by Vera Caspary
At the start of the twenties she still lived with her parents, taking advantage of their evenings out to neck on the sofa and inventing out-of-town interviews for her job in order to lose her virginity. This was a turbulent time, particularly in 1924, during which her father died on the same day Bobbie Franks vanished. Vera not only observed the Leopold and Loeb murder from inside her community, but she spent weekends with her lovers at the Loeb’s cottage in return for handling its rental while the family avoided public contact (1979, 81–88). The “baby” became the support of her traditional mother, who was impressed that her daughter could “pound” money out of her typewriter. Vera had already left full-time advertising to freelance and begin writing fiction. Later in 1924 she moved to New York to edit Dance Magazine, achieving her goal of living a Bohemian life in Greenwich Village as she had on Chicago’s near north side. As she put it, life as a “flaming thing” meant that “sexual inhibition was to be avoided like pregnancy and a repressed libido shunned like a dose of clap” (1979, 96).
Caspary’s chief fictional portrait of her twenty-something-at-work-and-in-love self was Evvie (1960), for which she merged Chicago and New York settings. In Evvie, Louise, who works for her living, tries to shore up her lovely roommate, Evvie, who lives on an annuity from her stepfather and who pursues an obsessive love affair that leads to her murder. The novel is more an account of the era than a murder mystery, however, and its frank references to abortion and free love—as well as a scene in which, as Caspary put it, “two naked girls discuss sex”—was still shocking enough to be banned in Ireland (1979, 265; “Correspondence 1957–58”).
The climactic, wild party in Evvie was modeled on a birthday celebration given for Caspary in 1926 by her pal Connie Moran at her Rush Street studio in Chicago that “smelled of paint and cats, spicy foods and French perfumes.” Caspary describes vividly in the 1970s draft of Secrets how at the real-life party the “bootlegger came with a gallon of pure alcohol which we mixed with distilled water,” the Dartmouth football team crashed the party, an admirer threw Vera into Connie’s china cabinet, and Caspary learned that another good friend had taken up with her own former lover (“Working Draft,” 42, 134). All these details were applied in Evvie to illustrate the mix of liberty and vulnerability of women’s coming of age in the twenties.
Her writing and editing projects during these years are stories in themselves. They included the Rodent Extermination League’s copy for war-produced live anti-rat virus that died in the mail, a correspondence course to learn ballet whose impresario was entirely fictional, an ad campaign for a book on sex and love, and another mail-order course on playwriting whose lessons Caspary absorbed as she wrote them. Caspary called these her “fraudulent years” (1979, 68). Some particular oddities of these years are portrayed in Stranger than Truth. This satire was one Caspary had long wanted to write as retribution for the death of her editorial assistant on Dance Magazine, Bryne Macfadden. Bernarr Macfadden, the magazine’s publisher and Bryne’s father, was a man much odder than fiction. As a health fetishist who promoted his lifestyle in his publishing, Macfadden allowed no deviations from his routines. He forced his daughter to exercise vigorously to strengthen her heart problems and discouraged her from seeking medical treatment for a chronic cough that turned out to be tuberculosis, as this could damage his lucrative “cures.” When Bryne grew weaker and at last began to hemorrhage, Caspary was asked to tell her father. He responded by cutting off Bryne’s income so that she could not pay for a doctor. He did not attend her funeral, and her sisters could not forgive him (1979, 97–103).
In Stranger than Truth Caspary transformed the Macfadden story into that of a plagiarist publisher of a series of “True” magazines—Crime, Romance, etc. This lying purveyor of truth dominates his daughter, Eleanor, who accurately suspects him of murder. Comic relief is provided by a fanatically devoted secretary’s testimonial, and the father’s secret is uncovered by an alcoholic Greenwich Village poet and an editor. Lola, the poet, has a white-painted milk bottle full of gin that Caspary lifted straight from the Macfadden offices, where the editor-in-chief even had to take off his “eye crutches” when the publisher was present (1979, 91–92). When the novel came out, Mary Macfadden, Bryne’s stepmother, wrote Caspary a letter of approval (“General Correspondence”).
