Preface to the 20th Anniversary Edition - Where the Truth Lies

There is no time more pleasurable for me as a writer than when I’m researching a novel or script, immersing myself in a world or era vastly unlike the ever-present present.

I spent nearly two blissful years roaming the wondrous realm of my second novel, Swing, set in the real but long-forgotten “World’s Fair of the West” (technically, The Golden Gate Exposition of 1940).

And for those of you who come here from the pages of my recent bestseller Murder Your Employer, you can well imagine the joy (and years) I took inventing every detail of the sprawling campus of McMasters, a finishing school for finishing people off, along with its experienced faculty, murderous curriculum, supportive textbooks, and perilous after-school activities.

But my preparation for writing Where the Truth Lies was a vastly different scenario. When the novel was first published, I was somewhat surprised by the many compliments it received for its detailed evocation of mid-1970s Hollywood, New York, and Miami: the sinfully sybaritic hotels, romantic restaurants with exacting kitchens or excessive kitsch, outrageous perquisites of first-class travel on the first jumbo jets, secret passageways and clandestine watering holes of Disneyland, a certain Bel Air hotel’s sacrificial swans, its lovely haunts and loose mores… one journalist, generously praising its meticulous period reconstruction, inquired how many months or even years I had spent researching the novel.

“None,” I replied. “I was there.”

This book is simply The Time of My Life, intensely experienced and lovingly remembered with equal amounts of disbelief and chagrin. Yes, I’d worked in L.A. a number of times in the late sixties. But in 1974, when I was the same age as Kerry O’Connor, Barbra Streisand heard my just-released debut LP and beckoned. Soon I was writing, arranging, and conducting her next album (Lazy Afternoon) and working as both a songwriter and interim script editor on her upcoming motion picture (A Star Is Born). I’d gone from a one-bedroom apartment on the East Coast to an office on the back lot of the Burbank Studios—not a tourist backlot like Universal, but the working remains of both Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures, where Shangri-la was just a stone’s throw from Paris, Texas. I found myself living at, alternately, the Bel Air Hotel, a fragrant garden apartment in Studio City, Barbra’s guest house on Carolwood Drive, and the two-bedroom bungalow with kitchen at the Chateau Marmont where a few years later John Belushi tragically checked in and checked out.

From the daft Autopub with its indoor drive-in movie room, and the deft gastronomy of Manhattan’s first Szechuan restaurant, to singing the national anthem at Shea Stadium to a crowd of 60,000 on Fireworks Night… strap me to a polygraph, cross my heart and hope to die, all is from firsthand knowledge. This world and its denizens are 99 and 44 / 100 percent true if hardly pure. And our protagonist, Kerry O’Connor, is based on several amazing women who forged ahead in Hollywood at a time when feminism was defined as “you’ve got your own cigarette now, baby!” and the divide between Public Relations and Private Relationships was often an invisible line.

In Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, the protagonists discover a message within a volcanic rock. It reads (in part): Descend into the crater, audacious traveler, and you will reach the center of the earth. I did it. Likewise, I hope you will descend with Kerry O’Connor into this crater she has stumbled upon. I went there, and so can you—garish and shameless a time as it was.

When I first began drafting this novel of intrigue, I decided it should best be told from Kerry O’Connor’s point of view, as she had the potential to be both detective and victim. At the time, I wondered aloud to my friend Jon Karp (editor of all my novels, including this one) if I dared narrate in a woman’s voice. He smiled and cited a string of vocalists and characters who’d brought my words to life in the first person: Barbra Streisand, Rita Coolidge, Dolly Parton, Dionne Warwick, Judy Collins, Dame Cleo Laine, Blossom Dearie, Patti LuPone, and countless female characters on stage and TV.

* * *

In the 1950s, the two coolest people on the planet were Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. As the “any resemblance” disclaimer so eloquently exculpates, all characters in this novel are fictitious. Vince Collins is not Dean Martin; Lanny Morris is not Jerry Lewis. No deceased young woman was ever found in any hotel suite of theirs.

But one of the inspirations for Where the Truth Lies does honestly lie in the heartbreak I felt as a boy when Dean and Jerry, my showbiz heroes, ended their partnership and friendship with no explanation, and then went without speaking to each other for nearly thirty years. A generation of fans felt devastated and betrayed by this huge and haunting mystery, one I’ve tried to address for myself within this narrative.

But now here’s the strangest thing: some five years after Where the Truth Lies came out as both a book and an Atom Egoyan motion picture, composer Marvin Hamlisch asked me to write the script and lyrics for a musical based on the classic film comedy The Nutty Professor. The musical was to be directed by the original film’s star and auteur… Jerry Lewis.

Upon hearing this and thinking about the questionable behavior of the principals of my novel, I did what most novelists in my shoes would have done. I gulped. A real audible gulp, like a comic sound effect in a Jerry Lewis movie.

I flew with Marvin to Las Vegas to meet Jerry, half-fearing this was a setup for a mob hit. No. He had warmth, he had charm… he had never read my book.

Several months later came the day when Marvin and I were to perform the first songs we had written in order to earn Jerry’s approval. And as I stood with the legendary comedian only a few feet from me, I realized I was going to have to sing the lyrics and dialogue I had written in the voice of a character he had both created and portrayed. In other words, I was going to have to do Jerry Lewis for Jerry Lewis!

When I had finished selling the song for dear life, he applauded, declaring: “Holmes, you’re a real ham!”

I thought, “Jerry Lewis is calling me a ham?”

We became friends as well as collaborators. As my boyhood hero, he never disappointed my adult self. He was a complex but always wildly inventive man. As our work continued, I became privy to his fascinating reminiscences and confidences.

Then one day he asked for a copy of this very book. How could I say no? And for the next few years, every time we met, I expected him to enter enraged, hurling the book (or at least some of its more scandalous pages) in my face. Until I at last realized with immense relief that there was no way Jerry was going to sit down, notify his secretary to hold all calls, and actually read this elaborate novel from cover to cover.

But please don’t let that stop you.

One final note about Jerry and me: In 2009, Marvin and I were rehearsing at the New 42nd Street Studios for a reading of The Nutty Professor when we read online that Jerry’s son Joseph had died the night before at the age of forty-five. The circumstances of his son’s last years were painful to read.

Jerry had been brought up with a certain kind of show business ethic, and I was not all that surprised to see him walk into rehearsal that day. We gave him space, but as he continued to watch the actors—minus his usual exuberance for their work—I sat down near him and shared that I, too, had lost a child, and had come to feel that tragedy is what we are all heir to as finite, sentient creatures… and that comedy is what our species uniquely invented to bear that sadness… Jerry being one of the true wizards of that brand of sorcery.

Jerry turned to me and softly inquired, “How long ago?”

I did the math in my head, and no matter what the answer, it always stuns me. “Twenty-three years,” I said.

He stared at me for a while and then replied, “You mean twenty-three days.”

And sadly, I knew that to be the truth.

Rupert Holmes

2026