SNEAK PREVIEW
Next Wednesday the Palatine premieres Book 2 of the Movieland Quartet, Occult Hollywood.
As Book 2 opens, Tom is about to unlock the mysteries of the Palatine Theater when he visits the widow of the occultist who built the theater. She is the former actress Daphne St. Lorraine, a glamorous gossip who, on the wings of brandy and liquor-soaked petit fours, tells all:
Gayly, colorfully, the actress reveals the secrets of The Religion of the Movie Star, the temple at the top of the theater, and, in the preview below, how her husband Arthur Aubrey came to conquer Hollywood.
Daphne St. Lorraine took a long, hearty sip of the brandy.
“Now Hollywood was in the grips of an Egyptian craze too. The discovery of King Tut’s tomb had set the twenties on its head. Aubrey was about to change all that with his Greek and Roman gods. It wasn’t hard. His British accent, laid on in all its cut-crystal iciness, gave him easy entree to all the chi-chi parties, there to cast his spell on the simple Hollywood folk.
“The movie stars didn’t know it, he told them, but they were the unwitting vessels of divinity … immense, eternal natures that throughout time had descended into special human beings and lifted them above mere mortals. The Romans called these powerful elementals gods, and for convenience, so did Aubrey. The ancient gods, he told them, had found a natural home in pagan Hollywood, and Aubrey had come to them, as we might say today, as a high priest of self-actualization. ‘I am but a messenger from Mount Olympus,’ he'd say — his idea of modesty.
“Now you can imagine how that went down at the parties, where the movie folk sat around him on couches and footstools and eventually had to make room on the floor. It is a well-known pitfall of the acting profession that by pitching oneself out into so many different characters, an actor can become … how shall I put it? … ‘confused?’ Add to that confused floating sense of identity a ton of money, personal assistants who never say no to you, wild acclaim on any street you walk down in the world, and … well, movie stars can lose themselves in a sea of unbearable wonderfulness.
“So here was Aubrey to tell them that on top of everything else, they were, in fact, the living avatars of this or that god, gods with natures as typecast as their own. Can’t you just see all those rapt, glamorous faces drinking this in with serious nods to mask the utter glee of grown children?
“But Aubrey came with a warning too. Movie folk were in grave danger, he told them in the direst of royal British tones.
“Aubrey pointed to the recent scandals, accidental deaths, suicides. Movie stars could go quite mad from housing such cosmic immensities, could be thrown, as from a speeding train, when their career was cast aside one day as another star ascended in their place, full of the charisma and elemental magic that had once inhabited them.
“The gods were promiscuous, hopping from body to body. The gods were carelessly cruel, rather like children themselves. But — and here was the hook — like children, these gods could be enticed if one properly understood their whims and knew how to cajole, flatter, and bribe them. They could be charmed, invited to inhabit one, make one a star, or a bigger star. Such were the lures that hauled in the big Hollywood fish to join Aubrey in the hidden temple at the top of the Palatine Theater.”
Occult Hollywood will be offered to paid subscribers. Every Wednesday a new chapter.
A payment portal will be available on this site on or around July 1.
Book 1 - Disappearance in a Darkened Theater remains free to all subscribers.
