Jed Rosenthal is living a desultory life in a garden apartment with his cat, both having been exiled from the family home they shared with Jed’ s partner and their daughter who he can see only at approved times. Despite a job as a professor of writing at Loyola University in Chicago and receiving good reviews for his previous works, Jed is disconnected from his current reality and immersed in his family’s past and the death of the daughter of their once close friends, shortly after JFK’s assassination.
The victim was Karyn Kupcinet, an aspiring actress and the only daughter of Irv and Essee Kupcinet, one of Chicago’s uber power couples who stayed in the limelight from 1934 to 2003. Kup or Mr. Chicago, as Irv was called, was a columnist for the Chicago Sun Times at a time that really mattered and if he didn’t know everybody, he knew almost everybody including Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King and Sidney Korshak.
Wait, you’re thinking Sidney Korshak? Who is he? Well, for people like Kup who was at the top of his game when it came to collected celebrities, you could sip Champagne with Dean Martin or Shirley McClaine in the Pump Room or have them on your television talk show, but if you need something fixed—and we’re not talking patching up the roof—and were connected, you called Sidney. And, in “The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter,” a novel by award-winning author Peter Orner, that’s what Kup did when his daughter died.
“Like Jed, I am somewhat obsessed with the case,” says Orner, the director of creative writing at Dartmouth College, who has spent eons researching this book.
But Orner isn’t the only one seeking answers about what happened to Karyn.
“If you’re into conspiracy theories there are numerous ones,” says Orner and then dives deep into some of those theories.
Was Karyn Kupcinet murdered? The autopsy performed in Los Angeles where she lived while working as an actress, said she had been. But there were doubts, could she have overdosed on pills? Either on purpose or accidentally? She was anxious, unsure of her looks, desperately trying to be slim, and extremely despondent about a recent break up with her actor boyfriend who had moved on to someone, no make that, numerous someones.
There’s the JFK angle espoused by some, says Orner, pointing out Karyn was among several people who mysteriously died around the time of the president’s assassination. Was Karyn the woman who called authorities just before Kennedy was shot to say he was going to be murdered?
In the book, Jed’s grandfather accompanies Kup to Los Angeles to identify his daughter’s body while his grandmother consoles Essee who remained in Chicago. That’s real life as well. Sidney Korshak was also at Karyn’s apartment and Orner discovered a newspaper photo of him carrying several of her belongings out of her apartment.
“They say unidentified man,” says Orner. “But everyone knew who Sidney Korshak was. I may have found a new clue.”
But the book is more than just a true crime caper, it’s about relationships, those that flourish and those that fall apart, it’s also about Chicago in a different era, a time when a gossip columnist held sway over the city and men like Korshak could make big problems go away.
“The relationship between the Kups and my family is true,” says Orner. “The families had been very good friends and then suddenly they weren’t. I’ve always tried to understand why.”
Korshak could fix many things but didn’t fix the rift that severed the Kupcinets from the Rosenthals, a cut so sharp and complete it’s as if someone took a cleaver to it. Why this happened is difficult for an obsessive like Orner, who sometimes, when he returns to Chicago from his home in Vermont, revisits all the family homes (real) or walks from where Jed lives in the book to where he and his partner lived, counting the steps (unreal since Jed and Hanna don’t exist).
You could spend a lot of time trying to figure out what’s true and what is fiction in this fascinating novel, or you can just go along for the ride so to speak, by enjoying a great read.
This article orginally ran in the Northwest Times of Indiana.
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