GLEN David Gold's first book, Carter Beats The Devil, opened in 1920s San Francisco with the death of the US president. Warren G Harding, in Gold's daredevil version of history, snuffed it two hours after appearing on stage in a stunt with master magician Charles Carter the Great.
It was an audacious kick-off, an eye-popping gambol in the past that held you hostage for the next 600 pages. Here was historical fiction with a difference, surreal and bold, sublime and ridiculous. Plus Gold was raised in Hollywood and is married to
Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones. Glamour, passion betwixt good-looking awardwinning authors, highbrow intellect, pulpy popular culture – this story had it all.
But we had to wait eight years for the next one. "It took me four of those to come up with the first lines," Gold confesses of Sunnyside, which has a similarly pyrotechnic start, opening with the apparent drowning of Charlie Chaplin in the winter of 1916, witnessed by a lighthouse keeper on the California coastline, his signature "battered black derby… surfacing, dome up… with a single strand of seaweed, like a rose upon a coffin." It's a grand, cinematic curtain raiser to a tragedy about three people who never meet – Chaplin, the lighthouse keeper and aspiring actor Leland Wheeler, and a learned engineer turned soldier Hugo Black – that takes in the birth of Hollywood, the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and a certain dog named Rin Tin Tin.
Still, eight years? "This book had to be egotistical," says Gold when we meet in London. A giggly, geeky 44-year-old, he says things like "filming with the lens cap on…" when he attempts to pour me a glass of water without taking the top off. "There is more metaphor in the first five pages of this book than there is in all of Carter. I wanted it to be about world view, about Chaplin changing, America changing, and ultimately about whether there is any meaning in life." I'm starting to see why it took so long.
Chaplin didn't drown in a boat on 12 November, 1916. But Gold discovered, while researching Sunnyside, that on that day in a moment of mass hysteria there were 800 sightings of Chaplin around America. The illusion of him at sea would be one of them. "Finding that out was like an apotheosis, the ringing of a gong," he says. "There seemed to be some sort of tie-in at this moment between Chaplin being the first genius comedian out there and America having this huge amount of anxiety about what their role in the war would be. Chaplin was a way to ease their pain."
Gold originally intended to feature Chaplin in Carter when he found a photograph of him and Houdini hugging. "Houdini was the first most famous man in the world and Chaplin was his successor," he says of his protagonist, whom he paints as an autocratic and tortured genius. "Chaplin was a pacifist who ended up advertising World War One, and a socialist who ended up owning his own studio. Yet all these contradictions came to make sense." How hard was it to create the voice of a legend? "Frighteningly easy," says Gold.
He also ended up structuring the novel into an evening's entertainment, beginning with a cast list and newsreel, and ending with a sing-along and the credits in which he apologises to "students of truth" despite a surprising amount of the book being grounded in fact. Most chapters end on a cliffhanger, a moment of high melodrama that nods to the style of silent film. It's an ambitious work, and tough going at times. Reading Sunnyside, I kept thinking writing it must have driven him mad.
"I figure if you're already taking on one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century working in a dominant art form at the peak of his creativity during the Great War, why not just go for broke?" he says. "You set the bar high for yourself and I started to understand that Hollywood pressure of going for bigger explosions, bigger themes, bigger everything. I gave that to Chaplin in the book but by the time I got there, I'd felt it go through my mind once or twice. It's relatively scary. But I wanted, by the end of the book, for you to feel like you got America at that point in time." If Carter is a Swiss watch, he adds, Sunnyside is an entire planet.
Gold grew up in Hollywood in the Sixties, though neither of his parents were "in the movies". His father was among the first engineers to convert reel-to-reel to cassette tape and his mother wanted to be a writer. Gold studied at Berkeley, and on the first day of a writing class at graduate school, he met Sebold.
"From day one we thought that becoming better writers was important and we were critiquing each other's work before we were a couple," he says. "We're each other's first readers and I trusted her criticism very early on."
They live in San Francisco and write under the same roof but in different offices. "We're as physically far apart as it's possible to be in the same house. Alice is very disciplined and I'm not. I'm more likely to have an idea when I'm at the grocery store reaching for a can of tomatoes. I stew in it all day and write at all hours which is kind of annoying."
How does that affect their relationship? "It's a bitch," he says. "It's terrible. Ultimately, at some point I have to take on Alice's schedule, just in fairness."
Before he wrote Carter, Gold was a screenwriter. At least, I thought he was. "That's a generous way of putting it," he says. "I was attempting to be a screenwriter but really I was a receptionist. I summarised depositions for five years, then wrote grant proposals for research scientists. During that time I wrote four bad novels and lots of bad screenplays."
Over seven years writing screenplays he reckons he made about $7,000 and had every bad meeting you can have in Hollywood. None of them made it to celluloid.
Now Gold has cunningly written a book about Hollywood that would be virtually impossible to adapt. He roars with laughter. "Maybe I have written a book about Hollywood no one could film," he says, looking pleased. "Tom Cruise optioned Carter three times, then the people who did Mad Men optioned it to be a TV series but the new president came in, said he didn't understand it, and killed it. I did say to my editor with Sunnyside, when it gets to the most heroic scene of the soldier going to a prostitute and asking her to suckle his puppies, which A-list actress would go for that?"
Sunnyside by Glen David Gold, Sceptre, £17.99