i Oral History Program Val Holley Interviewed by Sarah Langsdon 21 August 2014 ii Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Val Holley Interviewed by Sarah Langsdon 21 August 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber and Davis County Communities Oral History Collection includes interviews of citizens from several different walks of life. These interviews were conducted by Stewart Library personnel, Weber State University faculty and students, and other members of the community. The histories cover various topics and chronicle the personal everyday life experiences and other recollections regarding the history of the Weber and Davis County areas. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Holley, Val, an oral history by Sarah Langsdon, 21 August 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Val Holley Val Holley 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Val Holley. The interview was conducted by Sarah Langsdon on August 21, 2014 in the Stewart Library. Holley discusses growing up in Utah as well as writing and music. SL: This is Sarah Langsdon and I am interviewing Val Holley. We are in the Waterstradt Room in the Stewart Library. Val, let’s just start with where and when you were born. VH: I was born here in Ogden in the Dee Hospital August 16, 1955. SL: Talk a little bit about your parents. VH: My parents are both natives of Weber County. My mother was born in Ogden, but actually grew up and went to school in Davis County. It was Davis High class of ’53. My dad was born in Slaterville and he was a fourth generation Holley in Slaterville. So, my roots in Weber County go back a long ways. My parents met because my dad delivered milk for his uncle’s dairy. His uncle was Ernest Ekins, who was once on the Ogden City Council, but he had a dairy in Slaterville. Dad delivered milk products around the area and my mother was working as a car hop in Davis County somewhere, I don’t—it may have been Clearfield—at something like a burger stand called Pink Bunny. They met there. There was a young woman from Slaterville named Joan Powell who was working there who said to my dad, “There’s someone here you should meet.” My mother’s name was Sharon Scott. My dad’s name is Orvil Holley. When they were married, Dad was 28 and Mom was 19. I’m sure this Joan Powell thought, “It’s time Orvil got married.” Now, to get into something quite personal. I think that the reason my 2 dad married so late—that is, late for a young Mormon man—was that money has never been important to him and it wasn’t until he met my mother that he found a woman to whom it was not important either. In other words, I think anyone he had dated before that had—he probably felt that they would expect to be supported in too grand a style than he was going to be willing to provide. SL: So how many brothers and sisters do you have? VH: I have four brothers, they are all younger than me. Their names are: Bret, Shawn, Shay, and Will and the sixth is a sister, her name is Savannah and she is married to Scott Cook and they live in South Weber. Except for me, all of my brothers live within spitting distance of my parents. You might think of my sister as somewhat of a rebel because she moved all the way to Davis County. However, she lives within spitting distance of her husband’s parents, so same thing. SL: What did your father do for a living? VH: My father grew up on a farm, but probably because he quickly realized that farming brings a lot of financial setbacks and disappointments, he didn’t want to farm, so he decided to become a teacher. His teaching career started out at South Junior High probably right after I was born and I think he was there two years and then someone—he told me, but I can’t remember at the moment who it was—someone suggested that he look into the LDS church educational system. So, he got into that. He told me in detail about this once, it was actually a very good story, but I just can’t remember it. So, from, I would say, 1957 forward to his retirement he was in the LDS church educational system. That had him teaching 3 at the Weber High LDS seminary, where he was principal and then he had an assignment for a few years where he worked with home bound students and then he became the seminary principal at Ben Lomond High and I think that’s where he was when he retired—about 1987. SL: What about your mother, did she stay at home? VH: Mother had always been a housewife. Well, almost always. She worked until she had me. I was born almost a year after they were married. As some sort of secretary. She was always very good at shorthand and typing. Then, when most of her kids were old enough not to need looking after, she went to work for the IRS seasonally. She was in their criminal investigation department and she worked long enough to have a small pension now. SL: What was it like growing up in Marriott-Slaterville? VH: Mariott-Slaterville didn’t exist when I grew up, it was just Slaterville and Marriott. I like to think of it as they got married. Marriott and Slaterville got married in 1997 or so. Before that, they used to share the same church building—the same chapel. But, before that, they didn’t like each other. I don’t know why, but I’ve been told by older people I knew (e.g. my great-uncle Ernest Ekins) that it was common for all the small towns in the western part of Weber County to be very insular and have rivalry with each other and not necessarily like each other. Although it wasn’t uncommon for the young men to raid the young women of the neighboring communities. So, Marriott and Slaterville didn’t like each other and I have been told that when the LDS church told them that they were going to combine their building funds and build a chapel together (completed in 1968) that 4 the Marriott people especially felt so strongly about it that they went to Salt Lake City and asked—begged not to have to join with Slaterville in doing this, but of course, they didn’t win that. Now, I think all of that is forgotten. I’m not sure that really answers the question—how was it to grow up in Marriott-Slaterville? Dull. Dull—very dull for someone like myself. I was always the kind who was interested in arts and humanities and there weren’t very many like-minded people to grow up with in that area. Not only just in Slaterville, but when I went to school. So, yeah, dull. SL: Where did you end