NIGHT NIGHT, SLEEP TIGHT mixes memoir, fact, fiction

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HALLIE EPHRON: Today’s the day! Night Night, Sleep Tight goes on sale. Officially.

This is the book I feel as if I’ve spent the last 20 years gearing up to write. It’s intensely personal, because as much as it’s a murder mystery and a suspense novel, it’s also a story about growing up in Beverly Hills.

In the book, Deirdre Unger is me. Sort of. Born when I was. Like me, she’s the daughter of a pair of married screenwriters, though she has a brother and I had three sisters. As a teenager, Deirdre was tall and gawky, flat-chested, painfully self conscious, and a lot smarter than she was savvy. All me. She moved to San Diego; I moved to the east coast.

Parts of this book began life as a memoir that I never finished. About three years ago, I dug out that old manuscript. It began: “Living in Beverly Hills was all about shoes.” Not a bad opening line, but what followed were a series of episodes about me and my best friend when we were about fifteen. Nicely written episodes. But unfortunately there was no story arc. No stakes. No point, really, other than a bunch of reminiscences.

What it needed, I realized now, was a murder.

Inspiration came from the 1958 murder of movie star Lana Turner’s mafia-connected boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato. I was ten, four years younger than Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, who confessed to stabbing Stompanato to death. The house where the murder took place was two blocks away from where I grew up.

Maybe that proximity is the reason I remember the news stories about that murder so vividly. The photographs of the pink bedroom and Johnny Stompanato lying dead on the plush carpeting. Of Cheryl Crane being led away by the police, her scarf-wrapped head bent.

I imagined what it must have been like that night for Cheryl, growing more and more frightened as Stompanato beat and threatened her mother. I could visualize myself in her place, formulating a plan, going into the kitchen, pulling open a drawer and selecting the longest knife, then climbing the stairs to her mother’s bedroom, and screwing up her courage to act. She told the police that when she entered the bedroom, Stompanato rushed her and ran into the knife. It severed his aorta. It was an amazing story. A miracle, really.

After school I’d ride my bike over to that corner house and stare up at the second-floor windows where I imagined the murder had taken place. Later, I imagined what it must have been like for Cheryl to live with the burden of what she’d been through. Even though the killing was ruled justifiable homicide, for the rest of her life she’d be dodging paparazzi. Stared at by strangers. She’d never sought fame but she was forever saddled with it.
 

I took the broad outlines of the murder and the theme of fame festering into notoriety, and bent them into a fictional tale of two girls who are best friends. One is the daughter of a glamorous movie star, the other the daughter of screenwriters. A murder happens after a party at the movie star’s house when the best friend is sleeping over. Both girls’ lives are forever changed

Twenty years later they are reunited in the aftermath of a new murder. This time it’s someone in Deirdre’s life.

To find out more, find me! My schedule of events is on my web site. I'll be around and about in New England and in Southern California, where the story is set. Book launch at Brookline Booksmith TONIGHT!

Today's question: What were the sensational news stories that captured your imagination when you were growing up?