The Brooklyn Rail

Nestled in a dark enclave amongst the many gyres, vapors, and innumerable spectacles of the Museum of Science and Industry, a Fairy Castle looks to have wandered out of a child’s imagination and lost its way. It has been delighting museumgoers, adults and children alike, for nearly a century. It’s the sort of enchantment visitors might otherwise miss, radiating with the museum floor plan towards the model trains and the historic landmark U-505 submarine. But, sleeping quietly in its dark chamber, the Fairy Castle is its own museum of curiosity and delight. Among its many splendors, it boasts an exact replica of the rig that carried Napoleon and Marie Louise to their wedding at the Tuileries, five-hundred-year-old amber vases from the Ming dynasty, and shards of wood from the true cross.

Kathleen Rooney, author and professor, was among those enchanted by the Fairy Castle as a child. In the years that followed, the Castle continued to weigh on her mind. She measured the larger world against its miniature proportions, never quite leaving it behind when she exited the museum and re-entered the traffic and lake effect chill of 57th Street. She went in search of Colleen Moore, the enigma behind the Castle, a flapper movie star turned Hollywood golden girl. Why build a palace, Rooney wondered, grander than any in Hollywood, for imaginary sprites? What kind of person retires from the spotlight but persists in leaving saucers of milk and slices of bread on window sills for fairies? Hers was a peculiar brand of magic: stardust.

In her new novel, From Dust to Stardust, Rooney investigates the larger-than-life stories embedded within those minute chambers. By reimagining Moore as Doreen O’Dare, she traces her footsteps through the glittering Hollywood hills, from silent film star to philanthropist to inspiration for A Star is Born. In these spellbinding pages, Rooney constructs a fairy castle of her own, a chapter for every room, a house built of words.

Rachel Robbins (Rail): When did you first see Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle? What was your first impression?

Kathleen Rooney: In chapter twelve, my protagonist Doreen—recording the audio guide to her Fairy Castle at the Museum of Science and Industry—observes of a visiting school group who have just had their lunch in the museum cafeteria:

Into the silence that follows the recorder’s click, the kids’ voices from the corridor continue, with a slight shift in timbre: the nearly imperceptible difference of children who have been fed. Most of them will carry no particular memory from this day; one or two, perhaps, will have seen something that steers the course of their lives.

I put that in there as a nod to the mystery of what makes something invaluable to one person and just a passing amusement to many others. Millions of people have seen the Fairy Castle and millions have admired and enjoyed it but nobody else (as far as I know) has published a novel based on the life and work of the structure’s creator. Who knows why? But the day I first laid eyes on it when I was eight years old installed the dollhouse—and Colleen Moore, the silent movie star who brought it into being—into my heart forever.

Rail: You write about the “controlled air in the Dollhouse’s chamber” in juxtaposition to the open space of the rest of the museum’s floor plan as being blindingly bright, like stepping out of a dark movie theater into the light. How many hours did you spend with the castle in its enclosure in writing this book?

Rooney: What’s funny is that I never specifically went to the Castle over the course of writing the novel under the heading of “research.” I visited it in December of 2016—just after the election of the odious enemy of democracy, Donald Trump—simply because I like to go to the MSI during the holidays. Something about seeing the Castle I’d seen dozens of times before made me re-appreciate what a beacon of hope it had been to people in the Great Depression, and set me thinking more deeply about what people need to get through dark times and not give up, even against horrible threats. Although I had loved the Castle for years before 2016—twenty-eight years to be exact—I had never loved it with quite so much depth or complexity, and in the seven subsequent years I spent working on and bringing out From Dust to Stardust, that complexity has only grown. There’s something heroic about creating something so beautiful in the midst of fear and ugliness; the Castle has a weird charisma and it drew me into its orbit forever.

Rail: Can you talk about the structure of your book? Why did you choose to organize the chapters around the Castle architecture, and what surprises did that uncover?

Rooney: The idea of a memory palace—an imaginary location in your mind where you can store mnemonic images—has always appealed to me. I used to work as an artist’s model, and sitting still in a pose for long stretches gives you a lot of time to think, and can make you think interesting things, but you can’t just get up and write them down because people are relying on you to stay put. So back in those years, I built a ton of memory palaces in my own brain so I wouldn’t forget things.