up going to school? VH: I went to the public schools—Plain City Elementary, Wahlquist Junior High and Weber High—the old Weber High which was at 12th and Washington. SL: When did you graduate from Weber High? VH: 1972. SL: After you graduated where did you— VH: I came right here to Weber State College, before it was a university. SL: How was Weber? VH: I didn’t appreciate Weber State at the time like I probably should have. I was fortunate because when I first got here in the fall of 1972, I had 2 scholarships and so one was academic and one was music. So, it was paid for. I should have been more grateful for that than I was. Then, since I had the delusion that I might be pre-med, I took a series of chemistry classes. In those days it was quarters, not semesters and after three quarters of C’s, I lost the academic scholarship, 5 but still had the music scholarship, which, for the record, was the Mona Smith, which I think is still offered. SL: I think so. VH: Never having any idea who Mona Smith was, I’m not even sure when they brought in some of the old ladies who represented the board or the organization that administered the funds, I’m not sure they even actually explained who she was. It wasn’t until quite recently, now that I’m an avid Ogden historian that I bothered to find out who she was. But, so I kept that and I was involved in music, although I never considered myself a music major. I was in the a cappella choir, I was their piano accompanist and then in my second year which was 1973 to 1974, in those days they had a smaller singing group which was intended to go around and entertain at public gatherings and sort of be an ambassador for Weber State. They were called the Weber State Singers, they were under the direction of Lyneer Smith. I was their accompanist. Then I did a two year Mormon mission, I came back, I was here for a couple of quarters and the two quarters— winter and spring of 1977 and I was once again accompanist to the Weber State Singers. Now, some of those people from my generation are still doing it. There’s an alumni group, they call themselves the Weber State Singers Alumni and they’re under the direction of Evelyn Harris who was on the music faculty in those days. Evelyn wasn’t actually over the group, she wasn’t their director when it actually existed. SL: So when you were here at Weber, what did you end up studying? 6 VH: Well, the chemistry went out the window after the first year, then my second year—I’ve kind of forgotten. When I came back from being a missionary, I decided I was going to major in journalism, so that was my focus. Then, the journalism thing didn’t last for a long time, my mother convinced me that I should go to law school, so before I transferred from Weber State to BYU in the middle of 1977, I had started taking philosophy classes and things that I thought might prepare me for law school. SL: Then you transferred to BYU? VH: I did transfer to BYU where I was a journalism major and went to school nonstop from June, 1977, to August, 1978, and graduated in journalism and then I think I started law school three days after graduating from BYU in 1978. Now, law school was not a pretty sight. It was not a marriage made in heaven. I’m not the lawyer type. I finished. I got the degree, but it was a comedy of errors. I had been used to—to that point in my life, I had been used to being good and getting A’s and being the best in everything and law school was such a poor match for me that I started getting D’s and was on academic probation by the end of my first year. I was told that to survive and be allowed to keep going on, I would be allowed to drop some classes and just have a lighter load that first year. So, I survived, but generally, in those days you would finish law school in three years, I finished in four. Any time I had to take a final exam I’d get a poor grade, but then at the end of my second year I took one seminar for which you could write a paper and I got my first high grade and from that point on I took as many seminars for which, instead of taking an exam, I could write a paper. So, I 7 brought my grades up a bit, but I was never a stellar performer and it was clear I wasn’t going to get a job as a lawyer or anything to do with law by the time I was done. SL: Where did you end up going to law school? VH: The University of Utah. I applied—how many—I know I applied to BYU, they didn’t accept me, but University of Utah did, so that was that. I was glad I did, too, because by the time I left BYU I was ready to leave it. I was getting a bit annoyed at just the strict focus on the letter of the law at BYU, it seemed unnecessary to me. When I arrived at the University of Utah it was clear that it was a far freer academic setting. So, that was happy. Even though law school was not fun and not a joy and not a happy memory, it was nice to be at the University of Utah, which by and large I liked. SL: Were you involved in any organizations at the University of Utah or did you just focus on school? VH: None that I really should have been involved in. I needed money, so I went over to the music department and I started playing the piano for all sorts of things for the small amount they’d pay me, whether for individual voice lessons or for the opera theater workshop. That, of course, was really more of a distraction than it should have been from law studies, but I didn’t care so much. I was a lot happier in that setting even though it was doing nothing for me. SL: After you graduated from law school what did you end up doing? VH: It was clear, as I said before, that there was not going to be a career for me in Utah in the law or probably anything that I really wanted to do. So, let’s see, there 8 was another year—I finished law school in 1982 and I hung around just kicking around doing things for the next year before I moved to Washington D.C. I was still playing the piano for the music department at the University of Utah and also playing for various—in restaurants while people ate or at the Little America working with singers that were entertaining at Little America. It didn’t bring in that much money. It was—I remember it turned out to be far less glamorous than I thought it would be and far less money than I thought it would be. I don’t know where I ever got the idea that being a musician was lucrative because for me it wasn’t. SL: So then you