Before the studio system was broken up by the Supreme Court, film studios would sign actors up to multi-year contracts. Actors under contract would not only be told which films they would appear in but also told which parties to go to, when to go to rehab, and sometimes placed into fictional relationships. Show business wasn’t just what the audience saw on the screen. It continued in the newspapers and magazines and, perhaps especially, in the gossip columns. Edie O’Dare, the protagonist of Lindsay Lynch’s novel Do Tell, is rapidly approaching the end of her seven-year contract and is unlikely to see a renewal. In 1938, there weren’t many legitimate ways for an unconventional woman to make a living...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.