Well, that was quite a year! If you’ve been following this site for more than a week, then you know I’ve been working on something big for awhile. All done.
Helen Twelvetrees, Perfect Ingenue is now available on Amazon.com both as an eBook for your Kindle (Click Amazon’s “Read on Any Device” link if you read on something else) and in paperback, a first for me!
In fact, there are many ways to read Helen Twelvetrees, Perfect Ingenue across a few price points—including FREE.
The paperback edition—362 pages long—is listed at $21.95. The Kindle edition sells for $6.99.
But if you purchase the paperback at the full price, you can get the Kindle edition for just 99¢ through Amazon’s Matchbook program [I’m still waiting for Amazon to link the two pages, so there may be some delay on this feature until they do] — The Kindle edition is slightly more interactive with some links inside, though, I must say, the paperback looks pretty snazzy on my shelf.
But I’ll get to those type of details in a moment.
—Anybody can read the Kindle edition for FREE this weekend only: December 19-20. Please do, and please spread the word on that. If you’re an email subscriber, I’ll send you a brief reminder Saturday morning.
Amazon Prime subscribers can read the Kindle edition for free anytime through the Kindle Unlimited program.
Now, onto the details:
As I mentioned in my last post, covers have been designed by Danny Reid of Pre-Code.com. Danny saved me from more than one mistake in this area, and I thank him. Every time we talk. In case you’re curious, the cover shot we settled on is a picture of Helen Twelvetrees in Her Man. It’s actually a cropped portion of a photo that appears in full on page 39, where you’ll find Marjorie Rambeau sitting left of Helen.
(Email subscribers will find copies of the original images used for both the front and back covers a little further down inside today’s mailing).
The Foreword—and to my mind, this was a major coup—was written by Dan Van Neste. Dan is the author of The Whistler: Stepping Into the Shadows, and I’ve had him on the site before as a guest. Why am I so excited about a Richard Dix/Whistler expert writing the Foreword to my Helen Twelvetrees book? A little over a year ago, when this all started with a pair of Twelvetrees posts on Immortal Ephemera, I discovered that Dan was author of what was both the best and the most recent print article about Helen, published in the Spring 2005 edition of Films of the Golden Age magazine. Since Dan had had the last word on Helen Twelvetrees, I thought it only right that he should have the first word in my book.
—By the way, anybody can read Dan’s Foreword, my Introduction, and the first five or six chapters that follow in the free preview Amazon supplies on its Kindle page for the book. Again, that’s here, just click “Look Inside” or the cover image.
So, let me give you the physical details of the book, just so you know exactly what you’ll be getting. The page counts I reference here are for the paperback edition, though I should add, the Kindle edition includes every bit of the same text except for the Index, which seemed redundant.
Dan’s Foreword and my Introduction run a few pages each at the front of the book. Then Part 1 of Helen Twelvetrees, Perfect Ingenue is a biography that runs from page 1-124 (Page 1 is actually the 21st page after the preceding front matter). When the biography concludes Part 2 kicks in and runs through page 279: Part 2 consists of 32 different articles and reviews, one for each of the films of Helen Twelvetrees. If you’re familiar with my style of movie coverage on the site (I hope you are!) you’ll be familiar with the type of material you’ll find in Part 2. Actually, it most closely resembles the entries from my Pre-Code eBook. Only they’re all Helen Twelvetrees movies. All of them.
The “Films of” section is followed by an Afterword that brings the legacy of Helen Twelvetrees up to date. Back matter follows including over 40 pages of Chapter Notes (I think the final count was about 650 notes) that occasionally add parenthetical information to Helen’s story, though most often provides citations of source material. There’s also a select Bibliography and the Index to cap things.
Finally, in case I haven’t gotten you to click over to Amazon yet, here’s the sales blurb from that page:
At her peak, Helen Twelvetrees was leading lady to legends like John Barrymore and Spencer Tracy. Other early co-stars who were billed below her included Joan Blondell, John Wayne, and Clark Gable. Twelvetrees broke out in Her Man (1930) and affirmed her stardom in Millie (1931). Her ten-year Hollywood career is highlighted by a run of starring roles in pre-Code era melodramas, but Helen Twelvetrees kept working long after movie audiences had forgotten her.
She lost momentum for a variety of reasons. External factors such as typecasting, studio anarchy, and Production Code enforcement, combined with an independent attitude that spurred inconvenient headlines and whispers of temperament are among those that kept her career from progressing. At her peak she chose to follow natural impulses and start a family, but in terms of her career, her pregnancy couldn’t have come at a worse time. When she returned to the screen it was with a new studio, and the types of films she was known for were not as popular as they had been before her maternity leave. Afterward, time itself may have been Helen Twelvetrees’ greatest enemy: one can only remain an ingenue for so long.
Helen Twelvetrees, Perfect Ingenue is one-half biography, one-half film retrospective. Presented here are the life, loves, and career of an unexpectedly modern woman. An extensive collection of notes supports corrections and new findings about Twelvetrees, including her accurate birth-date and a previously unreported marriage, while also supplying additional background about each of her thirty-two movies: the good, the bad, and the lost.
Foreword by Dan Van Neste, author of The Whistler: Stepping Into the Shadows.
Illustrated with still photographs from the author’s personal collection.
The paperback and the eBook are listed on separate pages at the moment, though I’ve sent Amazon a request to combine them. For now, you’ll find the paperback HERE and the eBook HERE.
And, yes, there is still time to order the paperback for Christmas: I just ordered a copy a few minutes ago and Amazon says it will arrive December 21.
Thanks so much for checking it out! I appreciate your sticking out what has probably seemed like a haphazard year on the site from your perspective—I hope that the freebie this weekend makes up for it some. Returning to normal, as of now —
Thanks again, Cliff Aliperti
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