ended up in D.C. VH: I did. I had known about D.C. because, let’s see, I’d been there a couple of times on family summer vacations and I remember liking what I saw—the Mormon community there seemed to me a lot more open minded and intellectually oriented than what I’d been used to in Utah. It seemed like people who did leave Utah went to California and I didn’t want to be one of them, I thought, “I want to go east, not west.” There was also the fact that I was meeting a lot of people, well, not a lot, but a few very significant people who had come to school in Utah actually doing just the opposite of what I was planning to do but they had grown up in D.C. and probably because they were Mormon, they either chose on their own or their parents decided to send them here to school. One friend named Gary Teare, who I knew when I was at the University of Utah, was from Bethesda, Maryland, and we were very good friends. He invited me to come visit on summer vacation, which I did for way too long. I’m sure his 9 parents were wondering when I would leave. But, in the summer of 1980 I had spent in D.C. at Gary’s parents place and had done a lot of research at the National Archives, even then it was clear that that was what I really liked to do. Also, in 1982 I think I was there for three weeks spending a lot of time at the National Archives and the Library of Congress just because that’s what I liked to do. In the spring of 1981, I met Bob Mensel in my Mormon student ward down in Salt Lake at the University of Utah who was also from—he was from Kensington, Maryland. There was a ward production of the musical, “The Boyfriend,” which was a musical of the 50’s which introduced Julie Andrews to Broadway. Anyway, I was in the show, Bob was the piano player, and the fact that he was from the D.C. area made me very interested. Bob was gay and he was really the one who brought me out of the closet. It was through my friendship with him that I came out of the closet, realized what I was, I should have been that self-aware much earlier, but probably because of Mormon brainwashing I just couldn’t see the obvious. So many of my gay friends say, “I knew from the time I was five or six.” Well, I didn’t and I can honestly say that. It should have been obvious but it wasn’t. So, by the end of the summer of 1983, I was ready to leave Utah. And, at that point I had met another guy—I hadn’t known him in Utah, he was from Nevada—he had gotten a job I think with the Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation in Washington, and by that time, I had met Trevor Southey, who was a very famous Utah artist; painted murals at the Salt Lake Airport. They’re not there anymore, but Trevor was a Mormon man who had been very popular very much en vogue in providing art for church museums I think in those days, 10 but Trevor was gay too. He had a wife and four kids, but then he decided he could no longer live as a straight man, so he was painting there in Salt Lake and all sorts of young gay men just somehow gravitated towards Trevor. He was sort of like a den mother or someone around whom a nucleus could form. So, I was sort of hanging around Trevor’s art studio and it was through him that I met Mitch Snow, who was the fellow from Nevada who was working for Interior. We decided to become a couple, so it was really to go back—I mean, I had wanted to go to Washington for a long time, but it was really Mitch who provided the toehold for me to go. He was house-sitting for someone in Alexandria, Virginia, who was away from their house for months and months and it was a rent free situation, so for someone who had no money— SL: Why not? VH: Believe it or not, when I went to Washington D.C. I couldn’t even afford to fly. I took the Greyhound Bus in the very beginning of August 1983 and looked for a job all month. Now we’re getting back to the law because even though I didn’t have what it took to be a lawyer, the practice of law to me is a team sport and I could never do team sports, the instinct for team sports was never within me, but I could research and if I really didn’t know what to do with the law, I was better than everyone else at finding the law and finding the history behind the laws and deliberations in Congress or what have you. So, I—through the want ads in the Washington Post, I got a job being a law librarian at a small firm, Busby, Rehm, and Leonard, that had only eight lawyers. They did international trade exclusively, about which I knew nothing. I think they took me on just because 11 they could get me for so little money, which I thought was a fortune, but it was nothing. So I found that job, took the Greyhound Bus back to Salt Lake where I was living and took a few days to wind up my affairs, buy a car, and drive across the country and live with Mitch Snow. After I moved in with him, it lasted four months, but I got a job and was off on my new life in Washington D.C. and I‘m still there. So, I’ve lived there for over half of my life now. SL: Do you want to talk about how your parents felt when you came out? VH: I would like to talk about it, but it hasn’t happened. In other words, they know, but it’s never been discussed. Now, I don’t think that’s uncommon either, not just among Utah families, but other families where it’s just assumed. I know my parents know, my brothers have told me that there have been discussions, but the word has never been said. They know what my living situation is. This is sort of getting out of any linear order that we’re in here, but with gay marriage really being on a roll now, in fact probably within a year, it’s going to be the law of the land. It’s now legal in at least 18 states and the District of Columbia and since I read the Standard online almost every day, I know that it’s in the paper here almost every day. Even so, my parents have never asked me about it, but they know and they know that I have gravitated away from the Mormon life that I had and that I don’t believe it and that I am not religious in any way. They’re nice to Joe. I haven’t mentioned him yet, have I? SL: No. VH: That’s sort of getting out of order. Joe Plocek is my husband of course. Same sex marriage became legal in D.C. in 2010. We had a marriage ceremony at the 12 courthouse in June of 2010. I’ve never told my parents that we got married. If they asked me I’d tell them. But Joe, who’s not religious and whose parents are not religious, has never told his parents. They’ve never asked. My goodness, we wear rings, and they’re not just rings they’re identical and everyone sees them but it can still be a tricky thing. We sort of got off track. SL: We did, sorry. VH: I don’t mind, it’s okay, this is all stuff I want to cover. SL: So, you’re in D.C., you’re going back to D.C.