When I began in earnest to write this novel, I immediately knew that the Castle itself would be Doreen’s memory palace. Of course, with its mélange of almost every fairy tale under the sun—from Japan to Russia to Disney to the Brothers Grimm to Catholicism to you name it—the Castle is a decidedly imaginary location. But—thanks to Colleen Moore and the craftspeople she commissioned—it’s also real; it’s material, it’s built, you can see and (if you’re a conservator) touch it. So from the start, I followed the plan of proceeding room by room, letting the Doreen of 1968 be set adrift over her illustrious past based on whatever she was encountering in the contents of the space.

Rail: Early on, you introduce The Birth of a Nation, through the naivete of a then fourteen-year-old narrator. The film, being unequivocally racist with direct relevance to the revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan, unmoors her family after her uncle helps it pass the censors on principle, sight unseen. This all seems shockingly relevant today. In what ways is the book engaging with trends in publishing from sensitivity reads to avoidance of the subject?

Rooney: When I read Colleen Moore’s autobiography, which I highly recommend, I was struck by the fact that her newspaper editor uncle Walter Howey helped get the film past the censors in the city of Chicago. Today we might say he was a free speech absolutist, or something along those lines. But plenty of people knew even back then in 1915 that the film was racist from start to finish, all the way to its core, and that it had the power to cause real damage, which it unequivocally did, essentially serving as recruitment propaganda for the KKK and unleashing hatred and violence across America.

As a huge Colleen Moore fan, I realized: I would not be able to even be her fan had her uncle not taken this questionable and controversial action. Because his doing so caused the director D.W. Griffith to owe Howey a favor, and the favor Howey called in was a six-month contract for his niece. There’s so much to think about there. And I was excited to get to talk about it in fiction because fiction can lead to a slower and more extended engagement with these relationships and twists of fate than a social media or nonfiction debate.

It would, for instance, be asinine and pointless to ask, “Was it worth it for Griffith’s horrible film to exist if it meant that we got to have Colleen Moore as a movie star?” But it can be rewarding to just consider and depict that this is bizarrely what did happen, and that this was the world in which she and millions of people were living at the time, a time of inequality and upheaval and problems of all kinds, a time not that incredibly different than our own. In our own world, all of us get by through hundreds of impure compromises within such systems as capitalism on a day-to-day basis. I didn’t think of it so much as a direct engagement with the publishing industry per se, but I did think it was relevant to all the conversations we are having about what to do with and about problematic art and problematic creators.

Rail: You also make an effort to embrace prevalent beliefs in Irish folklore such as thin places: “the borders between our world and the next are narrow enough to leak a bit.” What are some thin places you love and live in?

Rooney: Books! Books are 100 percent thin places. Movies, too, hence my working that theme so heavily into this book about the silent film industry—the dream factory, as we often call Hollywood. Sleep and dreams are thin places too. I love the idea that there are realms beyond the visible and we can sometimes be lucky enough to access them. Music is a total thin place, a portal to another place and time and set of beings. Writing is a thin place. Getting lost in a flow state where you forget to eat lunch or look at your stupid phone or even forget for a minute who you are in your limited container as one single separate person. Artists of all kinds get to visit thin places if they want to, I think.

Rail: So, onto another potential thin place: love. You write such an engrossing romance through the device of cold weather. There’s something so perfectly Hollywood about falling in love surrounded by mounds of fake snow. How does weather impact your writing process? As a flaneur, is walking part of your process year-round, even in winter?

Rooney: One of my most dearly held unpopular opinions is that winter is a magical season. When people complain about the “Chicago winters,” I: a) disagree because winter is one of Chicago’s finest times to shine and b) wonder what the hell they’re talking about because we’ve not been having proper winters now for years. Winter, it pains me to say, is dying. If you pay even a tiny bit of attention to the trends, we have been getting less cold and less snow—the most magical form of precipitation—for going on two decades. The planet is broken and we humans broke it and that sucks. I’m not a climate defeatist by any stretch of the imagination and believe we should keep the pressure on our leaders and corporations to do any and everything they can ASAP to stop the worst consequences of global boiling.

But yes, to say weather—and by extension climate—affects my writing process is an understatement. I’m super-sensitive to my environment in every way, whether I am sedentary or moving around outside. As a flâneuse, walking is crucial not just to my process but my existence. And I am already feeling the climate squeeze: more days of torrential rain; more days of heat so oppressive you should stay out of it if you have any choice.

So it felt really good to write the scenes of snow in the book, real snow and fake, and to weave it into the romance of Doreen and the director Victor Marquis. Even when someday snow stops existing for real, it will still exist in this book.