Between the Hammer and the Sickle:
Caspary in the 1930s
In the 1930s, and somewhat in contrast to her first years in Hollywood, Caspary was attracted to Communism. During this time, Caspary supported herself with movie “originals,” or screen stories, which were summaries of action and character from which screenplays could be written by others. Women were admitted easily into screenwriting during this period because writers weren’t highly valued or highly paid, whether male or female (Warren 1988, 9). During the same period, Caspary met many Communists, some of whom introduced her to socialist politics. Her mentor and early collaborator Sam Ornitz explained the apple-sellers Caspary had seen in New York to her as capitalist victims. Even while selling screen stories, having a house built in Connecticut, writing radio dramas for a season in New Orleans, and bringing her mother triumphantly to Hollywood shortly before her death, Caspary secretly joined the party, attended “cell” meetings, helped to raise money for organizations associated with Communism, and wrote socialist plays and scripts with George Sklar, who would later co-author the play version of Laura. In the 1950s Caspary was “gray-listed,” and provided technically truthful but unrevealing testimony in response to California investigations of un-American activities (1979, 192–97). In 1968 she wrote a novel, The Rose-crest Cell (1968), based on this period in her life, admitting that “The skeleton in my closet carries a hammer and sickle” (1979, 169).
Her involvement with Communism was sincere, if ultimately limited. In 1939, on the money from an “original” sale, Caspary planned a visit to Russia to view Communism firsthand, but then derailed her trip in Paris in order to marry an anti-Nazi Communist spy whose sister had put them in touch. Though she detested the man, who talked only of American film stars, Caspary had promised to save him. Eventually she had either to use or lose her own visa for Russia. When her new fiancé’s papers did not arrive in time, Caspary left with relief. She later heard that he had succeeded in reaching the United States. During her travels in Russia, personal encounters impressed her most while she was chilled by “the sense of constant surveillance” and tension she found in the Russians she met (1979, 182–87). By the end of the thirties, Caspary had begun to part company with Communism and to return to themes of independent women at work.
Laura was the novel Caspary published ten years after her autobiographical 1932 family saga, Thicker than Water. In drafting The Secrets of Grown-Ups in the mid-1970s, Caspary discusses at length how she wrote and rewrote a never-published novel during the thirties, which became a sounding board for her evolving politics and eventual dissatisfaction with them. In the much-reworked and finally abandoned political manuscript, she recalls, “Four hundred pages, or five hundred or six, were not enough to contain my rage.” Part of what she was unable to express was “the pie in the sky hopes instilled by the Cinderella legend,” which Caspary, having just read Marx, saw as “the opiate of the bourgeois woman” (“Working Draft,” 255–57). Caspary thought she ought to write a “proletarian novel,” while in real life, “In bed, wearing a lace-trimmed jacket and eating breakfast off a tray, I read New Masses and Daily Worker.” But sexual politics ultimately were more her theme than socialist doctrine; in the end, “Poor hapless Cinderella—special target of my rage” and “the illusory prince” became her focus (1979, 170–71).
Caspary’s Turning Point Novel: Laura
To escape politics and war news in the early forties, Caspary began Laura as a “mystery and a love story.” The original idea had come from reading about a girl killed in a gas blowup that had destroyed her face (“Working Draft,” 428). Laura already existed as an unfinished play and as a movie original,
neither of which Caspary was able to sell in those forms (Caspary 1941). This time she would change her narrative strategy, finish the novel to her satisfaction, and, though she did not know it, forever after become known as “the author of Laura.”
Caspary’s life among women in business and the arts generated both the heroines and villains of her “psycho-thrillers,” as publishers and reviewers called her psychological mysteries. Of these, Laura Hunt and Bedelia Horst are the pole stars, demonstrating balance of feeling and reason on the one end of the continuum, and the abandonment of balance altogether at the other. These women are not, as they have sometimes been categorized, sheer femmes fatales. In Laura Caspary gave urban noir a Gothic fillip in which women negotiate the mean streets of a male world.