— VH: 1983. The fall of 1983. So, I worked for Busby, Rehm, and Leonard, a small international trade firm and there are two concepts in International Trade Law which are anti-dumping, anti-dumping has to do with foreign countries dumping, as it were, their products in the United States at prices lower than they cost to manufacture just to get a toe hold here. So, there are laws against that, anti-dumping. The other one is countervailing duty, we won’t get into that, but the funny thing about anti-dumping law, I told you that they took me even though I knew nothing about international trade. The first time I heard anti-dumping, I thought it had to do with nuclear waste. That’s how I started from ground zero, but I caught on quickly and my skills for organization and research soon made everything right. Of course, four months later, it was December of 1983 and it was the first time I had ever been to a Christmas party there—you know, an office Christmas party. And, of course, since I was there now we had to have a skit, we had to have music, and I wrote all of them. So, I don’t know what they thought they had on their hands, but they enjoyed it. 13 SL: How long were you there? VH: Three years, and then I just kept moving from one library job to another depending on if I could get a better salary. I’ve worked for a lot of the principal law firms, well, five in all, five law firms in Washington. Before I was laid off last fall, it was September of 2013, so that was 30 years in the field and they were good to me and I was good to them. My specialty was legislative history. I became, my second law library job I became what’s called a legislative librarian. I don’t think there is such a job in Utah, but in Washington D.C. where knowing what the legislative intent behind laws is can be such an important thing in lobbying or arguing a case in court. Most law firms do have a legislative librarian on their library staff, so I became very good at that. That’s one of the few things of my law background that I am now proud of. SL: When did you meet Joe? VH: I met Joe in 1995. I had just broken up with someone else. I had had a long term relationship from 1984 to 1995 and then there was a long distance dating situation with someone who lived in Connecticut. And then within hours of breaking up that relationship, I met Joe. We clicked right away. We started dating and it’s funny because Joe, at that time, was working for the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and it was an important job. He was the Chief Investment Officer, but because of downsizing his job had already been eliminated, so he only had about two months left to work and he was going to leave Washington and go back to Florida where he had an apartment. He’s actually a New Yorker, but people dissemble when they first get acquainted. He 14 told me he was from Florida even though he was really from New York. He did leave, but no sooner after he left, he sent roses to me at work and I thought, “Well, if that’s how you felt, why did you leave?” He started visiting a lot in Washington and I visited Florida. That was my very first time to go down to Ft. Lauderdale which was in the spring of 1996 and I’ve been there every winter since. It’s been kind of a nice thing, but Joe fortunately found a job in Washington D.C. A contact that he had from his years as an economist in New York, had told him that there was an opening for an economist and writer—a small D.C. company that furnishes—it’s called Market News—it furnishes information for bond traders. So, he’s still with them. He’s been with them going on 20 years. So, that was fortunate. So, it’s been a very happy relationship. I think it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. SL: Good. So, let’s talk a little bit about your writing. What was your first book? VH: My first book was—you know I don’t talk much about my first book—it was about James Dean, but it’s not the one that came out in 1995, which was James Dean: The Biography from St. Martin’s Press. It was a coffee table book which came out in 1991, its title is, James Dean, Tribute to a Rebel. Because I had long been a James Dean fan and belonged to a James Dean fan club which had a monthly newsletter. Someone I knew from that club told me that there was a publisher outside of Chicago that was looking for someone to write the text to a coffee table book that they were going to put out on James Dean. They had put one out already on Elvis and maybe some others, and I thought, “You know, I can do this.” 15 I first got the idea that I could write a biography of James Dean in 1985. So, it was ten years from the time I thought I could really do it to the time it came out. My first article on James Dean was published in Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History in 1989, so at least I had that on my little publications resume by that time, but when I found out about the people that wanted to do the 1991 coffee table book, I said, “I can do that.” I called them and they were persuaded somehow, probably on the basis of the nicely illustrated 1989 article that had been published in Indiana which was James Dean’s native state. And, yeah, they were persuaded, so they needed 40,000 words of text and I had 45 days to do it in. It was a very intense period of work, but I did it and the salary was $7,000, $3,500 of which I got in advance and $3,500 I got upon acceptance of the manuscript, so that was a very good credit to get to then convince other people to publish even more. Let me take a step backward, I think probably people will wonder why I was so interested in James Dean. We’re going to go back to law school. I was in my first year of law school and this was in the spring of 1979 and I should have been studying for my final in the subject of real property, which of all the subjects in law school was for me one of the most boring. So, I was in the Salt Lake City Public Library and I should have been studying, but I was back in the biography shelves thumbing