Author Plays with Fire Sparked on Bienveneda

By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief

“Playing With Fire” is a new novel set in New York and Germany, and put onto paper in Santa Barbara. But it was born, said author Frank Root Hotchkiss, in Pacific Palisades, two decades ago.

Those were the days when Hotchkiss was becoming almost respectable.

He had already been a lot of things—Yale scholar, Vietnam War officer, actor—and was living in a house on Bienveneda Avenue, north of Sunset, snapped up for $100,000 in the mid-1970s.

He was even an early member of the Pacific Palisades Community Council.

He was working as a newspaper reporter in Santa Monica, trying to avoid being relocated to a bureau in the remote north and pondering the consequences of such a move.

A question was troubling the happily married man: “I love my wife, I love my life, but what happens to a man sane in almost every way who is stricken with amour fou: the madness of obsessive love sparked with a single glance that breaks hearts and tears down empires?”

Thus was born a 50-page manuscript, a fable that follows a middle-aged, highly successful New York advertising agent who falls for a Ukrainian beauty, Natalia—and the havoc it unleashes in his life.

In many ways, Benno Strong, the smitten adman, is Hotchkiss: tall, distinguished, very much a leading man with patrician grace, good hair and a big voice.

Where they differ is that Hotchkiss has never strayed—he shared thoughts and plot twists with his wife, Sandi, as the book evolved over the next turbulent decades before being finally published at 236 pages at the start of 2017.

“I never fell into such a mess, but I have seen others who have—and it can be both glorious and terrible,” he said, shaking his head.

It’s a first novel, a hot and furious tale that displays both his pedigree—the Connecticut native studied the history of art and sociology at Yale—and his interests, from the media to cars.

It’s the kind of book, with the right marketing, that could be a summer beach favorite.

But, in the end, Hotchkiss has published it in winter because, having spent so much of his family’s time on it, it’s the right thing to do.

He has other books planned, including a story of a man facing his own mortality, but a tell-all autobiography would work, too.

In real life, he has all the stories we want to hear. How, as an art student, he picked up girls in swinging 1960s London impressed with his accent.

How, as a lieutenant on board a Vietnam War patrol boat he dodged rocket-propelled grenades.

How he played a traffic cop who pulls over Kris Kristofferson in a marijuana-filled Bentley in the 1972 cult classic movie “Cisco Pike.”

That was in the days when Kristofferson was still largely known as a longhaired army brat, smart enough to win a Rhodes scholarship to the University of Oxford, and highway patrol officers wore dickey bow ties with their leather.

“We were shooting the scene on Sunset when a guy drove right between me and the Bentley. I had to ask him to move along, and with my uniform and my voice he did move it pretty fast,” he recalled.

There are many other stories, including how he became a public face of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, then a nationally syndicated writer on all things automotive and then ran his own PR agency for nearly two decades—not dissimilar to the ad agency run by his alter ego Benno.

In recent years, Hotchkiss has found himself, much to his surprise, on the more peaceful streets of Santa Barbara, serving on its city council.

There are even rumors he may one day end up as mayor.

But he is still digging into his Westside past to create new worlds. So don’t be put off by the novel’s sub-title, “A New York Story.” As a “Cisco Pike” character might say, “This is all Palisadian, and it’s groovy, baby.”