Martha's Insatiable Desires

Martha's Insatiable Desires is the never-before-told story of how actress Martha Hyer stole approximately 10 million dollars from hubby famed producer Hal Wallis.  As a couple, Hyer and Wallis were somewhat mismatched.  He was a boy from the slums of Chicago whose success in the movie business (196 films over a 44-year career) owed as much to his ability to pinch a penny as to his aptitude for wheeling and dealing. Beautiful, sexy Martha was a relentless shopaholic who dealt with her addiction through skullduggery.  To get relief from huge mounting personal debt she mortgaged Hal's Beverly Hills mansion, his 12-room oceanside "getaway" in Trancas Canyon, and their desert home in Palm Springs.  And then there arose the itchy question of what to do about Hal’s small but superior collection of French Impressionist paintings hanging there in the sun room of their L.A. abode doing nobody any particular good….

About the Author

Carter Wilson is the author of six novels, a children's story, and two earlier books of ethnographic nonfiction. As a young man he lived in Mayan communities in southern Mexico and wrote and produced a documentary film called "Appeals to Santiago" about an eight-day Mayan religious festival, "Appeals to Santiago" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKG94SRJtg4). Later he studied Quechua people's use of coca leaf in Peru on a grant from the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. His children's novel, On Firm Ice, is about Netsilik Inuit people of Canada, Treasures On Earth, a fictional account of the discovery of Machu Picchu in Peru seen through the eyes of a photographer who is also in the midst of discovering he is gay. Wilson’s first novel, Crazy February, has been in print 59 years. He wrote the narration for two Oscar-winning documentaries, "The Times of Harvey Milk" (with Judith Coburn) and "Common Threads," and received the Ruth Benedict Prize from the gay section of the American Anthropology Association for his "Hidden in the Blood.”