s clients, rising star Rex Trent, asks her out, she thinks all her fantasies are coming true, but there are dark undercurrents at work in the Hollywood of the 1950s: the Un-American Activities Committee is on the hunt for Communists and other ‘subversives’. Audrey herself has a former friend back in England whose politics could prove troublesome to her, and Rex has a secret that would destroy his film career if made public. Audrey agrees to a ‘lavender marriage’. She knows what she is doing, but will the superficial glamour and life among Hollywood’s elite suffice?
Alexandra Weston’s settings are vividly described—from the drabness of Sheffield (Yorkshire) and London in the late 1940s, to the sunny glamour of L.A., and a wintry hotel resort in the Canadian Rockies. Her characterisation and narrative voice are superb. The story is told mainly in a vivid first-person present tense by Audrey, capturing the speech rhythms, colloquialisms and manners of the 1950s. She is naïve, starstruck and damaged by her grim upbringing, suffering from a deep sense of insecurity and a lack of self-worth. This allows her to be easily manipulated by those around her: Rex (whose charm hides vanity and weakness) and the devious Dirk Stone, who calls her ‘kid’ like a noir private detective, and exists on coffee, cigarettes and mint balls.
Excerpts from various gossip magazines and a 1989 interview with the older Rex frame each chapter and give additional nuance to the story. The novel was inspired by Rock Hudson’s marriage to his agent’s secretary in 1955. Highly recommended.
