First novel by Christene "Cookie" Meyers

Years of research, travel, plays, and music inform novel about early days of the talkies

Editor's note: This story first appeared in The Billings Outpost before the novel went out of print. Plans are underway for a second edition. Please stay tuned and let us know how many copies you'd like.

By David Crisp

EDITOR, BILLINGS OUTPOST

Above, Christene Meyers reads to fellow travelers aboard Celebrity's Millennium, one of a half-dozen readings delivered on ships. The following story first appeared in a respected Rocky Mountain newspaper, The Billings Outpost. It was picked up by the Last Best News, a nationally known on-line publication edited by award-winning writer Ed Kemmick featuring Montana news and interesting personalities.

AFTER 40 years in journalism, Christene Meyers decided to start making things up.

The result is her first novel, “Lilian’s Last Dance,” which she introduced to readers here as part of Big Read events in Billings. Writing the book was, she said in an interview, the hardest thing she has ever done.

Bay Area writer and editor Kathleen Mohn introduces Christene Meyers at a reading in Oakland. Meyers is on an international tour for the novel. She read in Europe this fall and will travel to the Far East for readings in March.

More of Meyers' writings at www.whereiscookie.com

Meyers’ fluid writing style is well known to longtime Billings residents. A native of Columbus, she got her first byline in a children’s magazine when she was 14 years old. In high school, she contributed to a Billings (Montana) Gazette column that featured voices of area teenagers.

That eventually led to a full-time job at the Gazette, where she started as a night police reporter, while going to college -- both Rocky Mountain College and the now Montana State University Billings.

“I covered all the major beats the paper had at the time,” she said.

She gradually worked her way up to movie reviews, then she was for many years the arts and travel writer for the Gazette before retiring in 2004.

She interviewed hundreds of internationally known actors, musicians and writers, and was active in many ways in the Billings arts community, spearheading the effort to save the Fox Theater, now the Alberta Bair Theater.

For a fourth-generation Montanan from Columbus, the career choice was not as unusual as it might sound. Her parents gave their children music and dance lessons, plus boxing lessons for the boys so they could handle any kidding they got at school about it all.

Her mother was an opera fan and musician, and Meyers began singing and tap dancing at age 2 or 3, belting out songs like “The Good Ship Lollipop” and “Oh, You Beautiful Doll.” At last week’s reading, she sat down at a piano to play a medley of original songs for a musical version of “Lilian’s Last Dance,” with Marian Booth Green providing the vocals.

In later years, that love of culture translated into an inextinguishable urge to travel, a habit that paid off when it came time to take up fiction. The novel covers settings ranging from France to England, New York to California, with stops at most points in between, including a reference to Corsicana, Texas, a few miles from where this reporter’s ancestors grew up, and, of course, her native Montana.

Meyers and William Jones Spent many years researching the novel.

“Our research was meticulous,” she said.

Meyers visited all those spots with her late husband, William Jones, who was a retired, well known film critic for the Arizona Republic before his death of cancer in 2005.

“He went to that great theater in the sky,” she said. But right up until days before he died, sitting with an IV at his computer, he urged Meyers to finish their collaborative novel. They had put in too much work to give it up, he told her.

He is listed as co-author of the novel, and Meyers said it was a true collaboration, an extension of ideas both had before meeting. They worked out the characters and plot together, she said, and there really is no way to tell now who gets credit for what parts.

Meyers' grandma, Olive Nystul, played for the silent movies and helped inspire the Lilian character.

Actually, the book’s roots go back even further. Meyers drew inspiration in part from a great aunt and from her grandmother, who refused to marry her grandfather until he raised $1,500 which in 1912 was a huge sum, She also requested he provide a piano, which he did.

Meyers' first husband was Bruce Meyers, a well known actor, poet and professor at Montana State University Billings until his death in 1992. They had kicked around the idea of writing a musical about a Western woman sharpshooter, a sort of “Annie Get Your Gun” but with a main character who was more worldly, more international and sexier than Annie Oakley. Meyers died of an aneurysm in 1992.

Later, Meyers and Jones took extensive notes on the novel, but she abandoned it for a time after Jones died. It was her second husband’s death and she needed time to heal.

She resumed the book after a box of notes and floppy discs literally fell off an attic shelf and hit her current partner, photographer and engineer Bruce William Keller, in the head.

Christene Meyers and her partner Bruce Keller in the Hollywood Hills as they researched the novel.

The finished novel is set around the turn of the last century, extending into World War I. It’s about an ambitious British-born film buff in the silent era, Walter Brown, who travels America showing short films and putting on vaudeville acts, trying to stay a step ahead of goons working for inventor Thomas Edison, who was attempting to squeeze out competitors in the motion picture business.

Walter meets the lovely title character, a French woman named Lilian Dumont, and recruits her from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show as an actress and sharpshooter. With the rest of Walter’s crew, they travel America and Europe, entertaining crowds with shooting tricks and films, and gradually moving toward more ambitious work in early-day Hollywood.

Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein are cameo characters in the novel, interacting with the fictional characters.

Along the way they encounter bank robbers, gunfighters, journalists, lawmen, a Peruvian artist and dozens of other characters, including 22 cameo appearances by famous personages of the time: Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Bat Masterson, Lillian Gish and Buffalo Bill himself, among others. They also bump into a range of disasters, including time on the front lines in World War I.

It’s a picaresque tale for most of the way, and eventually a love triangle develops—really more of a quadrangle. One of the characters is motivated more by revenge than by affection.

From there the story gradually builds toward a rollicking climax, which won’t be revealed here except to note that guns blaze.

Meyers' many global readings appear to delight listeners, and it may be that the book works better as a series of anecdotes than as a tightly plotted novel.

Besides the book tour and classes, Meyers is taking courses at Sarah Lawrence in poetry and play writing, working on an eventual doctorate in poetry and playwriting. She and Keller write a blog at www.whereiscookie.com. (Cookie is a childhood nickname.) She is working on the musical version of "Lilian's Last Dance," and splits her time between California and a Montana place near Nye. She still travels the world and attends the theater regularly. And she gives Writer's Voice workshops, inviting students to bring photos of ancestors. Her classes include exercises to encourage participants to trust one another.

It’s just, she said, that she has a lot she wants to do "before I’m in my urn.”

She even still does a little freelancing, she said, but is finding that she has to cut back.

“I’m learning one small thing in my 60s,” she said, “that I can’t do everything.”

Writer and editor David Crisp has worked for newspapers since 1979. He has been editor and publisher of the Billings Outpost since 1997. The Outpost is published every Thursday and is available free all over Billings and in nearby communities.

The Last Best News is an independent online news site focusing on the culture, people and places of Billings and Eastern Montana. Its founder, Ed Kemmick began his newspaper career in 1980. “The Big Sky, By and By,” is his collection of journalism, essays and a short story.

Available on Amazon or by contacting the author direct