through just looking at the spines looking at the dust jackets of some of the biographies and I didn’t know who James Dean was. Most people do know who he was by the time they’re in their twenties, but I remember I had seen the movie East of Eden in high school, we must have been studying John 16 Steinbeck because when I was a junior at Weber High they showed East of Eden and there was James Dean and he was extremely captivating. I thought, “Well, I know who all the stars—why haven’t I seen him? Why don’t I know who this is?” Somehow, I got through the movie without getting his name. So, I was there going through the biographies of the Salt Lake City library and I pulled one off the shelf, not of James Dean, but of Montgomery Clift. I was thumbing through it and somebody said to Monty Cliff, “Well, you should get to know this James Dean character. He likes motorcycles and waitresses and waiters.” I thought, “Ooh, this is interesting. I should read more about him.” So, I went to the Ds and got a biography and read it and just a combination of his good looks, his bad boy aura, which was the opposite of what I was, I was so good-boy you can’t imagine. Growing up I was the perfect Mormon boy. If you’ll permit a little bit of pop psychology, I think Mormon boys who are actually gay, whether they know it or not, realize that there’s something at the bottom of that difference and they compensate for not being like the other boys by being good and obeying and being perfect and learning their lessons and reciting what they’re supposed to. So, James Dean seemed to be the opposite of what I was and I wanted it. I think that’s what it was. Also, the fact that, not just that he was in Hollywood, but before that he was in New York in the early 50’s at a time which was of great historical interest to me because the energy in the arts was so strong then. This was still very soon after World War II and because Europe had been so devastated, their preeminence in the arts had been harmed and I think it had come into New York, so everything, jazz, ballet, painting—it was 17 all New York then and James Dean was right in the thick of it. So, I just became extremely interested. My mother’s older sister lived in Indiana and so if I passed through, yeah, about the time I moved to Washington, when I drove to Washington to move there I stopped in Indiana. Of course, I visited them before, but then, since they were my relatives nearest to Washington I would sometimes go to Thanksgiving there. I said to my aunt, “Let’s go up to Fairmount,” which was James Dean’s hometown where he was buried and so we went to see his grave and then I think there was something in People magazine about some annual celebration that they had every year on the anniversary of his death, which was September 30th and I hadn’t known about it, so as soon as I knew about it, the next September 30th, there I was, and I started meeting people who were also fans. Where did we leave off on the writing? Okay, so, there was the coffee table book which was published in the end of 1991. There was also another important aspect to the James Dean project which I’ve left out. James Dean’s high school drama teacher, whose name was Adeline Nall, was looking for someone to ghost-write her autobiography and she’d had a couple of ghost writers who didn’t work out. I met her on one of my annual trips to Indiana for the James Dean thing. She belonged to an organization called the Colonial Dames which I guess is like the Daughters of the American Revolution, and that brought her to Washington once in a while so we got to be very close, and I said, “Well, you know, Adeline, I can write your book.” But this began in 1987, so the article that I mentioned earlier that was published in Traces of Indiana History in 1989 18 actually had both our bylines on it. I had written a book manuscript for her and we had tried to sell it without success and it never was published, but we were able to get a portion of it published as an article. So, that helped me get the coffee table book job in 1991. At that point, I started very seriously, although I really didn’t know what to do, very seriously trying to get a contract to write a biography of James Dean because by that time I had read all the biographies that there were and they were obviously full of incorrect information—wrong dates, wrong places, contradictions and I thought, “I could fix this so well. I can do this. I’ve got to have the chance.” I think my story of first being published is not unlike other authors when they got their first book published. It’s always a case of rejection, rejection, rejection and probably on your 40th or 50th or more try, all it is is just dumb luck. It lands on the right desk. It’s just a matter of odds and you’ve got to keep sending it out. I managed to get myself a literary agent in Washington D.C. who sent the proposal, I forgot to talk about the proposal. The proposal was harder than writing the book itself. Writing the proposal with a good enough hook to get some publisher interested, but first you’ve got to get your agent. Well, I tried lots of agents before I finally got one. Nina Graybill was her name. Nina sent the proposal out to auction and since I’ve never been an agent, I don’t understand the auction concept perfectly, but I think what it was that she said, “This is open for consideration for “X” number of days or weeks and if you want this please respond to me by…” Auction, I guess, implies that they offered “X” amount of dollars as an advance, so I guess it can be a bidding war. This is a very interesting story. Right while Nina was sending this out, the Washington 19 Post, almost every day in its Style section would have a profile on some interesting person. More often than not, someone in the arts. For whatever reason, this caught my eye probably because it was literary. This was probably in October of 1993, there was a profile of a book editor in New York whose name was Charlie Spicer and what Charlie Spicer was famous for was the True Crime book. It went into quite a bit of detail about his methods. He lived on the upper west side of New York and every day when he would commute by a combination of subway—probably taxi to the subway stop and then the subway downtown— as he commuted, he would scan the New York tabloids for sensational crime stories and if he saw one that he thought