Kings Go Forth

I've accepted the Blogging A to Z Challenge. All month, I'm going to blog about Books from A to Z.

At one point I discovered musicals. It must have been around the same time I started acting in high school productions, and I found that I quite enjoyed watching them. Singin' in the Rain. Camelot. West Side Story. Gypsy.

Those last two, of course, starred Natalie Wood, and I became somewhat enamored with her. I started watching more Natalie Wood movies, seeking them out on late night TV. The Great Race. Cash McCall. Bombers B52.

Somewhere around that time, she died. I read the biography her sister wrote. I wore a tux to the premiere of her final film, Brainstorm. And I sought out books, paperbacks, tie-in editions to her films, usually with a photo of her somewhere on the cover. And I found out that a lot of the novels, the source material for her movies, were actually pretty good reads.

I really enjoyed both the film and the book Love With the Proper Stranger. The same with Inside Daisy Clover. The most recent one I read, and this was just a year or two ago, was a World War II story called Kings Go Forth. The film starred Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis along with Natalie, and I'd noticed that it was getting an airing on TCM or some such station. Since I'd never seen it, I decided to watch it, which I did. Then I decided I'd read the book, which had been sitting in my stack of Natalie Wood related novels for many years.

Once, I had a dream in which Natalie Wood and I were sitting in a hot tub. "When we're together like this," I told her, "it's hard to believe you're really dead." I later cannibalized that dream in my short story In Memory Yet Green. Write what you know, people. Write what you know...