What had Emily ever given him actually, in return for his indifference and brutality, but love and loyalty and patience. And in his warped, perverse way he’d made of that very patience and loyalty something to use against her. And against himself. Because he realized now he’d loved Emily all along. Emily. He said the name over, with a surge of tenderness. Emily. Emily. How strange, how passing strange. It was true, what the doctor had tried so patiently to get him to see—in some mysterious way he didn’t yet understand he’d been revenging himself on her, making her pay—for what? He couldn’t say yet. That was Dr. Baume’s department. He was eager to get on with it now. And eager to make it up to Emily for all the wasted, warped years.
He stood in the doorway to his bedroom now, saw with disbelief the wild confusion he’d created, emptying the drawers. “Drinking is dangerous for you Bowen.” The doctor’s voice sounded in his mind, almost with the tonality of one of those echo chambers in the movies. “You don’t realize it, but your neurosis is an atom bomb locked up inside of you. When you’re conscious your will keeps it under control….”
Roger shook his head. Unbelievable that a grown man could blow his top like this, over a dress shirt. Like a child splashing cereal around a room. He started to enter the room and suddenly he had a moment of complete clarity, what the psychologists in their specialized jargon labeled “total recall.” He knew what it was he’d actually quarreled with Emily about. It was what Dr. Baume had said to him, on Saturday, “She’s making progress, Bowen, she may surprise you and walk out on you, one of these days.” That was why he’d slapped her. That’s why he’d turned on her, shouting, wild with rage, with fury that it seemed now he’d been choking down for years, all his life. “Yes, I know, you’re going up to Boston and you’ll sit there with your family commiserating with you about your hard life, what a rotter I am and how you ought to leave me, just like your analyst has been telling you to do. Don’t tell me, I know what he’s been putting into your mind. Well, I’m telling you now, you’re not going to leave me, the way you’ve been doing all your life, with chauffeurs and gardeners and who knows who else and then looking so holy about it: ‘Come here, dear boy, let me fix your tie. You can’t do without your Mummy for even a minute, can you.’ Well, you’ll not do it again, you hear, you’re not ever going to leave me again, never, never, never…”
He saw the bow tie on the floor where he’d thrown it. It lay describing a crude arabesque, like a child’s drawing of an S. It was somehow ribald, like the rest, the leftover trace of some high revelry that had struck the room and moved on. He didn’t see Emily until he moved into the room. Her face, too, was a caricature of carnival, a Halloween mask, the eyes wide open and protruding, staring up in a travesty of surprise, the tongue grotesquely swollen, sticking out of her mouth, bunched and purple, like grapes.
One Man’s Secret
RITA WEIMAN
THE STORY
Original publication: Cosmopolitan, March 1943
LARGELY UNKNOWN TODAY, RITA WEIMAN (1885–1954) once was practically a one-woman factory for producing books and stories that Hollywood gobbled up to make a huge number of films, mostly silent, including The Co-respondent (1917), Madame Peacock (1920), Curtain (1920) with Katherine MacDonald, Footlights (1921) with Reginald Denny, After the Show (1921) with Jack Holt and Lila Lee, The Grim Comedian (1921) again with Jack Holt, Rouged Lips (1923) with Viola Dana and Tom Moore, and The Social Code (1923) with Viola Dana and Huntley Gordon, among others.
Weiman also provided stories for films when the sound era began, including The Witness Chair (1936) with Walter Abel, Margaret Hamilton, and Ann Harding, The President’s Mystery (1936) with Henry Wilcoxon, Sidney Blackmer, and Evelyn Brent, and Possessed (1947) with Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, and Raymond Massey.
Weiman was one of six writers who wrote The President’s Mystery Story (1935), a novel based on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s idea of a mystery plot: Could someone totally disappear, taking with him his wealth? The other writers were Anthony Abbot, Samuel Hopkins Adams, John Erskine, Rupert Hughes, and S. S. Van Dine. It did not provide a satisfactory solution and it was reissued in 1967 as The President’s Mystery Plot with a new final chapter by Erle Stanley Gardner.
