Laura (Femmes Fatales)

by Caspary, Vera

  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 fo
r 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 autobiography—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” about 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” (145). 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” (148).

  Laura’s independence makes her both vulnerable—to being pitied for not having a husband at almost thirty—and free enough to play some of the same relationship games men play: using objects in place of feeling. However, Laura imagines Shelby feeling like a gigolo, not only because of their financial inequality but also because of his genteel Southern heritage in which men are supposed to support and dominate women (145–149). Her complex analysis in these passages is considerably different from Preminger’s conclusion. Like Caspary herself, Laura was neither the most promiscuous nor the most chaste of women. In her drafts of “My ‘Laura,’” Caspary emphasized that Laura “knew how to love,” “had enjoyed more than one lover,” and had “enjoyed her lovers lustily” (Draft Article, 9). She considered being this explicit almost thirty years later to rebut Preminger’s misinterpretation of Laura’s sex life.

  Laura on Stage

  The play version of Laura that Caspary wrote with George Sklar in 1945 revolves more centrally around Laura’s relationships than either previous version. Waldo’s character is intensified in each act so that he appears more clearly as a suspect than in the novel or film, not only because of additional scenes with Mark McPherson, but also because of two added characters: Laura’s landlady and her son. Laura’s point of view is preserved in the play through her speeches summing up her past affairs. Of most interest perhaps are Laura’s additional scenes alone with Waldo, which bring their early relationship, including a disastrous sexual encounter, to life. After Laura tells Waldo to “Stop pretending you’re in love with me,” we learn that at one point in the past Waldo apparently made a pass at Laura and felt painfully rejected, though her version of that evening is that “You called me wanton. You said I was throwing myself at you. You stood in the hall and shouted at me to get out” (1945, 62–63).

  The addition of the immigrant janitor’s wife, Mrs. Dorgan, and her jazz-mad son, Danny, who also is in love with Laura, may be due in part to Caspary’s collaboration with George Sklar. Mrs. Dorgan’s presence adds immigrant and working class issues, as when she upbraids Laura for influencing her son. After declaring that “I’ve sacrificed my whole life for that boy,” she goes on: “I gave up my own career—I was a natural born coloratura—We have a musical tradition in our family. You see me as a janitor’s wife, someone who cleans the halls and scrubs the steps” (1945, 38). But as she has also revealed herself as the sort of controlling wife and mother Caspary had written about in Thicker than Water and would later address at length in Thelma, Mrs. Dorgan is also Caspary’s creation. Mrs. Dorgan even threatens to evict Laura to control her son further. She functions principally in the play as a parallel to Waldo’s possessiveness of Laura, positioning Waldo himself as a male version of Caspary’s typically controlling villains who seek to manipulate their nearest and dearest.

  Bedelia: “The Wickedest Woman Who Ever Loved”

  If Laura is new woman noir, then Bedelia is its prequel, set in 1913, the era in which Caspary grew up and a time she viewed as closer to Victorian mores than the following decades of her working life. Bedelia was written during the last years of Caspary’s affair with the still-married Igee. After she discussed the novel with and dedicated the book to him, Igee produced the British film version. Though Caspary consulted on the script, she was exasperated by Igee’s decision to reset the plot as contemporary, which she felt missed the point that Bedelia had few options for independence. Caspary felt so strongly about this that she later wrote a screenplay of Bedelia, hoping for an American production (1979, 225–26).4

  Bedelia’s character inherits her deadly illusions from several villainous female protagonists in earlier novels, including the title characters of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856–57) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–63). Like them, Bedelia comes across as perversely sympathetic, partly because the men in her drama aren’t exactly heroes, and partly because she embodies the dilemma of women who have few, if any, opportunities—except for marriage—to improve their financial position and live well. Bakerman accurately calls Bedelia “a professional wife” (1984, 48).

  In Flaubert’s novel, Emma Bovary marries for security, but her Romantic dissatisfaction with the life of a provincial doctor’s wife leads her to lies, bankruptcy, and adultery. Deserted by her husband, Lady Audley abandons her child, takes on a new identity as a governess, and marries into status. When her legal husband returns and recognizes her portrait, she kills him, and is exposed by Robert Audley, nephew of her second husband and friend to her first. Bedelia is also a narrative of unmasking. Bedelia resists having her portrait made, yet clings to her black pearl ring as fatally as Lady Audley preserves her child’s shoe.

  Because of Caspary’s explicit interest in Wilkie Collins’ novels, Bedelia may also be cousin to Collins’ poisoner, Lydia Gwilt, whose revenge drives the sensational plot of
Armadale (1864). Lydia, on her own in a sexist and class-ridden England, murders her abusive first husband and manages to escape legal punishment by manipulating the pity of men. Unlike Bedelia, Lydia’s viewpoint comes across vividly in her diary and letters, but the two women ultimately drink their own poison, undone by fatal husbands whom they can neither reject nor dispatch.

  In Bedelia, Charlie Horst’s most horrifying revelation is not that his wife may be trying to poison him, but that his sexy, submissive, perfect wife is playing a deliberately dramatic role. Having scorned Bedelia’s favorite reading—novels of women’s adventures in love—Charlie finds himself living in one. He is shocked to discover that her name, tragic past, and cloying present are all fictions: she has learned to manipulate men’s expectations of women with deadly efficiency. Bedelia is a complex killer protagonist; instead of driving men to crime and destruction, Bedelia is a hard-boiled murderer herself, though stewed in women’s fiction rather than crime novels. As a female criminal who seeks to elevate her position, Bedelia evokes commentary on the ways in which women may get ahead. Bedelia may be, as an early cover had put it, “The Wickedest Woman Who Ever Loved,” yet money cannot be her motivation, since in her sequential wifely roles she can’t use it openly. As a serial bride Bedelia seeks again and again the thrill of seduction, of being chosen, of exercising the power granted to females.

  Caspary wrote several stinging portraits of women who marry for security and live for illusion with disastrous results, notably Thelma (1952), narrated by a Caspary-like friend of the title character who has more to occupy her than love affairs. As Caspary put it when drafting her autobiography, “My protagonist is always a career girl unless, as in Thelma, she is the anti-heroine who believes that a woman achieves success only as the wife of a man who supports her in style.” She went on to identify Thelma as a composite of her fault-finding and eventually mentally ill sister and another relation, who “lamented the failure of her daughter happily married to an artist who hadn’t a lot of money.”