Laura (Femmes Fatales) Read online

  Caspary admitted she understood this type from the inside as a woman she could have been (“Discards,” 576). Thelma marries a man she doesn’t love in order to be given material wealth and security, though she remains romantically attached to a footloose former lover. Thelma’s long-suffering husband and daughter turn on her in the end, rather than fall victim to her machinations permanently.

  Through the character of Ellen in Bedelia, Caspary explores a self-supporting woman. The novel’s omniscient narrator notes that in another era Ellen would have been considered attractive, but “fashions in women change as drastically as in clothes” so that “nowadays Ellen’s face was considered too long, her head too narrow, the pale brown coronet of braids absurdly out of style”(Bedelia, 8). Ellen thinks of herself as “the Tailored Girl and enjoyed wearing suits and shirtwaists” at her job, but she suffers the candor of her stylish friend, Abbie, who tells her, “There’s nothing so abhorrent to the masculine eye as a plaid silk shirtwaist. It simply shrieks old maid” (Bedelia, 14).

  Caspary’s fiction pivots on the trade-offs women face. Ellen, though pitied by Abbie and unloved by Charlie, dresses as she pleases and also smokes defiantly. Bedelia gets the man, but she must play the expected role, at least until she kills her latest husband. It is Bedelia who is bitter, who sees men as “rotten” and “beasts” (Bedelia, 94), not the disappointed Ellen who still has a life because she has a job. As Charlie tells her (while Bedelia is dying upstairs), “You’re an independent woman because you go out and earn your living.” Ellen retorts, while smoking a cigarette, that she enjoys her life, and comments pointedly, “But men don’t like a girl to be too independent, do they?” Charlie, who is thinking about how he will have to discover his charmingly dependent wife’s body, doesn’t respond (Bedelia, 185).

  In Bedelia Caspary manipulates point of view far differently than in Laura, yet to equal effect. Whereas Laura’s narrators reveal their information, much of it incorrect, in Bedelia, the narration reveals the thoughts and feelings of Charlie and Ellen, but not those of Bedelia or her nemesis, detective Ben Chaney. Like Charlie and the others, we never know exactly what Bedelia thinks or feels, only what she chooses or can be pressured to reveal. While this limits the portrait, the strategy allows for much of the novel’s suspense as we wonder how she will respond in the end to the growing charges against her. But whether she is trying to flee from exposure, attempting to seduce Charlie into believing her, or taking poison at his command, the mask never completely slips. Similarly, Ben’s disguise as a painter stays in place until he reveals himself.

  Writing Her Own Life

  Caspary herself was as complex as any of her characters. She was moved by ideals affecting workers and women, but was much more inclined to start a social group than to recruit, organize, or protest. In the thirties she created the “Conversation Club,” a group of Communist wives who put on social events (1979, 181). Caspary was aware that she was not going to portray World War II Rosie the Riveters, but her own trajectory as a professional. Yet she remained conscious of working women in all contexts. In her seventies Caspary visited and taught writing workshops to prisoners in the New York Women’s House of Detention. When she proposed a nonfiction book on the lives of inmates, she also proposed to portray the lives of the staff and administration working there as well (“Women in Crime,” 17–18).

  Kathi Maio, in her review of The Secrets of Grown-Ups for Sojourner, called Caspary a “Rebel with a Cause,” and accurately assessed her “mild-mannered radicalism.” As she put it, “Caspary is not primarily a feminist. But, rather, a natural and unabashed female rebel” whose stances therefore can be “contradictory” (12). Perhaps it is more precise to say that Caspary’s rebellious spirit enabled her to enjoy her professional and private lives. For example, early on she chose to break into business writing to support herself so that she might write fiction. In 1910, a generation of Jewish women educated in the United States began to enter colleges and the business world. Caspary might have done either. Her choice of stenography placed her in the business category chosen by about 15 percent of Jewish women her age, a perfectly acceptable one to her family (Schloff 2003, 97).

