Episode 37: James Fritzhand
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James Fritzhand, 1980s.
I first came across James Fritzhand’s work through an ad in the July 1978 issue of Cosmopolitan. Advertising his novel Dream Babies, between the title scrawled in lipstick and the headline “They’re Hollywood’s Wild Children, Who’ve Got it All – But Want More,” I knew it was going to be the kind of trashy showbusiness novel I love. I found it on eBay, thoroughly enjoyed it, and started ordering more—from a roman à clef about Jean Nidetch, the founder of WeightWatchers, to a thinly veiled one about Barbara Streisand. When I started researching him, I discovered that after a successful career as a commercial writer in the 1970s and early 1980s, James switched to TV—writing for many of the major prime-time soaps of the era: Falcon Crest, Flamingo Road, and Hotel (which he also produced for a season). I tracked him down in northern California and we spoke on the phone last fall—for him, it was the first time thinking about or discussing his earlier work for decades.
James was born in 1946 in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he grew up. Though he wanted to become a writer, his parents pushed him into medicine; after studying pre-med, he dropped out of medical school and started working as a social worker in Manhattan. All this time he had been writing—by the time he was sixteen he had completed one autobiographical novel, Crown Heights (never published and now lost). Every night after work he would return home and write; that became his first published novel, Son of the Great American Novel, which was picked up by a publisher when he was 21. Darkly comic literary fiction, it was reviewed positively in publications like the New York Times. When another literary novel wasn’t picked up by his publisher, Fritzhand started trying his hand at writing popular fiction. He began picking up commercial jobs writing under pseudonyms—sometimes for long-established series (like the Nick Carter adventure novels)—each in a different genre.
Fritzhand is the author of twenty books, across many genres. Under his own name, James wrote literary fiction, a young adult novel, a techno-thriller, along with several sagas and roman à clefs. Additionally, he wrote three adventure novels for the Nick Carter series, two gothics under the pseudonym Janine Fitzpatrick, a novel about homosexuality as Geoffrey Linden, a trashy novel about a hair salon as J.F. Farber, two horror novels as James Farber, and two V.C. Andrews style books as J.S. Forrester.
As he discusses in our conversation, after he spent years working on a roman à clef loosely based on Walt Disney that wasn’t published for legal issues, James gradually stopped writing fiction. By the early 1980s, he had moved to Los Angeles and begun to write for TV—finding his place as a screenwriter for one-hour dramas like Trapper M.D., Bare Essence, and Flamingo Road. Fritzhand then went on to work on Hotel for five years, both as a writer and then as a producer for one season. After that, he wrote for Falcon Crest and a sixty-five-episode 1990s cable TV version of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (as he describes it in the interview, “wonderful junk”). A bad experience on the long-running soap opera As the World Turns led him to retire around 2000.
Since then, Fritzhand and his partner of 46 years have lived a quiet life in Napa, California. Away from the glamour of show business, James has been able to focus on his partner and his love of birding. Together they travel the world, visiting exotic, difficult-to-reach locations to see rare birds.
Son of the Great American Novel, Fritzhand’s debut, is to be re-released next year by Tough Poets Press. It will include a twenty-page afterword about the novel's gestation, what inspired him, and what it was like to be a young writer in New York some fifty years ago.
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An episode of Trapper John M.D. (1981) written by James:
Novels by James Fritzhand, both under his own name and pseudonyms:
