Stars Cast No Shadows

Stars Cast No Shadows, by William Hegner

November, 1974  Pocket Books

Apparently I read this William Hegner novel seven years ago, at least judging from the last paragraph of my review of The Lovelorners, but it looks like even then I couldn’t remember much about Stars Cast No Shadows. I decided to “re-read” it again, but honestly it was like reading the novel for the first time, as it’s clear this book made zero impression on me. I’m happy to say it did on this reading; I can attest, though, that I got one thing correct in my previous mini-review: the book is more a series of inter-connected short stories than it is an actual novel, with a flurry of characters for the reader to keep track of. 

As usual with a Hegner book, the focus is on Hollywood, and Stars Cast No Shadows has an interesting take: a prep school for the children of stars. But rather than tell a regular sort of novel, it is instead arranged into a series of twenty-six short chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet, each of them focused on a different character (“A is for Amy,” “C is for Christy,” etc). The “main” character in the novel is Dean Jesse Wellman, who when the book opens is about to retire after 42 years of being the Dean at Hollywood Prep. We’re informed that the Dean has written “dirty limericks” about many of his students over the years and kept robust scrapbooks on them, but curiously we only see one limerick in the course of the novel – and also, the novel is not arranged like a scrapbook, with the Dean’s first-hand recollections of this or that student. Instead, each chapter is told like your typical Hegner novel, in third-person, focusing mostly on memorable one-liners (with a special gift for sleazy repartee) and brazen sex acts. 

Indeed, Stars Cast No Shadows is like an even more surreal take on Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon; here the various stars think of nothing but sex, men and women alike booze-guzzling, pill-popping sex maniacs. This of course makes the novel seem all the more wild in our #metoo era. Another thing that only occurred to me late in the game is that the vast majority of sex scenes in the novel concern teenagers, though given that they’re all the sons and daughters of megastars they are so jaded and blasé that they come off like adults. At any rate this would be another indication of a novel that could’ve only been published in the ‘70s. What makes it all the more interesting is that the age of the kids is rarely mentioned. 

Well anyway, the setup here is that Dean Wellman is about to retire and he looks back fondly on his 42 years with the school, which as you’ve probably guessed by now is an exclusive preparatory in Hollywood for the children of stars. As usual with Hegner the novel for the most part seems to occur in an earlier age; the chapters can jump all over the place, from material in the ‘30s and ‘40s to as late as the early ‘70s, which apparently is when the main storyline takes place. But also as usual with Hegner there are zero topical details; a mention of “rock bands” and “Woodstock” is really all we have to even let us know when the latter-day sequences are exactly occuring. Otherwise the novel is incredibly bland so far as scene-setting or period flavor go; Hegner is so locked into the sexual personae (to quote Camille Paglia – and I’ve been waiting years to write “to quote Camille Paglia”) of his characters that little else matters. 

Dean Wellman is the main character, but he doesn’t much feature in the interconnected chapters, other than a minor appearance here and there. The book is framed as his recollections on his past 42 years, but as mentioned it’s not told in first-person; each chapter will open with some new character and the sexual adventures he or she gets into during their time at Hollywood Prep Academy. Of these students, probably the main character is Amy Winters, who opens the tale with “A is for Amy.” But already we get an idea that Stars Cast No Shadows will jump all over the chronological map; Amy, when she comes to HPA as a student, is a “hubba-hubba girl” whose own parents are actors, and we learn that she too will eventually gain superstardom due to her acting and singing talents. But we also eventually learn she is “class of ’39.” 

Amy Winters will come and go in the novel, mostly appearing later in life as the parent of three hell-raising daughters of her own; the youngest, Bella Donna, also coming close to appropriating the “main character” status. But the problem with this book is that characters and subplots will emerge, seem to build toward something, and then drop. I mean, you all know I’m a sucker for a vintage rock novel. Well, it develops that two of the male characters become “teen idols” who front rock bands (though Hegner’s knowledge of rock music seems incredibly vague), and toward the end of the book we learn of plans for a “TV Woodstock” which will feature a “Battle of the Rockers.” But this subplot is never brought up again. Same goes for other characters and subplots, and in fact Amy Winters is the only character who has a complete story arc other than Dean Wellman. 

Given this, there’s no plot per se, other than the Dean’s upcoming retirement; another late subplot has him choosing his successor and transferring duties to him, but even this is overshadowed by the wanton escapades of the students, new and old. As the novel progresses, the majority of the stories seem to take place in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, with some of the earlier students, like Amy Winters, now adults. As ever with Hegner all this stuff is roman a clef territory, with these oversexed and overdrugged stars paper-thin caricatures of real-life celebrities. Amy Winters is more than likely Judy Garland, with the same sort of career trajectory, and Bella Donna would be Liza Minnelli. There’s also comediane Lilli Havoc and her husband, Ramon Cortez, blatantly obvious stand-ins for Lucy and Ricky, even down to their beloved TV series and ensuing production company. I mean, if you’ve ever wanted to read a novel where a Lucille Ball stand-in gives a blowjob to Ricky while he’s on the phone, complete with Ricky shooting his “essence” on Lucy’s cheeks, then this would be the novel for you. 