would be a best seller, no matter how gory or obscene or just awful, he had one or more stringers that he would farm this out to and expect them to give him a manuscript in four weeks to be rushed into paperback on some very sensational crime. It seems to me that the principal person who did this for him was a woman who had a background at People magazine and when she was working she would just hole up with cans of soda and junk food and write until she had it done. It was interesting. So, this is the profile of Charlie Spicer and about a week, I think it was a week to the day after it appeared in the Washington Post, Nina called me with good news and she said, “Well, the proposal has been taken.” I said, “Oh really? Who?” “Charlie Spicer.” And I think because it was so fresh, not only in my mind but hers I said, “What would Charlie Spicer want with this book? This is a serious…” I mean, I really wanted this to be a scholarly, I hope that’s not an oxymoron, scholarly Hollywood book. “What does he want with a book like this? He’s True Crime.” And it’s funny 20 that Charlie, in all the months we worked together on this book, he of course was my editor, he never told me that he was a very intense James Dean fan. What happened is that later Joe had a long-time friend in New York named Walter, who I got to know after I knew Joe. Walter, somehow it came up, Walter had been Charlie Spicer’s roommate at one point and Walter said to me, “Oh, well, Charlie was a huge James Dean fan.” Charlie never admitted that to me in all the time we worked together. Actually, what he did say was that—okay, when proposals are sent out, it’s not the editor who sees them first, it’s their poorly paid, overworked administrative assistant who sees all the proposals. Well, the proposal had landed on the desk of his administrative assistant and she was a big James Dean fan and she showed it to her editor who secretly, I guess, was a big James Dean fan. So, that’s how it happened. I think the contract was signed in November 1993 and from the beginning I said, “You know, you guys have got to—you would be really smart if you were to publish this to coincide with the 40th anniversary of James Dean’s death.” Every year on this day it’s a big deal, but on the 40th anniversary it’s going to be pandemonium. Well, it wasn’t, but it seemed like a good idea. So, I had a year to write it until November of 1994 and then they had a year to produce it before September 30, 1995. That’s standard, that’s how long it generally takes. And that’s how it happened. Now, they did not give me a promotional tour. I wanted one so much that I was willing to pay for it myself. Somehow it was agreed that if I paid for the flights their publicity department would line up all the speaking and signing events, which they did. My tour included New York, Indiana—both Indianapolis and Fairmount—Ogden and Salt 21 Lake, from the native son angle, and Los Angeles. So, that was a good experience and I was very happy with it, I was pleased with it. For a while I had delusions that I could leave law librarianship and somehow go into publishing. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, but for several months I scanned the want ads under publishing to see what there might be. Also, while writing James Dean: The Biography, I’d worked closely with the Museum of TV and Radio in New York, which is now called the Paley Center. They’d helped me a lot in finding rare TV shows James Dean had been in (dramatic shows). Their librarians were very helpful to me and I thought, “I could work for them.” So, I talked to them about it and they said, “You don’t want to work here, we are so poorly paid you can’t imagine.” So, I thought, “No, I’ll stay in my safe haven.” At least I was making enough money as a law librarian in Washington to live on and take a vacation once in a while and to support my writing habit. After I finished James Dean, I was convinced that I could write anything I wanted. My editor, Charlie Spicer, for a while, would talk about ideas that I could do as another celebrity biography and we’d hit upon a name and I’m trying to remember, some of them were Burt Lancaster, I can’t remember if he had died yet. Was Liza Minnelli one of them? We just threw out name after name and Charlie would either veto them right away or he’d say, “Yes,” and then a week later he’d say, “No.” We just never could come up with another idea. What I really wanted to do, and this was a suggestion of Wyn Craig Wade, a friend in Indiana, I wanted to write a book about the friendship between Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy because I thought there was enough material there to make a whole book. 22 People knew that they had been friends and that they had cavorted in Las Vegas together and they had done whatever powerful men at the top of their profession can get away with, but the real story was not there. Nobody knew how they met, nobody knew what the friendship consisted of. Was there really anything there? What did they have in common? What women did they share? So, I wrote a proposal about that, my agent, Nina, sent it out and nobody took it. So, that was a bit of a disappointment because I did get a lot of data. It could have made something good. So instead, my next book was about someone who is not well-known now, Mike Connolly, who in his day was the top Hollywood gossip columnist. The reason I say top is that even though he wasn’t more famous than Heda Hopper or Louella Parsons or reporters like that, he worked for the actual trade journals in Hollywood and that was what the powers in Hollywood would actually read in the morning. The more famous gossip columnists stole all their stuff from Mike Connolly—or a lot of them. The situation with James Dean, it seemed to me obvious—one of my main reasons for wanting to write James Dean was that everyone had treated him as a heterosexual and he so obviously wasn’t. I said, “I am going to out James Dean and I am going to write about what he really was.” Then, unbeknownst to me, someone else had a contract to write a book and it came out a year before mine and it did what I wanted to do. It outed James Dean. That book was Paul Alexander’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams. So, I had to change—I had been scooped, so I had to change my approach. So, I couldn’t emphasize that as much, but Mike Connolly