Daisy DeVoe has left her abusive husband, her father has been pinched for bootlegging, and she’s embarrassed by her rural Kentucky roots. But on the plus side, she’s climbing the ladder in the salon of Paramount Pictures, styling hair for actress Clara Bow.
Clara is a handful. The “It” Girl of the Jazz Age personifies the new woman of the 1920s onscreen, smoking, drinking bootleg hooch, and bursting with sex appeal. But her conduct off the set is even more scandalous. Hoping to impose a little order on Clara’s chaotic life, Paramount persuades Daisy to sign on as Clara’s personal secretary.
Thanks to Daisy, Clara's bank account is soon flush with cash. And thanks to Clara, Daisy can finally shake off her embarrassing past and achieve respectability for herself and her family.
The trouble begins when Clara’s newest fiancé, cowboy star Rex Bell, wants to take over, and he and Daisy battle for control. Torn between her loyalty to Clara and her love for her family, Daisy has to make a difficult choice when she ends up in the county jail.
Here, Daisy sets the record straight, from her poverty-stricken childhood to her failed marriage; from a father in San Quentin to her rollercoaster time with Clara, leaving out none of the juicy details.
I have a strong following of regular fans in the old Hollywood subculture. The Forgotten Flapper, my first bestseller, is up over 700 ratings/reviews on Amazon. I continually hand out postcards with my book information on it, wherever I travel, whether in Canada, the U.S. or internationally.
I have not been monitoring my rankings for several years.
umor has it that when confronted with a patrol of blue-coats ready to bivouac outside his cabin near Fredonia, Kentucky, my grandpappy, Will Henry DeBoe, gave their captain such an earful that they turned tail and spent
the night elsewhere. Yes, they had guns, but he had a tongue sharper than Robert E. Lee’s saber. Kentucky was a border state, but there was no doubt where Grandpap’s sympathies lay. When that rebel general, Nathan Bedford Forrest, invad-ed a few years later, Grandpappy saluted and tacked his Stars and Bars to the cabin wall. His was one of the few places that wasn’t burned to the ground.
It seems far-fetched, I know, but Paw swears up and down it’s true (even though he wasn’t born until twelve years after the war ended). My point being, we DeBoes don’t scare easily. Then or now.
Maw comes to visit me, but those vulture newspapermen take her picture. They’ve been camped outside for days wait-ing to snap photos of anyone related to the trial. The neighbors
already saw the police arrest me. Maw doesn’t need this. Not after what happened with Paw. She’s getting older, and at my age I should be helping her instead of being such a burden.
“Daisy, honey,” she said last time she came to visit, “cain’t you make some kind of plea bargain? So’s they can git you out of here?” She sniffed into her handkerchief and tucked it back into her pocketbook.
“Afraid not, Maw,” I said. I took her hand across the vis-iting room table. “I did what was right. I’m not a thief. The judge is going to realize that.”
Here I sit, in the LA County Jail. Money, publicity, and the power of Paramount Pictures was going to trump a poor secretary with the best of intentions. But this Kentucky girl still had an ace up her sleeve.
