Interview with a character—TOMMIE O’ROURKE

June 28, 2022 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

Interview with a character—TOMMIE O’ROURKE—for WWWB

By Shelley Blanton-Stroud, author of Tomboy: A Jane Benjamin Novel

About TOMBOY

It’s 1939. On the brink of World War II, Jane Benjamin wants to have it all. By day she hustles as a scruffy, tomboy cub reporter. By night she secretly struggles to raise her toddler sister, Elsie, and protect her from their mother. But Jane’s got a plan: she’ll become the San Francisco Prospect’s first gossip columnist and make enough money to care for Elsie.

Jane finagles her way to the women’s championship at Wimbledon, starring her hometown’s tennis phenom and cover girl Tommie O’Rourke. She plans to write her first column there. But then she witnesses Edith “Coach” Carlson, Tommie’s closest companion, drop dead in the stands of apparent heart attack, and her plan is thrown off track.

While sailing home on the RMS Queen Mary, Jane veers between competing instincts: Should she write a social bombshell column, personally damaging her new friend Tommie’s persona and career? Or should she work to uncover the truth of Coach’s death, which she now knows was a murder, and its connection to a larger conspiracy involving US participation in the coming war?

Putting away her menswear and donning first-class ballgowns, Jane discovers what upper-class status hides, protects, and destroys. Ultimately—like nations around the globe in 1939—she must choose what she’ll give up in order to do what’s right.

—

It wasn’t the best of circumstances the afternoon I interviewed world champ tennis phenom Tommie O’Rourke about her role in Tomboy: A Jane Benjamin Novel. Tommie had just lost her Ponds Cold Cream sponsorship. Here’s how the interview went.

Me: Thanks for taking the time, Tommie. I know how busy you must be, with your tennis training and all.

Tommie: Not so busy as you might think, now that coach is dead. [Slouching on the divan, she takes a long drag on a Lucky Strike, then puffs a fuzzy ball of smoke, which disperses around a half empty bottle of champagne and one glass.]

Me: You must miss her.

Tommie: What are you implying? [She curls her Tango Red upper lip.] Have you been talking to Jane?

Me: No, come on, I wrote the book!

Tommie: Like that means anything. Like you have any control over any of it.

Me: Hey now…

Tommie: You’re really more of a stenographer, and not that good at it either.

Me: Listen…

Tommie: Not one mention of my working as a spy in World War Two—I seduced an Austrian banker—it got in the Nuremberg Trials!

Me: Well, first, Tomboy’s set before that happens. And second, your character’s real life inspiration did that—Alice Marble—not you. You’re fictional. I made you up.

Tommie: Ha! What makes you think you made me up? Maybe I invented you so I could have a stage to perform on.

Me: Tommie, come on. You’re getting us off track.

Tommie: Who gets to say what track to ride?

Me: Okay, okay. How about just a couple simple questions?

Tommie: Wonder if you can pull that off. Okay. Try me. [She kills her Lucky, lights another, and extends her long arm, long fingers, long cigarette, admiring them all.]

Me: You had a romantic relationship with a pretty dangerous man in Tomboy. Are you still with him?

Tommie: I don’t kiss and tell.

Me: You are, aren’t you?

Tommie: Are you judging? With your house, your husband, your kids, your retirement…all that boring stuff.. You’ve made your tradeoffs, I’ll make mine.

Me: I don’t make tradeoffs. I’m not a liar.

Tommie: Really? So you just loved twenty years of PTA and school carnivals, no writing.

Me: This interview’s about you, not me.

Tommie: Mmmmmhmmmm… There you go pretending to control things again. (She shakes her ashes onto the hotel’s carpet.]

Me: If you keep sleeping with that guy for money, a guy you aren’t even attracted to, to say nothing of the complete lack of respect you have for him, doesn’t that make you a liar? A completely inauthentic fake?

Tommie: You’re hysterical. Are you really even a writer? Have you ever met even one person who is just one thing and acts consistently their whole life? Even one person?

Me: I’m not saying anybody’s just one thing. I’m saying your actions should tell the truth about who you are, even if the truth is complicated.

Tommie: Blah, blah, blah. Shoulda coulda woulda. Nobody does that. The world’s mean. If I told the truth about who I am, all the things I am, the world would say, Sorry lady, you can’t compete in Wimbledon. You can’t make any money. You can’t talk on our radio show. You can’t show your face on a box of Wheaties.

I don’t know about you, little miss white picket fence, but I don’t think authenticity is worth starving over. I’d rather sleep inauthentically with a well endowed man, if you know what I mean, and get my rent paid for a year. So yes, I’m still with him.

Me: Okay, okay, I get it. You’ve got a point.

Tommie: Just one?

Me: How about Jane? Are you still friends?

Tommie: Friends? Is that what you call it?

Me: So you’re just using her too?

Tommie: Hold up! Climb off the ledge! I’m teasing. We’re still “friends.” Listen, people need each other. Life is long. So we messed each other up a little along the way, my skin’s not so thin I can’t get over it.

Me: Can Jane get over it?

Tommie: [She puts out her second cigarette and pours a glass of champagne.] Jane is a very ambitious girl. As I know you know.

Me: Yes, that’s the way I made her.

Tommie: Sure, right. And I do like that about her. I understand it. But if she wants to survive, she’s got to grow rhinoceros skin. She can’t get her feelings hurt over every little tussle.

Me: Tussle? Lying about a crime? You call that a tussle?

Tommie: Whatever. Like I said, life is long. Mine, and hers. We’ve got a lot to accomplish. Sometimes, we’re on the outs, sometimes we band together. Don’t clutch your pearls. That’s how it works.

Me: Isn’t that what Jane says, Don’t clutch your pearls?

Tommie: Where do you think she got it from?

Me: So you two keep up? What, are you in cahoots? I have to deal with you again?

Tommie: Sounds like you better write book three if you want us to let you in on it.

—

Shelley Blanton-Stroud grew up in California’s Central Valley, the daughter of Dust Bowl immigrants who made good on their ambition to get out of the field and into the city. She taught college writing for three decades and consults with writers in the energy industry. She codirects Stories on Stage Sacramento, where actors perform the stories of established and emerging authors, and she serves on the advisory board of 916 Ink, an arts-based creative writing nonprofit for children. She has also served on the Writers’ Advisory Board for the Belize Writers Conference. Tomboy is the second book in her Jane Benjamin series. Her debut novel, Copy Boy, was the first. Shelley and her husband live in Sacramento with an aging beagle and many photos of their out-of-state sons.