In fact it gets to be humorous – and possibly intentionally so – that all these stars think about is sex. That and how to advance their careers. Ramon Cortez is the most level-headed of the lot, gifted with a ruthless business acumen…but still given to openly grabbing his crotch during meetings. True to the trash fiction template, every chapter revolves around sex, either among the older generation or the younger generation. As mentioned though it’s the teens who get the most of the narrative as the novel progresses, particularly Bella Donna, who swoops in on new guys who enroll in the school and has sex with them within the hour. The intentional humor is especially pronounced when the celebrity parents start to worry about the sex lives of their kids; not that they’re having sex, but that they aren’t having sex. Two sequences of inverted parental concern stand out in particular. 

In one, Davy Lord, a famous comic, pushes his son Greg into rock stardom as singer for the group Greg Lord and the Hereafters. Lord Senior gets a home studio and relentlessly pushes his kid, Murry Wilson style, for number one hits. But as mentioned Hegner has no concept of rock, or at least doesn’t seem to – he tells us absolutely nothing about the sound of the music (nor about any of the movies or TV shows the other stars are in, for that matter). Davy also expects his son to be a ladykiller, thus gets Greg a limo with a bar in back – Davy even telling his kid he could “go at two broads at once” on the big comfy mattress back there. But Greg, we learn, is so shy he prefers to sit in his room and pleasure himself…something a sickened Davy discovers while secretly monitoring his kid on hidden cameras. Later Davy will be even more sickened to learn that Greg has taken to driving around that limo…while other kids have sex in the back! “He’s a good boy,” the private detective who has discovered this informs Davy, confused why Davy Lord is acting so horrified. “The kid’s a fuckin’ chaffeur!” The disappointed father says. 

Even more outrageous is another sequence in which Frannie Moon, another comediane (and also a former HPA student), hosts a party for her dopesmoking teenaged daughter, Maggie, and her druggie friends. Frannie is infamous in the movie colony for picking things up with her…well, you can guess. So after the kids have been smoking joints and whatnot, Frannie’s on the fringes, hoping to be invited to join in. When she is invited, she of course shows off her nether-region talents to the delight of the teens…then an orgy ensues, with Frannie ultimately getting double-teamed. The orgy rolls into the following morning, and when the kids get up and wearily head home, Frannie reflects how not a single one of them was checked on by their parents. She congratulates herself that at least she knows where her daughter was last night! “The family that lays together, stays together,” she later tells her current stud. 

This alone is almost enough to make Stars Cast No Shadows a classic, but the problem is the reader is robbed of the full dramatic impact with the too-short chapters and the dropped subplots. Also, some of the characters are easily confused, mostly because they’re presented as ciphers with no emotional makeup other than the most basic drives for sex and power. But there’s one kid named Jaguar Stoddard, whose dad is an agent or somesuch and thus not a star, so Jag’s not able to enroll in HPA, so he instead acts as resident drug dealer. He’s easily confused with a kid named Owen who is the son of a star and does enroll in HPA; the two are hellraisers and become friends, but the characters are too similar. Owen is nicknamed Bullet, by the way, due to the bullet he wears on a necklace; the bullet his superstar old man used to kill himself. Bullet even starts up a biker club, and there follows another of those “couldn’t be published today” bits where Pamela Grass, another of Amy Winters’s daughters, tries to join the all-male gang; Bullet makes her wear a strap-on dildo so she’s truly “one of the guys”…and then he and the others gang-bang her after a trip to Mexico. Indeed, all thirteen of the bikers “enter her anal passage” during the festivities. 

So as you can tell, Hegner pulls no punches in his tale. It should be mentioned though that, as ever, the actual boinkery is seldom described, other than one or two lines of graphic depiction. Hegner’s talent is witty repartee, which comes off like an X-rated take on classic Hollywood dialog. Like notorious felatrix Maggie Moon’s comment on her ex-husband: “I never want to look his cock in the face again!” Or when Amy Winters, in the opening chapter in which she herself is just a teen, informs Dean Wellman that she missed class for the past couple weeks because she was having an abortion. The Dean’s response: “That is an adequate excuse.” As for the actual hanky-pankery, Hegner’s descriptions usually go for more of a sleazebag literary approach, a la “She knelt before him and fed the soft cylinder of flesh into her mouth.” 

The novel seems to be building toward something: Ramon and Lilli start their production company and sign on the progeny of their movie-world friends for future plans, but nothing comes of it. Like as mentioned the TV Woodstock, which would feature Davy Lord’s kid as well as Ramon and Lilli’s own teen idol son, Dudley. But all this is dropped. Hegner delivers an epilogue which does the heavy lifting of informing us of what happens to the various characters, many of whom are in store for sad fates. There’s also a curious circular approach to the narrative, as the tale ends with the Dean’s last day on the job, yet we’re informed in the epilogue that he’ll be back within the year, given the outright failure of his successor (who, much to the Dean’s horror, starts hanging around with the party scene that exists on the fringes of Hollywood). 

So I’m not sure why Stars Cast No Shadows made such little impression on me when I first read it a few years ago. I really enjoyed it this time, to the extent that I wished there’d been more to it – more of a storyline, more content to the characters, and especially more description of the various time periods and productions the characters worked on. But don’t get me wrong, as it’s certainly a fun novel, and if you enjoy Hollywood-style repartee, especially of a venomous nature, you’ll find a lot of gems in the book.