The writer who chronicled a Hollywood childhood

Growing up, Nora Johnson had an unparalleled insight into Hollywood’s glitz and glamour. The daughter of Nunnally Johnson—a successful screenwriter, producer, and director who worked on films as varied as The Grapes of Wrath and The Dirty Dozen—she saw Judy Garland, Humphrey Bogart, and Marilyn Monroe at her father’s cocktail parties. She played croquet with actor Tyrone Power and attended Shirley Temple’s birthday parties. But Johnson, who documented her experiences in several well-received memoirs and novels, including The World of Henry Orient, never felt entirely comfortable among such luminaries. “If I went out to Romanoff’s with them, and Groucho was there and the Bogarts and Coop and Rocky and all the rest,” she wrote, “I’d just be the black hole in the bright tapestry.” Johnson was born in Hollywood “when her father was already well on his way to a prominent career,” said The New York Times. Her parents split up when she was 6, and her mother took her to New York City. She went to school on the East Coast and spent the holidays in Beverly Hills. During her trips West, she often worried about boring her partyloving father. “The things I saved up for months to tell him,” she said, “never seemed worth bringing up when I was with him.” At age 25, Johnson published her first novel, said The Washington Post.A social satire, about two students at a private girls’ school who become obsessed with a famous pianist, The World of Henry Orient was praised by the New York Herald Tribune for “recalling— and re-creating—the poignant bittersweet of late childhood.” Johnson’s father helped her adapt Henry Orient for the big screen in 1964, with Peter Sellers in the title role, and also turned the book into a stage musical, “causing a short-lived rift with his daughter, who opposed the idea.” Johnson became a “prolific and fluid writer,” said the Los Angeles Times. She “mined her childhood and adolescence” in three memoirs: Flashback (1979), You Can Go Home Again (1982), and Coast to Coast (2004). But she always felt under the shadow of her father. “Even now, when I write a passage that pleases me especially,” she said in 1986, nine years after Nunnally Johnson’s death, “I find myself thinking, ‘How he’d like this...I hope.’” Times.