This Hollywood memoir is an expertly mixed cocktail of history and family drama

I was raised by sensible Midwesterners who believed that no good could come of psychology or introspection. That may be why I get impatient with memoirs that dwell on their writers’ inner lives. What I want are memoirs that go beyond the personal to offer a portrait of something larger: a culture, a historical period, a whole way of living.

You find that in The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood, a new book by Matthew Specktor, a child of the movies who happens to be a really terrific writer. Spanning more than half a century and speckled with the caviar of famous names, this isn’t a tell-all, pity party or diatribe. Mixing things up with the brio of an expert bartender, Specktor serves an invigorating cocktail of family saga, cultural criticism, fictionalized biography, Hollywood history and lament for a vanishing world.

The main action begins in the mid-1960s when his parents meet. His father, Fred Specktor, is a low-level agent, eager to make it but devoted to his clients. His mother, Katherine McGaffey, is one of those beautiful LA women who might’ve been a successful actress or model. But she’s short on drive. What she has is high literary taste: When she and Fred meet, a book by James Joyce spills from her purse. Obviously mismatched, the two could be a metaphor for Hollywood’s collision between commerce and art.

But like so many others, they get carried away by the intoxications of the movie biz and a ’60s culture that’s cracking the industry wide open. Early in his career, Hollywood was so square that Fred can’t find work for even Jack Nicholson — too weird, casting directors thought. But after the groundbreaking success of Bonnie and Clyde, the industry suddenly wants the off-center actors that Fred champions. His career takes off, Matthew is born, Katherine thinks of doing screenplays. The golden future shimmers before them. And yet, Specter writes:

It’s an insidious thing, this industry of theirs: its illusions are too quick to become one’s own. [Fred’s] last girlfriend was Stella Stevens, who’d co-starred with Elvis. Once you’ve watched your partner kiss the King onscreen and then come home to kiss you, it changes things, redraws the boundaries of your reality. It deforms you and renders you vulnerable to boredom, makes you impatient with a life that is merely human-sized.

As Fred rides the crest of ’70s movies, the family flounders. Katherine is a lost soul, struggling with her identity and sliding under the bottle. Fred — predictably enough — finds a new woman and moves out. As for Matthew, he has long periods of estrangement from a father whose shallowness he can never quite grasp and from the mother who struggles with alcoholism and whose sensibility he shares but finds himself forced to look after. Eventually, he heads East to college where he takes a writing class from James Baldwin — the book’s implicit hero, of whom he writes wonderfully — and finds work in a corporate-owned movie business that’s a far cry from the one that launched his dad.

Now like any good Hollywood book, The Golden Hour has its share of movie star stories, from being mooned by Bruce Dern to a hilarious phone message from Marlon Brando. David Lynch pops in to do a nifty cameo. Yet much of Specktor’s best writing deals with two super-agents-turned-powerbrokers, MCA’s Lew Wasserman and CAA’s Mike Ovitz, whose mere names made other industry bigshots quake. Fred worked for both. Taking us fictionally inside their heads, Specktor captures how their near visionary brilliance served soulless values, transforming Hollywood into a place about making deals rather than about making movies.

Still, my favorite parts of the book have to do with Fred and Katherine. He finds in them a mythic dimension we often feel in thinking about our own parents. Even as we can grasp the shape of their lives, there remains some sort of irreducible mystery. Fred and Katherine feel larger than life, like characters in an old Hollywood movie. By comparison Specktor’s chapters about himself, though well written, feel a tad prosaic — like a low-budget indie.

And in a way this is fitting. You see, for all of Specktor’s verve, The Golden Hour tells a story of diminution, about the loss of youthful hopes, the corporatization of Hollywood, the movies’ dwindling ability to feed our dreams, and the decline of the egalitarian America, imperfect but promising, that so many of us grew up with. It’s a book about how the soft golden light of magic hour, which makes everything look so beautiful, eventually makes way for the darkness.