  But Caspary had no intention of launching a business career. She used her father’s age and her own lack of confidence as excuses for not attending college (1979, 37). She may have realized that the University of Chicago was likely to steer her toward such domestic careers as teaching, nursing, and the new profession of social work, rather than writing. She must have recognized that Jewish professionals often worked in their own communities. Caspary had a larger scope in mind. Caspary used stenography to break into copy writing and then creative authorship. It is no accident that her first novel, The White Girl, is about an ambitious black woman who passes as white, or that Caspary places this protagonist in a shop much like her father’s workplaces, with an owner who is to some extent a portrait of her father.5Vera herself “passed” as a good-girl office worker until she could pass on to a more Bohemian artist’s life in the wider worlds of Chicago, New York, Hollywood, and Europe.

  Caspary considered herself a non-practicing Jew. In reply to a query for a display on “The Jewish Woman Writer” in 1977, Caspary said, “I am quite without religion but definitely feel that I am Jewish” (“General Correspondence”). However she was conscious that prejudice operated within and without Jewish circles, and rejected both contexts. Her family saga, Thicker than Water, as autobiographical as many of her other novels, examines hierarchies of race and class within a Jewish community over several generations. She was quick to rebuke anti-Semitism. Early in her writing career Caspary rented a room in which to work temporarily. When the landlady revealed she had told the other boarders that Caspary was “only half Jewish,” Caspary snapped back, “‘What a pity,’ I said, ‘that it was the front half’” (“Working Draft,” 41).

  Caspary’s core identity was as a writer. Many of her characters beyond Laura and Waldo also write, including Sara Collins’ radio mysteries in Murder at the Stork Club, a false diary by the title character of The Man Who Loved His Wife, and the overall chroniclers of Stranger than Truth and The Mystery of Elizabeth. Even Bedelia constructs her own romance plots. The power of imaginative shaping ultimately allowed Caspary to focus her own life on a writing career in which she drew heavily from that life for fiction.

  In her autobiography Caspary frames herself as the ultimate fictional character. At the beginning of her life story she describes a “specter” that she has tried to bury “in a closet smelling of old women’s dresses.” This is who she might have been, a “skinny girl shivering as the Chicago wind sweeps across the Wells Street station of the South Side El.” This failed self is one whose life has been eaten up by family duty and dull subsistence though she longs for better things. “Saddest of all,” Caspary writes, “She is a writer among those secretly writing in locked bedrooms the poem, the story, the novel that will never be published” (1979, 1–2).

  At the end of her autobiography, Caspary again evokes this ghostly double who jeers at the successful writer. She concludes, “Everything good in my adult life has come through work: variety and fun, beautiful homes, travel, good friends, interesting acquaintances, the fun of flirtations and affairs, and best of all, the profound love that made me a full woman.” Here Caspary may be bowing to her upbringing as well as thumbing her nose at those who thought she couldn’t have both career and marriage. She closes by saying, “Those who come after us may find it easier to assert independence, but will miss the grand adventure of having been born a woman in this century of change” (1979, 281). Caspary was, to paraphrase Ida Cox, a woman wild enough not to live the blues. Because of her independent spirit, her fiction and self-portrait continue to champion self-supporting women even into the twenty-first century.

  A.B. Emrys

  Kearney, Nebraska

  October 2005

  NOTES

 
1Caspary created three professional detectives: policeman Mark McPherson in Laura, insurance investigator Ben Cheney in Bedelia, and Joe Collins in the novella Murder in the Stork Club (also published as The Lady in Mink), who must clear his radio mystery-writer wife of suspicion. Caspary also read some mystery writers she liked, such as Cornell Woolrich and Frances Iles. She had met Dorothy B. Hughes, whom Caspary admired as “a blithe spirit, a hard-woking [sic] woman who wrote her books, kept house, raised three children and never complained of anything!” (“From Readers,” 1981).

  2In a script not used, both Mark and Laura had voiceover narrations, paralleling Waldo’s voice that still introduces the film (Preminger 1978, 77).

  3Some odd criticism has resulted from admiration for the glamorous picture of Tierney. The only book chiefly about Caspary’s work, “Laura” as Novel, Film, and Myth, by Eugene McNamara, does contain insightful comments, especially on the film’s production, but also dwells heavily on “myth.” It is sometimes unclear whether the author has in mind the character of Laura in either novel or film, or Tierney, the picture of her, or the theme song.

  4I have seen the American script and read Ann Warren’s comments on the British script. In both scripts Bedelia apparently is not pregnant, and takes poison left for her but not actually pressed upon her by Charlie.

