McCall wasn’t used to being denied. The granddaughter of John A. McCall, the president of insurance giant New York Life, she came from rarified stock and soon entered decidedly glamorous circles. Actors James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were friends. (Cagney’s working-class bad boy allure led McCall to use him as the basis of the hero of “The Hoofer,” one of her early popular short stories.) In 1927, at age twenty-three, she married the dapper, worldly Dwight Franklin, a costume designer and miniature artist who was much in demand as the film industry churned out swashbuckling adventure flicks; he’d even appeared alongside Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate.
McCall soon gained a foothold of her own as a short-story writer. Her tales were often satirical and largely concerned with working-class women, a subject that would interest her throughout her career. Despite publishing in top magazines like the New Yorker, Collier’s, and the Pictorial Review, the money wasn’t enough; in 1930, she’d had her first child, and life in Manhattan was far from cheap. Glossy magazines were suffering following the Great Depression, which meant McCall was too. As Cagney and Bogart went Hollywood, it was only natural that McCall would try her hand in the land of plenty. The Goldfish Bowl was her gambit to enter the industry.
Her tales were often satirical and largely concerned with working-class women, a subject that would interest her throughout her career.
The book was a fictionalization of the mania that surrounded Charles Lindbergh, who had in 1927 become the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris. In McCall’s version, young submarine officer Scotty McClenahan becomes an overnight sensation after he saves his crew, electing to stay behind and suffocate so as to get everyone else out. He’s rescued at the last minute, and the parades commence: Scotty had been…
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Auteur: Alex N. Press