Laura is Caspary’s manifesto, applying her experience both in advertising and as a woman professional with a private life. Laura makes it on her own in the big city, enduring many Caspary-like rejections from prospective employers. Laura acquires in Waldo a godfather who shows her around town and boosts her career, but she must also reject the illusory Shelby, who exudes charm but has the heart of a competitive stepsister. The soft-boiled Mark has no clues except Laura’s discarded possessions, including her painted image, all symbols of her self-reliance. There are no photographs of family or lovers in Laura’s apartment, only her own portrait, a startling illustration of the individual as the social unit.
Caspary’s fairy tale for working women takes place in a world of men who use women for advancement and self-reflection. The potential darkness of this world places Laura into the noir category and shadows even Caspary’s non-crime fiction with related suspense. “Who can you trust” was a game working women had to play frequently, and Laura makes evident that women might be labeled femmes fatales simply because they worked in the male-dominated business world. Liahna Babener calls the novel rightly “a proto-feminist commentary on the state of sexual politics in America at mid-century.” She further argues, “the underside of achievement for women is often emotional alienation and punitive retaliation and as Caspary demonstrates, Laura’s plight is that her public stature and sexual autonomy have ignited the envy and anger of the men who surround her, now culminating in a killer’s wrath” (1994, 84–85).
In Laura Caspary hit her stride as a novelist. She was already an experienced plotter of screen story synopses and the author of several plays and scripts. Her earlier novels use third-person narration, and parts of them read a bit like movie-scenario summary. In Laura Caspary’s characters speak directly, and the effectiveness of their witnessing monologues influenced the style of Caspary’s later work.
To display Laura and her suitors Caspary applied what she called “the Wilkie Collins method” of multiple narrators, each of whom tells us about the others as well as revealing their own selves. Waldo Lydecker, Mark, and Laura herself are writers in their own ways (of a newspaper column, police reports, and advertising copy). After her friend, play and screenwriter Ellis St. Joseph, drew her attention to dramatic monologues in Collins’ novels, Caspary allowed Laura, Mark, and especially Waldo to “write” their own accounts. Waldo even allows himself to narrate scenes in which he was not present, assuming an authorial role. Caspary based her fastidious, fascinating, and fat villain on Collins’ Count Fosco (in The Woman in White, which Caspary outlined to study its structure), though lean Clifton Webb is the image that now comes to mind for Waldo Lydecker (Emrys 2005, 9–10).
Mark, the second narrator, who later admits he has written and collated this informal account, dryly recounts Laura’s return and the unfolding investigation, in which she is now a suspect. Shelby’s viewpoint appears in a brief section of interrogation, but the novel’s third narration goes to Laura herself as she reaches conclusions about the obsessed Waldo, who loves her too much, the cheating Shelby, who doesn’t love her enough, and the detective whose independence she trusts as a reflection of her own. Mark then recounts the conclusion. The lively voices of these three narrators, including the contrasts between them and each character’s assessment of the others, are important ingredients. When the book appeared, reviewers consistently cited this structure as fresh and enjoyable.
Laura on Screen
Seeing Laura as a traditional femme fatale stems largely from the Otto Preminger film, which appeared in 1944 and was, from the start, classified as noir, thus enhancing the association of Laura with deadly females. Laura, in fact, was one of four films discussed in the first recorded use of the term “film noir” in 1946 (Jackson 1998, 94). With its rainy urban nights, black-and-white contrasts, and Waldo’s opening voiceover, Preminger’s film seems unmistakably part of the noir canon of harshly-lit urban crime.2 But in other ways, particularly those most faithful to Caspary’s characters, the adaptation does not fit noir parameters for cynical, tough loners driven to murder by earthy fatal women on mean streets. In Laura, the chief criminal and its most world-weary character is a highbrow aesthete, its settings are upper-middle-class apartments and upscale restaurants, the romantic lead is a policeman, and the heroine holds down a good job and keeps rooms of her own. If there is a femme fatale in Laura, it is surely the model, Diane Redfern, who entangles Shelby, pawns the expensive cigarette case he gave her, and dies as Laura’s stand-in.
