Mollie Gregory sat at the back of her bed, papers stacked in organized fashion around her like it was a large desk. It’s her latest book, as yet untitled. This one is a novel that draws from her early years in Portland.

Mollie is a stalwart writer, the kind that has gone effortlessly between fiction and nonfiction, despite the large, roiling river between them. Nowadays that water has become polluted but when she mastered it, it was crystal clear whitewater rapids with giant rocks and treacherous undercurrents that could take you down.

Her first book was nonfiction about the movie business, an area she knew because she worked in it. That was Making Films Your Business. (1979). It was practical information for filmmakers and students about documentaries and non-theatrical films.  It contained information about proposal writing, selling, financing and distribution, even the legal side with copyrights, contracts, and insurance. And it sold well. 

Seven years later Equal to Princes: A Hollywood Novel (1986) was published. Its characters were a politically divided family at the height of McCarthyism and it looked Joseph McCarthy dead in the fictional eye. It did well, but it was Triplets, another novel about three sisters in Hollywood, that hit the big time. By 1988 the book, and Mollie, was in every newspaper in the country. These days most people probably know Mollie from her most recent book, Stuntwomen: The Untold Story (2015), which received critical acclaim. At her book signings stuntwomen almost always showed up, grateful to her for creating the record. 

There have been several books, and a couple of movies, between those efforts, fiction on one side of the river, nonfiction on the other. In 2018, the University of Southern California asked if Mollie would donate her papers. She had begun the arduous process of going through boxes to organize them. In the mix she found her first book. George Washington’s Cat at Valley Forge.  She was 12 when she wrote it and it’s never been published. It’s only significant, she said, because that’s when she fell in love with writing. “That was my first attempt to write something. I thought it was thrilling, just putting the words down.”  

Mollie told the cat story, and some even better ones, from the middle of her current desk, the bed in her apartment. It’s in a grand building in what was once the Brown Derby section of downtown Los Angeles. The Derby was old-old days of Hollywood and the building makes you think of what it was like 100 years ago. But the large apartment feels more like old-style literary New York, books on shelves that extend up nine feet and truly amazing artwork.  

Mollie was out for a movie with friends last Fall shortly after she began sorting the boxes. When they returned to the building she fell and broke her leg. It was a bad break, and they rushed her to the hospital where she stayed for a week to 10 days, she isn’t sure. She had the cast on for a couple of month. It’s gone but there is still too much pain. Johnny, a friend in the building who is helping out, heard her holler in pain, and came in to check.  

“I’m fine,” she said. “I just need to fight through it!” 

Same Mollie. “I’m slower,” she said. “But I’m gaining on it.”