The Easter Egg Hunt

by Speed Lamkin

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312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Hillyer Speed Lamkin was an American novelist and playwright. He is best known for his first novel Tiger in the Garden (1950) and was called "the poor man's Truman Capote" by the composer Ned Rorem. He was a recipient of a 1950 O. Henry Award for his short story 'Comes a Day', later adapted into a Broadway play.

Lamkin graduated from Harvard University in 1948, which he had entered at the age of 16.

Reviews

[Neglectedbooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story itself is pretty thin. Lamkins’ narrator, Charley Thayer, a young writer for Time magazine from Miro (read Monroe), Louisiana, encounters Angelica O’Brien, a a childhood playmate and bright young thing, now married to Laddie Wells, a pompous would-be intellectual and assistant to a producer of “A-movie” westerns. At first the narrative seems to be leading into a triangle between Charley, Angelica, and Laddie, but then Charley, whose bumper sticker must have read, “I Brake for Bright, Shiny Objects,” becomes the confidant of Carol Culvers and the course takes a sharp turn. From there on, we follow the rocky course of Carol, who idles at unstable and regularly revs up to self-destructive, her affair with Laddie, and the ambitions and jealousies of Clarence. Although Charley hints at one point about halfway in the story that this all will climax in some violent, headlines-grabbing event, what we get at the end is more whimper than bang. Overall, I thought The Easter Egg Hunt an utter failure as a novel.

At the same time, however, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Lamkin might not have been an effective novelist, but he is a terrific observer. If he kept a diary during his time in Los Angeles, somebody needs to convince him to publish it. The Easter Egg Hunt is a treasure trove of descriptions of the people, places, and trappings of Beverly Hills in the early 1950s. If you read L.A. Confidential and other James Ellroy novels for the scenery, you’ll love The Easter Egg Hunt. Take, for instance, just a portion of the account of one of the Culvers’ frequent parties:

They sat drinking in sixes and eights around the tables under the marquee; and they would dance for half an hour to the bouncy music of an orchestra playing the songs of South Pacific. Then the orchestra would alternate with a rumba-mambo-tango band. People spread their fur wraps and lay down on the grass, and people had their fortunes told by a swank Beverly Hills numerologist. Two snobbish English actors arrived with Vera Velma the strip-tease queen, who wore pink dyed fur and was introduced as Mrs. T. Markoe Deering of Southampton and New York.

At two-thirty sharp the man who had played Washington in Valley Forge vomited over the buffet, and a sturgeon and three red herrings had to be taken away. Down the hill in the Japanese tea house two ensigns were having a crap game with Len Evansman, the columnist. Len Evansman wanted to know if I could change a thousand-dollar bill. At a quarter of three a dozen Hawaiian girls did the hula-hula and a dignified producer, who had an obsession for pinching young women’s behinds, got his face slapped by the ukelele player. A thin man who did rope tricks followed the hula girls. It was during the rope tricks that somebody started throwing the plates out over the hill. “Look,” cried a starlet, “flying saucers! ” Forty-five people rose from their chairs to look. Three men started throwing plates, then a woman started.

The book is rich of succinct character sketches full of efficient defamation: “George Martin was not handsome, he was not well-mannered, he was not entertaining in the least; in fact, every remark he made, every opinion uttered, was something stupid and inane; yet when George Martin entered a room, the eyes of every woman in it went to him.” Or the studio founder who “lived on in a Norman castle on Doheny with trained nurses to tend his artificial bowels.”

[TalkinHorse · Rating 3 out of 5]

A "Hollywood novel" from the periphery. First-person narration by a correspondent for Life Magazine who is trying to tell the story of a rich man who has moved to Hollywood and aspires to make his trophy wife a star.

The book is readable but clumsy and not very gripping. A stylistic problem is that the first-person narration isn't adequate to tell the tale; the narrator flails to tell other people's stories, often out of chronological order, and with a clumsy explanation of how he came to have knowledge of information that is not his own. I'm left wondering why this book was worth writing, or whether it may be a vague roman à clef based on some actual Hollywood scandal or the author's autobiographical incident, and it went over my head.

This is the sort of novel that, had it held my interest, I would be looking up the author's backstory to find out how similar his own life might have been to that of his narrator. But in this case, I don't care enough to follow up.

Opening lines:

First of all, I had known Angelica, his wife. I went to her second birthday party at the Miro country club, when she was supposed to have tossed pink cake in other children's faces.

When I was nine, "Tootie" James and I one summer afternoon climbed the great mimosa tree in Angelica's back yard. I had got out on a limb about eight feet from the ground, when suddenly I began to shake with fear. I longed to climb back to the trunk to safety. Angelica, who was one year older, sat in a clover bed below, looking up at me.

She was a pretty little girl, I remember, with long dark curls, honeysuckle skin, and tawny-gold eyes that glowed like two candles in the win. At ten she had already begun to paint her lips behind her mother's back. She wore shoes with tiny heels, flaring pink skirts, and owned a diamond ring. She noticed what make automobiles other children's families rode in, how many servants they had, how large their homes were. And she knew all about men's private parts, and could tell you where babies came from. Oh, she was a lovely, snotty, artificial little girl, and boys flocked around her like flies.

As I said, I had climbed out on the high limb and had begun to tremble, when suddenly Angelica said: "If you really love me, Charley Thayer, jump." And I jumped. As a result, I broke my right leg and I had to hobble around on crutches the rest of the summer months.

Some people seem to enjoy femme fatale stories, but I just find them depressing.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an obscure 1955 book about Hollywood. The writing and story are fun and the author has an exceptionally vicious take on the Hollywood scene. His style reminds of Patrick Dennis and the storyline reminded me of The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West. The original title was the Easter Egg Roll but I read this sleazy paperback edition. The title was really not appropriate. The author wrote an earlier book called “Tiger in the Garden” which I will try to track down.