One of the few times I ventured outdoors at the LA Times Festival of Books was to meet actress and screenwriter Heather Thomas at the booth for Book Soup, where she was signing copies of her debut novel, Trophies, a cutthroat satire where the wives of entertainment industry power players stake out their own philanthropic “turfs” and sponsoring the wrong charity event can provoke an orchestrated downfall and humiliation. After the signing was over, Thomas and I found a shady spot to chat about how the book came together—and why, she says, “if you want to get something off the ground, [you] go find a trophy wife.”
Originally, she explained, when a friend suggested that she write a TV show set “behind the scenes” of the trophy wife subculture, she balked: “Who’d give a rat’s ass about us?” (Thomas readily counts herself among the ranks: She’s been married to powerhouse attorney Skip Brittenham for more than 15 years, and her breakfast salons have become a must-invite for Hollywood and D.C. types.) Eventually, she came around and co-wrote a pilot for a show about three wives who accidentally solve murders in their spare time, but then Gigi Levangie Grazer suggested she write a novel—and one thing led to another, and one day Thomas was meeting with Judith Regan. “I’m like a Fuller Brush man,” Thomas recalls. “I’m pulling out 500 different ideas… She picked this one.” Regan stood by her as the scope of the novel expanded, loosening the deadline for delivery, but after the controversial publisher’s departure from HarperCollins, her new editors at William Morrow told her she had seven months to turn the manuscript in. (Not a problem, Thomas recounted, as she was used to completing TV pilots and screenplays with much less time.)
Thomas readily admits that she and her fellow philanthropist/activists are held up for ridicule, dismissed as intellectual lightweights, sometimes even by the ostensible political allies who come courting the money they control. “If you’re a wealthy second wife,” Thomas says, “you’re like a poster child for schadenfreude… But as a feminist, I don’t think we should attack other women. I’ve never met a bimbo trophy wife. I think women label other women because we’ve been socialized to compete with one another—but when we stop attacking each other, we’ll realize how powerful we are.”
It’s a subject she cares passionately about, and her argument about contemporary political activism is peppered with references to Leonard Shlain‘s theories about the different ways men and women process information, which lead her to believe that YouTube and other elements of digital multimedia are reestablishing a feminizing influence over the Internet after an early period of text-heavy conservatism. For Thomas, it can’t come fast enough. “It’s not even patriarachial anymore,” she says of the current political situation. “It’s just fascism.” To combat those forces, she says, the “ladies’ groups” others so readily mock are “the only people who have the time, the money, and the will,” and she plans to continue her fundraising efforts in the months leading up to this fall’s presidential election.
And after that, she’d told a fan back at the Book Soup booth, her children are old enough now that she feels comfortable getting back into acting after a decade’s break. This being LA, he had a project in development; cards were exchanged. In the meantime, a promotional video for Trophies is in the works—with a potential guest star narrator (I’m not going to jinx it by saying who) would perfectly encapsulate the interlacing threads of show biz, literature, and politics. So keep an eye out for that…