More than a decade before he would chronicle the decadence of suburban America, Orrie Hitt bared the bruised soul of an aspiring songwriter clashing against Hollywood in the aptly named short story "Academy Award." Among his earliest publications (and featuring his middle name "Edwin" in the by-line), "Academy Award" appeared in September 1938 in the pages of Screen & Radio Weekly, an entertainment supplement from the Detroit Free Press that was syndicated in various newspapers across the country, including the Atlantic City Press, Sacramento Union, and the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot.
The story begins as Susan Hale gets out of a limousine for the biggest night of the year in Hollywood. She's up for an award for her performance in the musical Forget Me Not, and arrives in a car belonging to the film's director, Milton Kristt. Standing near the red carpet is Susan's old stock theater partner, the songwriter Tony Fellows, who gave up his own career to be her agent, and then almost tanked hers when he advised her to go on strike for a better salary. And it was Milton Kristt who rescued her career and made her a star. But on this big night, Tony knows something that neither Susan nor Milton knows.
Tony swore under his breath. He must have been crazy to come here. For an instant, he was tempted to get up and show: "Listen, I'm the guy who wrote those songs! And that doesn't make me a jinx any more, does it?"
While it runs only one page, and on the surface doesn't resemble the more lurid paperbacks for which he is best known, there are still many traces of Orrie Hitt in this early tale. Already, he is displaying a cynical view of American industry and society, and focusing on human exploitation. (It's not hard to picture a seedier version of the Tony-Susan-Milton love triangle in one of Hitt's later novels.)
Hitt also greatly sympathizes with Tony as an outsider artist facing an uphill battle in fear that his own artistry will be lost in anonymity. At such an early stage in his career, perhaps Hitt was using Tony as a way to channel his own anxieties about how to enter an industry all-too-eager to take advantage of young and idealistic artists.
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Orrie Edwin Hitt, "Academy Award," Screen & Radio Weekly (section of the Detroit Free Press), September 4, 1938, p. 4.
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