Rail: That’s such a magical way to think of this novel—a snow time capsule. Another thing I adore is that you manage to weave traditional Irish fairies and Hollywood’s golden age into such an unexpected and somehow perfect match! Did you set out to do so, or did one piece precede the other?

Rooney: When I was eight and seeing the castle for the first time, the wall texts explained that Colleen Moore was an Irish-American star and also raised Irish Catholic, and rose to fame at a time when there were still many less than flattering stereotypes about Irish immigrants, not to mention serious prejudice against Catholicism in the US. Even back then, something about that formula of Catholicism plus Irish folklore plus the movies added up to me. When you visit the castle, you learn that in the Chapel, she placed a piece of the one true cross, given to her by her good friend the Catholic convert Clare Boothe Luce. As in, the cross that Jesus Christ himself supposedly died upon. I had just done my first Communion back then and was still a very traditionally faithful person, and something about the fact that Colleen was able to balance this simultaneous belief in her religion, a pride in her Celtic culture’s more mystical aspects, and her incredible talent as a silent film comedian made me her ally forever. So yes, I set out to make sure all those strands got woven in.

Rail: At its core, this book is a devastating study about domestic violence and alcoholism. It takes an unflinching look at the blood-chilling abuse that Moore survived. It’s almost impossible to recognize her story in the watered-down Hollywood version of A Star is Born. What fears do you have about the way this Hollywood story has been transmuted by Hollywood itself? Why is it important to archive the facts and to tell the whole truth, and why did you choose to do so, strangely enough, in fiction?

Rooney: There’s some saying about how nonfiction is interested in facts and fiction is interested in the truth, and I think that can be an oversimplification, but there’s something to it. When I read in Moore’s own autobiography that her—admittedly brilliant as a producer and publicity man—husband exerted so much control over her career and life to the point where he tried to kill her not once but twice, I wanted to get that out on the page. This kind of thing—a man becoming proprietary and jealous of his talented partner to the point of abuse and violence—happened a lot back then and still happens, and it’s so easy to be like “she should have just left him” or “why did she stay” but it’s so much easier said than done, even when the woman is—like Colleen was—so famous and powerful in so many other ways. I think that this story often doesn’t get depicted in all its harsh realities because it’s considered unpalatable—it’s more fun to see Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper than to consider what a really messed-up dynamic actually entails.

I love so much that Moore eventually was able to move on and do so much for herself and for other people, including becoming a financial advisor and writing a book in the late sixties, in the midst of the Women’s Liberation movement called How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market, because of her firm belief that women should be independent and not have to rely on a man.

Rail: Speaking of which, there’s a clear feminist motif throughout that is reiterated in the silent films themselves—the literal silencing of female leads. In many ways, the influx of the talkies ushered in a new era, but for women, whether having volume and being heard were synonymous is debatable. Do you think in some ways that Hollywood, popular culture, and by extension the rest of us, are perpetually stuck in the past? Does volume make a difference, or are women still intended for looking?

Rooney: This is part of what drew me to telling this story—the prominence of women in the early film industry, and their subsequent displacement and erasure as the years went on, talkies came in, and men relegated them to the status of objects. In a weird way, women in silent movies have more of a voice than women in a lot of later cinema.

Colleen Moore’s granddaughter Alice Hargrave, a wonderful person and visual artist, introduced me to a brilliant documentary that breaks down how this silencing and objectification happened and to a maddening extent continues to happen, Brainwashed by the director Nina Menkes. What’s outstanding about her approach is that she doesn’t just take on the content of films and how sexist that can be, but she breaks down the techniques and the very grammar of cinema—the camera angles, the sound mixing, the cuts and the edits—that lead to a gaze that is too frequently misogynistic and minimizing by default. Everyone should watch it because it’s an education.

Rail: Speaking of Moore’s surviving family and legacy, I was horrified and perplexed by the unbelievable story about the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s failure to guard against the instability of the nitrate and the consequent destruction of that legacy—her whole life’s work, gone without a trace. As an artist, how important is permanence in your work? Do you hope your books will outlive you?

Rooney: Not gonna lie, I hope that people still read my books after I’m dead. But then again, why? What will I care? I’ll be dead!

But I do love using historical fiction to try to restore formerly radiant figures from the past—like Margaret Fishback, like Cher Ami, like Charles Whittlesey, like Weldon Kees, like Colleen Moore—to their past radiance. I love them all, I love them so much, and I want other people to get to love them too. But I also appreciate how each of the aforementioned subjects is an object lesson in the perishability of renown and the inevitability of obscurity.