She also was a playwright, with several of her plays serving as the basis for films, including The Co-respondent (1916), released on film under that title in 1917 and again as The Whispered Name (1924), and The Acquittal (1920), filmed with the same title in 1923 and again in 1953.
THE FILM
Title: Possessed, 1947
Studio: Warner Brothers
Director: Curtis Bernhardt
Screenwriters: Silvia Richards, Ranald MacDougall
Producer: Jerry Wald
THE CAST
• Joan Crawford (Louise Howell)
• Van Heflin (David Sutton)
• Raymond Massey (Dean Graham)
• Geraldine Brooks (Carol Graham)
Told in flashback, Louise Howell, now in a mental hospital, tells her psychiatrist how she came to psychotically walk the streets of a strange city. Holding a responsible position as a nurse for the matriarch of a wealthy family, she secretly falls in love with David Sutton, a confirmed bachelor and roué who lives across the lake from her placement. They have an affair that he breaks off, tired of her obsessive, possessive love. When the wealthy old woman in Louise’s care is found drowned in the lake, the verdict is that she committed suicide but there are questions. Serious questions. As a trained nurse, Louise recognizes that she is having a breakdown that deteriorates over time, eventually leading to her present situation.
Producing the screenplay for Possessed was not a smooth ride. The first problem occurred when Joan Crawford and director Curtis Bernhardt sought to make the film as authentic as possible, so they visited several psychiatric wards in southern California to observe mental patients. When they watched, without permission, one woman undergoing electroshock treatments, she claimed her privacy had been invaded and sued Warner Brothers, which gave her a substantial settlement.
The first draft of the screenplay was written by Silvia Richards but Wald hired Ranald MacDougall to completely rewrite it. MacDougall had written the script for the wildly popular Crawford vehicle Mildred Pierce two years earlier and was brought in in an attempt to replicate its success. Mildred Pierce garnered Crawford an Academy Award for Best Actress, and she also was nominated for her role in Possessed.
Ever grateful, Crawford apparently threatened to walk off the set permanently unless twin brothers Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein agreed to rewrite her part. As it happens, the Epsteins had been suspended by the studio so executive producer Jack L. Warner had no choice but to reinstate them and give them back pay. They wrote scenes to Crawford’s satisfaction but they did not get a screen credit. Crawford also insisted that cinematographer Sidney Hickox be replaced by Joseph A. Valentine, despite the fact that Hickox had already worked on the film for more than a month of shooting.
Oddly, Joan Crawford had already starred in a 1931 film titled Possessed that costarred Clark Gable, but the films were completely different with no connection to each other.
When Possessed was first announced by Warner Brothers, it was intended to star Ida Lupino, Paul Lukas, and Sydney Greenstreet.
ONE MAN’S SECRET
Rita Weiman
IT WOULD NOT HAVE occurred to Dean Steward that six months after his wife’s death, he could ask another woman to marry him.
He was standing at his study window when the knock came that proved to be destiny. At first it was lost in the splash of waves against the rocks, a rhythmic sound at once soothing and stirring. Or it may have been his absorption in the view, the swordlike streak of gold that followed sunset, the waters foaming where they hit below the window, the islands that dotted Long Island Sound glistening like amethysts in the
afterglow. Today high tide was at twilight, the hour he loved best. He did not hear the knock at the door.
When he bought Rockland years ago as a summer home, he had had part of the wall in this room torn out and the huge stationary pane of glass installed as the frame for a changing picture he never tired of. And always he marveled that this scene of sweeping beauty, these cliffs, the fishing boats, the crescent of white beach curving off to one side of the sprawling comfortable house should be in Westchester within such short distance of New York.
