Virginia Coffman (July 30, 1914 – March 30, 2005)

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Virginia Coffman was born in San Francisco on July 30, 1914, and worked in the Hollywood studios during the Golden and Silver years. She has worked on many TV scripts as well as doing some acting herself. She began writing in 1959 and since then has had over ninety titles published. She wrote also with the pen names of Kay Cameron, Virginia C. Deuvaul, Jeanne Duval, Diana Saunders & Ann Stanfield. Virginia Coffman passed away on March 30, 2005.

Someone once asked Virginia Coffman how long it took her to research her first book.

"It took me thirty years to research," she replies. "That's all I was doing in my youth and young womanhood; constantly reading, because history is something I love."

"I care more about background in my books than anything else," she said. Indeed, Virginia was an expert on various periods of history.

"I know the French Revolution so well, and Ancient Rome. If I were to visit Rome in that time and place tomorrow I'd know exactly where to go and what to do. I'm crazy about it, have been ever since I saw the silent movie, Ben Hur," she said. "That changed my life - I saw the movie on October 16, 1927. I was a little kid then, and when I saw it, I knew what I wanted to do in my life - I wanted to write historical novels."

Virginia fulfilled her burning childhood ambition, though not without a struggle and her share of rejection slips. But determination has its rewards. And, when most women are counting grandchildren, this vivacious lady was toting up successful novels. If the count is correct, there are more than sixtyfive published in all, including paperbacks and nineteen hardcover novels, with foreign sales in England and throughout Europe. Her novels have sold over seven million copies; her first published novel, Moura, has been reprinted and reissued six times.

In Moura, she took three ingredients of a typical nineteenth century Gothic - an evil uncle, equally wicked housekeeper and innocent niece — and surprised readers with a shocking plot turn.

"I made the wicked uncle the hero, the villainous housekeeper the heroine, and the sweetest-girl-who-ever-lived the monster. And nobody has ever guessed the solution until the end. It's always been such a shock," she said with pride.

Reminiscing on her career, Virginia recalled it took her nearly twenty-five years of writing before she ever sold anything. She was in her forties and was the secretary to a Reno real estate agent when Moura, the product of nine years of on-again, off-again work, was published in 1959. But like most successful authors, she had begun writing seriously years before, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1938.

For twelve years (beginning in 1944), she worked in Hollywood, first as a secretary and writer for David Seiznick, then as a publicist for Monogram, a brief stint with Howard Hughes at RKO, and eventually as an editor of sons for Hal Roach.

"I started out as a secretary and sneaked in the back door as a writer," as she laughingly put it. "Eventually I was polishing or editing scripts, which really meant I was writing the whole thing, but not getting any credit for it."

It was in 1965 that Virginia turned full-time writer.

"That was when I got: mad at the publishers who were rejecting my manuscripts," she recalled.

She resorted to a last-ditch attempt to get her work primed. On the same day, she sent three different manuscripts to three different paperback publishers. Within ten days she was notified by mail and three $1,500 checks that all three books had been accepted.

"That was the real beginning, and it was in paperback," she said.

Independently single and glad of it, the exuberant lady admitted she had little time for a social life, preferring to spend an average of sixty hours a week writing for her pleasure and her living.

"I get up around 7:30, have breakfast and write longhand on a yellow legal pad until I have five-good pages," she confided.

She frequently wrote while casting sidelong glances at her favorite television serials: "One Life to Live," "General Hospital," and "Edge of Night." By the time she had finished, it was four o'clock: sometimes it was 10 P.M.

Another key to her success, she said, had been a worldly, stimulating life. Her socially prominent family had a nodding acquaintance with men like Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur, among others, and the family owned property in Hawaii when most people weren't even sure where Hawaii was.

Her father, a corporate executive, was as egotistical and domineering as he was charming, and Virginia said she never really gave up trying to impress him. Not surprisingly, in more than one of her books he was recreated as one of the characters, sometimes as the villain, other times as the hero. Daddy's pale blue eyes gaze piercingly out of a picture which the author displaied prominently, in her living room.

Although Virginia never married, there was nothing of the spinster image about her.

"It is my personal opinion that single people have more fun," she said, though she didn't deny having been in love at various times in her life. In one romance, at least, the object of her affection was a combination "Don Juan, mother's boy, and gigolo."

"Possibly I defend being single too much, but I truly believe many people marry because they're supposed to. I always knew I wasn't going to marry. Thirty or forty years ago that was rare. People would ask, 'Oh, you're such a nice girl. Why aren't you married?' As though the reward for being nice was marriage," she commented wearily.

Virginia loved to travel and did so almost exclusively by ship.

"I believe in going first-class all the way," she admitted pleasantly.

Travel also seemed to nourish Virginia's imagination and satisfied her appetite for history and the macabre.

"In Paris, people will say, 'Don't you see the magic beauty of it?' And I say, yes, of course I love it. But then I tell them, that's where they cut off the head of so-and-so, and this is the place where so-and-so was stabbed! In other words, to me it's all bloody and horrifying and dramatic. It's the drama that intrigues me. That's the magic"

Virginia Coffman's Books on Amazon: Virginia Coffman

Source: Love's Leading Ladies by Kathryn Falk