My BOOKS
Voices on the River: 22 Days on the Delta Queen
Come along on a vacation unlike any you have ever taken -- as a big red paddlewheel propels you along the currents of history, romance, and memory on the grandest steamboat ever to cruise America's inland rivers, the magnificent Delta Queen. Voices on the River recounts a nostalgic three-week journey on this legendary boat through the heartland of America. Your travel companions will include everyone from folk heroes like Mark Twain and Roy Rogers to Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Jimmy Carter. One of the many joys of steamboating is that travelers never know what unexpected delight lies in wait around the next bend. So too, in Voices on the River, the reader never knows what happy surprise awaits on the next page. Welcome aboard the Delta Queen, for the trip of a lifetime!
a conversation with Dennis Brown
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What’s the book about?DB: I would tell folks that Voices on the River is a book about the Delta Queen steamboat. But that didn’t really rouse anyone’s enthusiasm. So I would add that Voices is about three steamboat cruises I took in 1986. It’s part travel book, part popular history, part personal memoir. That didn’t get people too excited, either. It wasn’t until I had finished the book and was reading a bound proof, that I discovered what Voices on the River is really about. Funny how you can miss these things as you’re writing, but I came across a sentence I had read a hundred times. Captain Lawrence Keeton, master of the Delta Queen, is talking about his early career working on towboats for the Army Corps of Engineers. “I spent most of my life on towboats,” he says. “My first was the Ohio. If a man can love a hunk of steel – I mean, if you can love a fabricated piece of steel – I loved that hunk of steel.” Suddenly, as if in an epiphany, I realized what Voices on the River is about: My book is a love story. If you can love a big constellation of wood – I mean, if you can love a boat comprised of walnut and teak and mahogany and Ironwood, all of it propelled by a big red wooden paddlewheel – then I loved the Delta Queen.
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How long did it take you to write the book?DB: This, again, was tough to answer while I was writing the book. But now that Voices is done, I can state very specifically that the writing took four years.
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Why so long?DB: I took a long time pondering that question. Then the answer came to me. Why did it take so long for me to write Voices on the River? Because I wanted it to. I enjoyed writing the book. I liked getting up every morning, sitting at my laptop, and asking myself: Where are we today? Are we still in St. Louis, walking out onto the magnificent Eads Bridge? Or am I chatting on the Sun Deck with the delightful Captain Fred Way, who in 1986 knew more about steamboating than anyone alive? Am I down in Plains, Georgia, talking to Jimmy Carter about his exciting Delta Queen cruise from St. Paul to St. Louis? Or am I in Pittsburgh, listening to Roy Rogers reminisce about his career? Wherever the boat took me, I liked being there.
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Are you satisfied with the final product?DB: I am very satisfied. My intrepid and fearless layout designer, Kary Spiegel, kept saying, “We are not sending this book to the publisher until you are 100% satisfied.” It took us a while, but now I am. The very last change occurred in the final chapter. At the last minute, I replaced the word “voyage” with “odyssey.” I suppose the Homeric definition of “odyssey” might be “a long, perilous journey fraught with trials and tribulations.” My river voyage was not filled with tribulations, but it was epic, nevertheless. Not only does the reader travel the inland rivers through thousands of miles of America, but the journey extends far beyond the confines of the river. You will ride in the pace car at the Indy 500 … you will find yourself on Cemetery Ridge on the day after the Battle of Gettysburg … you will join Elvis Presley on the film set of Blue Hawaii … you will be sitting with the defense during a highly publicized murder trial in Atlanta. I don’t think it matters if the reader has ridden on the Delta Queen – or never even heard of the Delta Queen. I hope that both the love story and the epic range that permeate Voices on the River will reach out and embrace any reader.
When people hear you’re writing a book, they like to ask questions of the author. The most prominent question is:
SHOPTALK:
Conversations about Theater and Film with Twelve Writers, One Producer – and Tennessee Williams’ Mother
The title pretty much says it all. It’s quite a thrill the first time you hear those magical words, “We want to publish your book,” and equally satisfying when you start receiving nice reviews from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. New York Times theater critic Frank Rich talked me up on the radio. Stephen Sondheim wrote to tell me he’d bought the book. When unexpected things like this happen, you feel as if you have “upped” your game.
ACTORS TALK:
Profiles and Stories from the Acting Trade
Again, the title is self-explanatory. Lots of interviews, some long, some brief. In the final days before publication, some anonymous editor littered the photo captions with egregious typos. It took me years to get over that. Now I can look at the book and see that it has much to offer, including an up-close profile of Gregory Peck, an appreciation of Jose Ferrer that was long overdue, and a candid conversation with Paul Winfield that speaks bluntly to the plight of the Black actor in America.
Forgive Me Father, For I Have Cinema'd
Back in 1960, The Hoodlum Priest, a movie about an iconoclastic St. Louis Jesuit priest that mostly filmed in St. Louis, was the first movie location I ever set foot on. I was so excited to have been invited. Alas, I made the mistake of arriving during the lunch break, and my first encounter with a movie set was about as exciting as eating week-old mashed potatoes. A year later, I attended the world premiere here in St. Louis, and the film itself was very exciting. I attached myself to that movie. I followed its trajectory as it opened across America; I accumulated all the reviews. The Hoodlum Priest was an enormous hit – and then, before you could blink an eye – the film was airing on television. For 50 years, I wondered: What happened? I wrote this piece to coincide with the movie’s golden anniversary. I wrote every word, did not allow my wonderful editor, Tom Finkel, to change anything. But it was Tom’s job to write the title. He did not want to show me his title, because he was sure I would disapprove. This might be the only thing Tom was ever wrong about. I loved the title, and so did Don Murray, the film’s producer/star. After he read the story, Don phoned me. He was crying with happiness. He extolled me as “the savior of the film.” You don’t write stories to please your subject; you write to try to scratch away at that elusive commodity known as the truth. But if you are able to tell the story true – and you still please the people you’re writing
about – that feels good.
Beat Regeneration
In 2004, when a local theater company revived the 1959 Broadway musical The Nervous Set, which had originated here in St. Louis, I thought it would be fun to write a 650-word column about the musical, a send-up of the “cool, Daddy-O” hippie world of the 1950s, for The Riverfront Times. One conversation led to another. Eventually I was steered to a fellow named Theodore J. Flicker in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who had conceived, directed and secretly written the book for The Nervous Set. When I first spoke to him, I said, “I don’t think anybody’s told this story.” To which he replied, “I’m not sure it needs to be told.” I told it anyway, and a 650-word column morphed into a 5,000-word cover story, a cautionary tale of what can happen when you abandon your ethics and standards. My interviews with Ted became a kind of confessional. After he saw the piece, he wrote, “In a lifetime of being written about, I never had the kind of deep satisfaction that I got last night reading your story. The NY production of The Nervous Set has always eaten away at me. Your story has cured that spot of hurt. I am deeply grateful.”