From the time they were little children, Cara and Wyndham loved it. And Pauline, too, when the days were warm and the nights brief. Yet never had he been able to keep her here the year round. She was afraid of winter cold, the early darkness. At this season they would have been moving back to their New York apartment in the beating heart of the city. Pauline always longed for her sixteenth-floor bedroom balcony from which she could gaze down, fascinated, on cars and trucks reduced to miniature; as if from the illusion of their dwarfed size she could draw consolation for her own ineffectuality.
During those long years, those very long years of her intermittent illness, this place had been to Dean a haven where problems seemed less insurmountable. All the staccate events of his life, its tragedies, were centered in New York. In a New York hospital their third child had been born, the little girl who lived only a few hours and took with her into the unknown her mother’s health and peace of mind. And it was from New York that Pauline had been sent to various private sanitariums in the hope that change of scene would conquer the attacks of melancholia, only to write frantic letters pleading to be allowed to come home.
As he gazed into the soft twilight, Dean was thinking that it was here Pauline had found peace, although she never realized the fact. Here she had regained something of the laughter and the sparkle of their early years together. Here she had looked like her daughter’s older sister, with the same aura of red-gold hair as Cara, and Cara’s gentian-blue eyes. Last year this time, just before they returned to town, he had fancied improvement in her condition. He had watched for every little sign—her more frequent smiles; her reviving interest in Cara’s boy friends and Wynn’s ambition to study law. The twins, sixteen then, seemed to bring back their mother’s youth. Last year this time he had dared to hope.
For a moment his thoughts stumbled and he could not lift them to consciousness of the beauty the window framed. In spite of him, they struggled back to the night last May when he had sleepily lifted the receiver and heard the doorman’s panicked, “Mr. Steward, come quick!” After that night he had been unable to look from any of the sixteenth-floor windows of the apartment without having imagination summon the picture of Pauline’s frail body hurtling downward through the darkness. Pauline’s suicide…
The knock came again, louder this time, more imperative. Clouds closed over the streak of gold in the sky. The last bar of daylight sank quickly, coldly, as it does in late autumn.
Dean answered, “Come in.”
The woman who opened the door hesitated. “Do I disturb you?”
“Not at all. I was just mooning over the view. It hits me particularly at this hour this time of year. The sky and water coming together like steel doors closing. Suddenly they’re one. Come over here and take a look.”
But she did not look at the view. She studied Dean’s profile against the luminous background, dark, gaunt, fine, as if etched on the glass; a distinguished profile, gray-streaked black hair sweeping from the high forehead; a nose clean-cut, eyes with the tired, kind expression of a man who has been hurt but not embittered. They were singularly handsome deep-set eyes. A trim mustache touched with gray failed to conceal the sensitiveness of his mouth. It was the face of a scholar with the smile of a friend.
He turned to her, and she glanced quickly out of the window. “Yes, beautiful. But it’s frightening too. There seems to be no beginning and no end.”
“Probably that’s right. We see a beginning and an end because our view is limited. Well, actually, there is no horizon. None ever existed. Our eyes place it there, Gladys, because we can’t see beyond.”
They stood watching the sky darken until all the luminous quality was gone. The splash of the waves sounded heavier, as if giant arms were pounding on the rocks.
She moved away. He followed and switched on a lamp that gently flooded the room. “What time is it?”
“Long after six.”
Dean kept no clock in the study. In these war times he spent all day, every day, at the plant of the Steward Chemical Company located near by. Being a chemist as well as president of the company made his work intensive and exacting. When he came home to this room, he wanted no sense of time passing. “Is Cara home?” he asked.
“Not yet. She went into town for a matinee. I had to see you before she gets back.”
He noticed then for the first time that Gladys’s hands, strong and reposeful—hands always suggestive of sculpture to Dean—were clasped tightly. Any sign of nervousness in this woman who for three years had been his wife’s devoted companion was so unusual that Dean knew there must be something radically wrong.