was a gay man who worked 23 prominently in Hollywood and had, for his day, the 50s and 60s, lived rather openly. He had a partner who worked as his leg man and they lived together and he didn’t try to hide the relationship. Now, when they went out in public, they had to have dates, but everyone knew what the relationship was. So, Mike Connolly in a way was the James Dean book that I had really wanted to write. In other words, this was my low-down, dirty, meat-and-potatoes, gay Hollywood book. Since Mike Connolly was not well-known, well, first of all, no commercial publisher took it. McFarland Press took it and they’re more or less a vanity press, although I didn’t know it at the time. Funny thing is, the Mike Connolly biography has been more widely and more favorably reviewed than James Dean ever was, but it still didn’t make any difference in the sales. So, once that was over, Mike Connolly came out in 2003, and I decided I’d said what I needed to say about Hollywood and it’s been Ogden and Utah ever since. SL: Let’s talk about your focus of Ogden and Utah. What did you look at first when you were doing your writings? VH: One of my other interests—James Dean was a great interest. I tend to have idols—literary idols, Gore Vidal is a literary idol, H.L. Mencken for a long time was, well, he still is an idol, but I belonged to the Mencken Society in Baltimore, I went to all the meetings. I was as avid about Mencken as I was about James Dean. My goodness, why did I talk about that? I was going somewhere and I’ve lost my train of thought. The question was— SL: Your interest in Ogden. 24 VH: My interest in Ogden and how did it happen. I can’t remember where I was going with Mencken. It seemed important. I just turned 59, I’m losing my brain cells. It really was going somewhere, it was leading to something about wanting to write about Ogden and Utah. Oh well, maybe it will come to me. By the way, Bernard DeVoto is one of those idols and I’m really glad and proud that Bernard DeVoto, you know, he preferred to pronounce it Bernerd. I’ve got to learn to say Bernerd. Anyway, I’m very proud that he’s an Ogdenite. If he could do it, I could do it, we all could do it. Coming back to getting interested in Ogden. Okay, now I remember what it was. I had written several articles about H.L. Mencken, none of them published in any general circulation magazine that would be widely read, but in the journal of Mencken studies called, “Menckeniana.” Since I’d studied Indiana so keenly for James Dean, I had found that Mencken had shaped Indiana’s literary image, so I wrote an article called, “H.L. Mencken and the Indiana Genii”, also for Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History. Genii being the plural of genius. That was a word he used, which was published in traces of Indiana History and then I wrote, “Vexing Utah: Mencken, DeVoto, and the Mormons” for Menckeniana. That’s where we were going. My first article ever published on Utah and anything having to do with my roots was that. That was in 1992 or so and even though I wrote it, at that time I had no idea, no intention, maybe not even any interest in being a writer about Utah history, Mormon history or what have you. But, it evolved. I’m going to try and remember all the things that made it come together because when it came together it came together very strongly. If I were religious, I’d say it was a personal revelation. Or what do they 25 say around here? How do they talk about it being? I was impressed. It really did come together in an amazing series of coincidences all at the same time. I was here in Utah. It was 2001 on a visit and while everyone else was at church, I was having coffee at Einstein Bagels here on Harrison Boulevard and looking at a Salt Lake Tribune someone had left behind. There was an obituary for a woman in Salt Lake City named Helen Marriott Dougan. Helen Marriott Dougan was the sister of J. Willard Marriott, who in my family had always had a rather revered position because we grew up right across the street from where he grew up. We may have had humble roots, but so did he, you know it was sort of an equalizing thing. It wasn’t just that—so it was because she was Helen Marriott Dougan that I noticed, but Helen’s daughter-in-law, Terrell Harris Dougan, who was a good friend that I knew from my days at the University of Utah. She’s in her seventies now. But, I read the obituary and I thought—I hadn’t been in touch with Terrell for a long time, but I said, “I’ll eat my hat if Terrell didn’t write this obituary.” I started thinking about how somebody from my very humble part of the world, Marriott and Slaterville, we lived on 700 South on the north side Slaterville, and on the other south side where J. Willard Marriott had grown up was Marriott. That got me to thinking about the Marriotts. There were eight Marriott siblings, and for someone like J. Willard Marriott to go out in the world and to become so acclaimed and so successful, I realized that I didn’t know as much about the Marriotts as I’d like to, and that it was interesting and I should know more. It also got me back in touch with Terrell, who to this day remains a very, very good friend. So, there was that and then I was talking to my great aunt who was an 26 avid genealogist, her name is Jessie Bishop Lewis, it was her mother who was the housekeeper at the Ben Lomond. That was my great grandmother named Marie Tams Bishop. They lived at 2824 Lincoln. Alright, Aunt Jessie was talking to me about something that just interested me to no end. It was that her grandfather, who was a Mormon pioneer named William Evans Bishop, had come to Utah with his first wife, whose name was Mary Pocock Bishop and she didn’t like it here for whatever reason. I don’t know what the state of the marriage was but she is one of the women who ran off with a soldier from Johnston’s Army when they came into Utah in the so called Utah War over at Camp Floyd and no one, whatever became of her no one knows. They had a daughter who had been about six years old at the time. Mary Pocock Bishop took the daughter and no one knows what became of the daughter. That’s my mother’s side. On my father’s side, my Holley ancestor Henry Holley, who is the original English immigrant, came over and his first wife came with him, but she didn’t make it to Utah either. In reality, she probably died on the trail, but