Glitter, Horror Are Bookends of Tryon’s Novels

Hollywood glitter; New England horror.

For Tom Tryon, actor, and Thomas Tryon, author, those have been the irresistible twin magnetic poles on the map of his vivid imagination.

After two best-selling novels about Hollywood’s legendary stars--”Crowned Heads” (1976) and “All That Glitters” (1986)--Tryon the horror master is back with “The Night of the Moonbow,” published by Knopf ($18.95).

Like “The Other,” Tryon’s 1971 psychological horror classic, the events in “The Night of the Moonbow” unfold in a seemingly innocuous but ultimately sinister Connecticut setting.

Evil in Camp

This time around, evil is lurking not in Tryon’s hometown of Wethersfield, which he calls Pequot Landing, but in “Camp Friend-Indeed” in northeastern Connecticut. Modeled after Camp Woodstock, the YMCA camp that Tryon attended as a boy, Friend-Indeed is a Bible camp whose optimistic motto is “Glad Men From Happy Boys.” But for 14-year-old Leo Joaquim, an orphan with a delicate artistic temperament who is struggling to suppress a terrifying secret, camp in the summer of 1938 is anything but a carefree experience.

Like Stephen King, Tryon has long mined New England’s landscape for his scary tales. “Harvest Home” (1973), his second novel about evildoings in bucolic New England, probably convinced untold legions of New York advertising men to forget their house-in-the-country fantasies.

Tryon, who was in bed recuperating from a chill and bronchial infection he caught in a drafty New York studio while recording the audio-book version of his new novel, recently spoke by telephone from his Los Angeles home about the “brooding darkness” of New England rural life.

“I have always felt there is that kind of steely, iron-y, dark, spare, sparse Hawthorne-ish aspect of New England which goes back to our Puritan forebears. There have been Tryons in the town of Wethersfield since the first 10 settlers,” says Tryon, 63. “There are pockets in the region that just seem made for that sort of dark horror story.”

Now for the Fun

If New England has been Tryon’s dark muse, Hollywood has been his “fun” muse.

By the time he got around to writing “Crowned Heads,” his first Hollywood novel, Tryon had accrued “a lot of inside dope.” Mae West had tried to seduce him. He turned her into the “Babe” of “All That Glitters”--and made the fictional most of the famous Hollywood story that the wisecracking sex symbol was really a man in drag. Fictional versions of Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo have also starred in his Hollywood novels.

As a young man Tryon was dazzled by the legendary Hollywood of the ‘30s and ‘40s. After making his Broadway debut in the Joshua Logan musical “Wish You Were Here” in 1952, he arrived in Hollywood on an inauspicious day--April Fool’s, 1955.

Paramount had a “lovely fish pond with golden carp” which was torn out and turned into a parking lot, Tryon recalls of that day. “It was a sign of the times.”

A Cardinal Role

The tall, darkly handsome actor appeared in scores of movies and television shows, and had the title role in “Texas John Slaughter,” the Walt Disney series.

And then came “The Cardinal” (1963), his most famous role and the one that, thanks to director Otto Preminger’s tyranny, eventually drove Tryon from acting.

“It was a very painful experience, and even today it’s painful to reflect upon or dwell upon,” Tryon says of working with Preminger. “He treated all actors abominably unless they were so big that they could just stomp on him. He never treated John Wayne like that. I saw him literally destroy actors, reduce them to babbling idiots.”

Tryon, who also keeps a home in New York, stayed in Hollywood (“I left in the spiritual sense,” he says) but turned to writing. “The Other,” a thriller about a 13-year-old obsessed with his evil twin, was an instant smash and later a movie.

(At a dinner party, Preminger once told mutual friends that Tryon should thank him because he was responsible for the former actor’s successful writing career.)

And although his books hit the best-seller lists, Tryon struggled personally, getting hooked on drugs and alcohol. He has been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous for eight years.

Tryon came clean publicly before it became fashionable to tell all in People magazine.

“I just felt that if in relating my own experiences I could help anybody, then it was worthwhile. And today the problem is so prevalent anyway, you’re looked at askance if you don’t have a history of drugs and alcohol,” Tryon says.

Children’s Market

These days, everything seems to be going Tryon’s way. After a delay in its scheduled publication (“we cut 250 pages”), “Moonbow” is out. In spring 1990, Tryon’s first children’s book will be published by Viking-Penguin. Called “Opal and Cupid,” it’s the story of a girl and an elephant, and Tryon jokes that “it’s typical children’s fare, with sex, money, greed, show business--all of those things that parents like their kids to read so they’re then ready for Jackie Susann or Jackie Collins.”

Happiest news of all, Tryon just heard from Knopf that the first volume of what he calls the “big book” has been put on the publisher’s spring 1990 list--with the second and third volumes expected to follow the next two years.

Tryon has labored for 12 years on “Kingdom Come,” which, when published, may number some 3,000 pages total, and those years account for the 10-year publishing gap between “Crowned Heads” and “All That Glitters.” It is a saga of two feuding families in Pequot Landing set between 1826 and 1878.

Publisher’s Reprieve

Hearing that the first volume, tentatively called “The Wings of the Morning,” is due out next year was like being “reprieved from a death sentence,” Tryon says.

And he says that he is pleased with “The Night of the Moonbow,” which he first began to write 17 years ago while on vacation in Mexico. But former Knopf president Robert Gottlieb, who was then his editor, “felt perhaps that it was too close to ‘The Other’ and that at that point I was repeating myself.” So Tryon put the manuscript aside for years and just finished it about 2 1/2 years ago.

Tryon acknowledges that critics will be tempted to compare “Moonbow” to “The Other.” Both are about adolescent boys and are set in the same pre-World War II era. Both Niles Perry and Leo Joaquim are, to varying degrees, wrestling with knowledge hidden deep in their subconscious. But there is at least one very important distinction, Tryon says: Niles is a victim, while Leo refuses to be victimized.

“The similarities I’ve made no attempt to disguise,” Tryon says of his new novel, “but I hope it will stand on its differences.”