My Secret Mother Lorna Moon
By Richard de Mille
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 311 pages, $25
`My Secret Mother Lorna Moon” is a lovely memoir made particularly so in that author Richard de Mille has such an unusual story to tell.
De Mille (“The Don Juan Papers”) grew up with a firm understanding that epic director Cecil B. de Mille and his wife, Constance, were his adoptive, not biological parents. The story he was told, the one that ran in the papers, was that in February 1922, a baby was found in the back of a prominent Hollywood lawyer’s luxury car. That baby was Richard, and when Constance saw the infant in a foundling home, she decided to make him her own.
The story he wasn’t told was the truth. That came in his 30s, at the time of his uncle William’s death. A playwright, and later a director after he followed his younger brother to Hollywood, William had been little known to Richard. There was a reason for that. William was Richard’s father.
Though William would later leave his wife and his two daughters, it was not for Richard’s mother, Lorna Moon. Cecil would take the baby in, but the condition was that William, who had always wanted a son, not involve himself with the boy. Whichever brother survived the other was to tell Richard.
Richard’s account of growing up in the de Mille household is absorbing, the more so because he is both discreet and gentle in the telling. But it is his mother’s story, she the plebian among Hollywood royalty, that truly fascinates.
Richard was not the only child she left for others to raise. Though raised by an aunt and uncle in England, his sister, Mary, had come to Los Angeles to work as a functionary in Cecil’s office. Mary had learned her mother had had a third child in Hollywood, knew also she’d worked for the famous director and decided he must be the father. Mary never approached Cecil with what she thought she knew, though. Being in his proximity seemed enough of a connection.
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Neither Mary nor Richard could go directly to Lorna because she had died in her early 30s. But as her son learned, this was a woman who had flung herself at life.
Born in a remote village in northeast Scotland, Lorna escaped by marrying a traveling watch repairman who relocated to Canada. After giving birth to a son, she escaped a harsh new life as an unskilled farmer’s wife by running off with a salesman. When he moved her to Minneapolis, she left him and her young daughter to reinvent herself first as a successful screenwriter in Hollywood and then as a successful novelist even as she was dying from tuberculosis.
Lorna Moon is so much a woman a reader wants to know better it is possible to feel her loss decades later. And to effusively credit her son for writing one of the few memoirs of late that deserves a place on the shelf.