The film obscures this doubling through the portrait of Laura, which dominates her apartment and appears in the most crucial scenes. In Caspary’s version of the portrait as Waldo describes it, Laura sits “perched on the arm of a chair, a pair of yellow gloves in one hand, a green hunter’s hat in the other.” In the film, the glamorous “portrait,” actually a photo of Tierney touched up to look like a painting (Preminger 1977, 76), embodies the male gaze of the infatuated artist rather than the living woman. In the novel, Waldo finds the painting too “studied, too much Jacoby and not enough Laura” (Caspary 2000, 39). The same can be said of the film, and of commentaries focused on the ethereal and seductive picture of Laura posed in an evening gown. We never actually see Tierney dressed or posing as in the painting, but most often in a suit or casual clothes.3
The contrast between painting and woman illustrates the gap between Caspary’s Laura Hunt and Preminger’s revision of her character. Caspary saw Laura as a thirtyish, successful woman who had lovers as well as colleagues and friends, rather than the young temptress of the film’s portrait. In her synopsis of the novel, which made the rounds of film producers, Caspary stated plainly that “He [Mark] finds the living Laura more fascinating than the image of the dead woman” (1942, 2). When Preminger showed Caspary the screenplay for the film, Caspary recalled—in both a 1971 article, “My ‘Laura’ and Otto’s,” written just before the film’s thirtieth anniversary, and in her auto-biography—that she argued with him about Waldo’s symbolic gun and Laura’s character. She was more successful about the character than the weapon.
In her autobiography, Caspary praised the film warmly for its nuanced direction, which created the world she had in mind for Laura, with its “gossip and phony charm.” But she was appalled by the Laura of Preminger’s script, calling her “the Hollywood version of a cute career girl.” She quoted Preminger as saying Laura was “a nothing, a nonentity,” and that Laura “has no sex. She has to keep a gigolo.” His conclusions caused Caspary to “rage like a shrew” in defense of her strong yet feminine protagonist (1979, 209). Her reply to Preminger, first restated in The Saturday Review a few years before she began writing her life story, bridged the span from Bedelia to Laura. Caspary demanded, “Do you mean she never got money out of men or mink or diamonds? That doesn’t mean a girl’s sexy, Mr. Preminger, it just means she’s shrewd. Laura’s just the opposite. She gives everything with her love” (1971, 27).
Caspary lost the battle to retain Waldo’s walking stick/gun. Even though she had researched its feasibility, Preminger used a shotgun hidden in a clock instead. But Caspary became convinced that Laura’s “romantic short-sightedness” came across as well as it did in the film because she had “shouted” a
bout it. She still thought Laura “would have been an even greater picture if the melodrama in the end had been equal to the mood of the beginning” (1971, 27). After the film appeared Caspary was paid by Good Housekeeping to research Murder at the Stork Club on location in New York. One evening Preminger appeared at the next table. Caspary still felt strongly enough about the film to get into another shouting match with him over whether or not she had influenced the script. “I accused him of a faulty memory,” Caspary recalled. “He retorted that I was telling lies” (1979, 211).
In the film Caspary wanted to see the intersection of class, crime, and sexual politics that she had created in the novel. Laura’s criteria for romantic partners are personal attraction and shared interests. She doesn’t need a man to support her or to be a life-long Pygmalion, and she soon outgrows mothering her babyish lovers. She can choose across class lines, rejecting the aristocratic Shelby for the low-brow policeman. Waldo obliquely critiques and ultimately tries to obliterate Laura’s freedom to choose.
Preminger’s gigolo reference apparently came from his misreading of Laura’s narration in the novel, in which she pictures Shelby rebelliously giving Diane the cigarette case Laura had bought him because “he hated himself for clinging to me, and hated me because I let him cling” (Laura, 126). Laura has decided not to marry Shelby, understanding that their marriage would have been “shoddy and deceitful, taut emotion woven with slack threads of pretense.” Some of that pretense would have been hers, for she faults herself for “wearing” Shelby to show off having a man. She says she bought him the cigarette case “as a man might buy his wife an orchid or a diamond to expiate infidelity” (Laura, 130).