II. Joan LaCour Scott. She was my first, though not exactly. She was just one of the dead that appeared in a printed page obituary a few years back. Other dead people had caught my attention before, but she stopped me in my tracks. Who is this woman that wrote episodes of old time t.v. shows, from ‘Lassie’ to ‘Have Gun, Will Travel?’ A strange oeuvre! Pictured sitting in a checkered shirt towards the ends of her days, wist passing over her face — I fell into a fascination. Her story’s trail leads through an era of blacklisted writers — herself, her husband, her peers. Life in 1950s Hollywood Hills. She was known as the “girl that writes like a man” from when she covered for her jailed spouse and submitted his scripts under her name, out of financial necessity. She said the ruse taught her how to write, and she would eventually write scripts herself, that aired on countless tv dramas over decades. Of Lassie she is quoted, “There were funny things about writing for that show; you had to learn to think like a dog.”
I became obsessed for a time about Joan. She lived abroad as an expat for awhile, jail broke her husband’s spirit, she experimented with psychoanalysis. She seemed to project a gritty, working spirit all along, something conveyed in the picture that first caught my eye. She opened a doorway for me, of such people that did things but escaped larger lime lights. The also-rans and those that used-to-be…well, something. I thought I heard her talking to me now and then, about her daily life, the way she worked. Those messages were faint flickers that wafted through me. My research was short and ineffective, but her imprint on me remains ~~ III. Perhaps the winged messenger communicates in these ways, a yellowing obit, the unspoken words between lines on a page… I began to follow the trail of these dead people that existed between worlds, led by a girl named Joan, in a plaid shirt.
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