it’s always been mysterious, we don’t know what happened to her and there were rumors that she left him because she decided, “I don’t like this, I’m leaving.” I thought to myself, “Okay, this is great. On my mother’s side, here’s a Mormon pioneer woman who said, “No more.” Here on my dad’s side, is someone who said the same thing. Okay, I’ve got not one, but two instances of this in my ancestry. I can’t have the only two instances in the history of the Mormon Church, it has to have been far more common than they want us to know, and I was so intrigued that I started researching. I never found out what happened to Mary Pocock Bishop. I don’t 27 know if we’ll ever know, but I gave it a real try. Then, also, I told you I was talking to my great Aunt Jessie and somehow, maybe it was my own pedigree chart, you know how the Mormon pedigree charts work, they have you, then your parents, your father and your mother, then their parents, their parents and by the time you get back four generations, those are your great, great grandparents and they’re all lined up in a vertical column on the pedigree chart and I’d seen this many times growing up, I even liked genealogy as a kid, I’d seen it, but during this visit, when all of this happened in 2001 I saw it in a light that I’d never seen it before. I looked down and I saw all of them being born in Europe and dying in Utah. It just hit me like lightning. I thought, “This was their defining experience. This was their Vietnam.” Call it what you want, but it just really struck me, so that plus the fact that I had two, well, they weren’t my ancestors, but my great-great grandfathers each had wives that left Utah rather than put up with it. And then Helen Marriott Dougan dying who I was very interested in—those all happened in the same trip and then it was just about that time when the University of Utah started digitizing the 19th century Utah newspapers. So, being curious about that thing, I started looking at them and I started typing Slaterville into the search box and coming up with what, to me, were very, very interesting stories about Slaterville and many of them were written by someone whose name was James Hutchins. I thought, “Hutchins, Hutchins, why is that familiar?” Well, it’s because my great, great grandmother Holley was a Hutchins. He was her brother and I thought, “These wonderful articles are written by James Hutchins and I’m related to him.” And I just loved this. All of this came together at the same time and the force of all of 28 these and the interest of going into these old newspapers and finding things about Slaterville that I had never imagined had been long forgotten, nobody knew about, weren’t written down anywhere else. I thought, “I’ve got to start working on this.” So, this is how Val Holley as an Ogden-Weber, Utah writer really got started. James Hutchins was the Slaterville correspondent. I also noticed that whenever James Hutchins went into Ogden, he was very popular. For some reason, the reporters just loved him. He could not set foot in Ogden without them saying, “Squire Hutchins, was in town today and he said that…” and whatever gossip he passed on got printed in the next edition of the Standard. I thought, “Well, they clearly loved him, why?” I couldn’t find an answer and then I purchased a copy of Sadler and Roberts Weber County’s History and lo and behold, they were talking about the early Ogden Standard and they were talking about how the reporters or the typesetters or all of the employees were paid. Sometimes there wasn’t money to pay them. It said, “Sometimes, they took their pay in beef that was brought in every Saturday by James Hutchins of Slaterville.” And there was the answer. So, these things just captivated and charmed me— interested the hell out of me. I just loved it. I’ve been on Ogden-Slaterville-Weber, Utah history ever since. SL: How did you get started with Two Bit Street? VH: I should have a ready answer for this, shouldn’t I? SL: Yeah you should. VH: First, it’s just such a wonderful, gorgeous, gaudy, sexy subject. The real question was, “Why? Why hadn’t anybody touched it before?” Well, of course, there’s that 29 other competing book. I can honestly say at the time I began my project, 2008, that hadn’t been published and I didn’t know it was coming out. I refer to Lyle Barnes’ Notorious Two Bit Street. So, I can honestly say there was nothing else about 25th Street. The same author had written a master’s thesis on it and I knew about that. I really should have a ready answer for this and I’ve spoken about it so many times in public here—on the one hand it should be obvious that it was such a wonderful, colorful subject, and here we are in Ogden and Ogden is famous for it. Why hasn’t anyone written about it? Well, I, cynically, I would say because it is not faith promoting and Utah historians do not write about what does not promote faith. Also, they probably were afraid of what they would find. Namely, that the Mormons were up to their necks in 25th Street making money off of it just like everyone else was. It was just an incredible subject, incredibly colorful. I never dreamed that I could have something that colorful to write about and the fact that it hadn’t been done before. I should say that, James Dean, by the time I got around to him, had been done to death. Every word I wrote, I was looking over my shoulder conscious of not copying what someone else had written, being fresh and new and not duplicating what had already been done. With 25th Street I didn’t have to do it because I was the first one. So, that was very gratifying. There was the fact that as I went along I was just finding wonderful scandalous, entertaining, really good stuff. All about a city that I had an interesting relationship with—Ogden. Ogden was a place that when I was young I couldn’t really wait to leave. I had just given up on finding anything that I really related to in Ogden. What I was, I wasn’t finding resonance with what I was when 30 I was young. But, when I started discovering the old Ogden Standard Examiner, well it wasn’t the Examiner, it was just the Ogden Standard. With what humor and intelligence and old time wit and pluck, they wrote in a way that can’t be written now. I was just falling in love with it—gaining respect for Ogden in a way that I never had when I lived in it. [Audio cuts out at 11:16 on VTS_01_4]