He motioned to the lounge chair and knelt to light the fire. The flame reflection leaped up to her eyes. They were cool gray eyes ordinarily, with something of the transparency of that twilight water slapping against the rocks. Tonight they had a warmer glow. Yet their expression was troubled.
Dean had never learned her age, but he judged Gladys Mayden to be in her early thirties. She had an untouched virginal quality. There was petal smoothness on her olive skin and in the gloss of brown hair brushed back from her ears in soft wide waves. Her mouth, without a sign of rouge, was nevertheless crimson and firm, chiseled like her hands.
Sitting there by the fire, in a round-necked brown sweater that hugged her breasts, a tan tweed jacket swung around her shoulders, and that anxious look in her eyes, she seemed more human than he had ever seen her.
“What’s bothering you, Gladys?”
She leaned forward. “It’s awfully hard to say this, Mr. Steward, but I can’t stay on any longer.”
“You can’t stay on?” For a second it was impossible to grasp what she meant.
“No. My things are packed. If you can let me go tomorrow, I’d appreciate it.”
“But Gladys, why? Why? What’s happened?”
“Nothing. You didn’t expect me to stay indefinitely?”
“I never thought about it.”
“I did. I’ve thought about it a lot these past six months. I came out here because I wanted to help you and Cara——” she broke off, fumbling for words. “I wanted to get you settled. But you don’t need me any more.”
“Of course we need you. Why, you’ve taken charge of this household for three years. You’re part of it.”
Her eyes filled, and now he understood the reason for their blurred look. Tears had been near the surface. “I tried to do what I could to make things a little easier for you. I—I loved Mrs. Steward, and I love Cara. But—forgive me—I’m not a housekeeper, and I can’t go on living here in that capacity.”
“Certainly not. I never expected you to. But you’re Cara’s companion now. She depends on you.” In his confusion, he was on the point of adding, “So do I.” The panicked realization hit him that life had just begun to move smoothly with a woman’s presence filling it. Through the years of Pauline’s illness there had been no other woman. Pauline loved him, and loyalty to her love had barred such a possibility. Work had been the substitute for passion. Work had been his release. He had devoted himself to laboratory experiments which resulted in his great success at forty. He had cut himself off from social contacts; from the temptation of women.
“Cara is seventeen and very independent,” Gladys was saying. “She has a lot of friends. She has her art studies. When Wynn is home from college, she has him. She doesn’t need anyone else.”
>
“She loves you. No one else can take your place. It’s utterly absurd for you to think of going.” His mind, his lips held to Cara. He told himself it was for her sake. Cara had been through enough—too much for a young girl. In these past few months he had seen her lovely young face change from a too-old expression to the gaiety which had been hers as a child. That elfin charm, regained last summer, he felt sure was due to Gladys. Often he had noticed the two of them, swimming together, streaking through the waters, glistening like mermaids, dashing out, their tanned bodies almost bare to the sun. Gladys had a beautiful figure whose perfect proportions were lost in the austere clothes she habitually wore. In a bathing suit she had the supple flowing muscles and strength of a boy. It struck him suddenly that he could not recall having seen her before in the clinging sort of sweater she had on tonight. Perhaps this, too, made her seem more human, more feminine. His gaze held to her, frankly seeing her as a woman. “You can’t go, Gladys.”
But her eyes avoided his. “I must go, Mr. Steward. It’s out of the question even to consider staying.”
“Why?” Dean insisted. “Don’t you like us any more?”
“Like you? Like you——” she said, and her voice caught and stopped.
“Well, then,” he put in quickly. “I take it you do like us. That settles any further argument.”
“What I want or what Cara wants doesn’t matter.” He wondered if she purposely avoided including him. “If I stayed it would do Cara more harm than good.” She was on her feet now, slowly pacing the floor. “It’s so hard to tell you—I wish I didn’t have to. But there’s been talk. Oh, won’t you see? I’m a woman alone, and I’m living here with a widower. It’s gossip, unfair to us both—to you, to me. And to Cara, too.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 178