  5The suicidal ending of The White Girl was the publisher’s choice. Caspary’s manuscript describes the protagonist picking up the pieces and getting on with her life (“Discards” 117–18).

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the Friends of the Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, for a grant-in-aid and the Research Services Council at the University of Nebraska-Kearney for their additional support, all of which enabled me to use the extensive library resources at the University of Wisconsin and thoroughly explore the Vera Caspary Papers archived at the Wisconsin Historical Society. I am also grateful to the Authors Guild for permission to quote from Caspary’s works and unpublished manuscripts. The archive includes the drafts and revisions of The Secrets of Grown-Ups, which is far longer in manuscript than in its published version, as well as working drafts of Caspary’s published works, business and fan correspondence, and unpublished scripts and other writing.

  Except for the present Feminist Press editions, all of Caspary’s books are out of print. Assorted editions of some are available from online booksellers, and some large libraries still have copies. Laura has been released on DVD, and the adaptation of The Blue Gardenia, Caspary’s screen story of a lonely telephone company worker who may or may not have killed the company masher, is available on DVD, as is Caspary’s screen adaptation of A Letter to Three Wives.

  Works Cited

  Babener, Liahna. “De-feminizing Laura,” in It’s a Print!: Detective Fiction from Page to Screen, edited by William Reynolds and Elizabeth Trembley. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1994.

  Bakerman, Jane S. “Vera Caspary’s Chicago, Symbol and Setting.” In MidAmerica XI: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, edited by David D. Anderson. East Lansing, MI: Midwestern Press, 1984.

  ———. “Vera Caspary’s Fascinating Females: Laura, Evvie and Bedelia.” Clues. 1.1: 46–52, 1980.

  Caspary, Vera. “Laura.” [catalogued as “Untitled Murder Story”]. Box 11. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, 1941.

  ———. “Laura, 1942, Synopsis.” Box 5. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, 1942.

  ———. Bedelia. Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1945; New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2006.

  ———. “General Correspondence January 1946–June 1962–March 1980.” Box 2. Folder 1. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, n.d.

  ———. Script of Recorded Interview [later used in The Boston Herald] by Dudley Fraser for Little, Brown & Company, 15 July 1950. Box 13. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.

  ———. Letter to Joan Khan, December 31. “Correspondence from Readers 1957–58,” The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, 1960.

  ———. “My ‘Laura’ and Otto’s.” Saturday Review. 26 June 1971: 36–37.

  ———.“Mark McPherson,” in The Great Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978.

  ———. The Secrets of Grown-Ups. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979.

  ———. “Correspondence from Readers 1979–1981.” Box 28. Folder 5. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.

  ———. Laura. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1943; New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2006.

  ———. “Discards and Rewritten Pages.” The Secrets of Grown-Ups. Box 29. Folders 4, 12. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, n.d.

  ———. “Draft Article.” Box 28. Folder 17. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, n.d.

  ———. “Screen Stories.” Box 9. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, n.d.

  ———. “Women in Crime.” Box 29. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, n.d..

  ———. “Working Draft 1927–1954.” The Secrets of Grown-Ups. Box 29. Folders 3. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, n.d.

  Caspary, Vera and George Sklar. “The Exiles.” Box 10. The Vera Caspary Papers. Film and Manuscript Archive, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, n.d.

  Caspary, Vera and George Sklar. Laura: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1945.

  Emrys, A.B. “Laura, Vera and Wilkie: Deep Sensation Roots of a Noir Novel.” Clues. 23.3: 5–13, 2005.

  Jackson, Kevin. The Language of Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1998.

  Maio, Kathi. “Rebel With A Cause.” Books. Sojourner. 12 January 1980.

  McNamara, Eugene. “Laura” as Novel, Film, and Myth. Lewiston: Mellen, 1996.

  Preminger, Otto. Preminger: An Autobiography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977.

  Schloff, Linda Mack. “We Dug More Rocks: Women and Work,” in American Jewish Women’s History: A Reader, edited by Pamela S. Nadell. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

  Warren, Ann L. Word Play: The Lives and Work of Four Women Writers in Hollywood’s Golden Age. Ph.D. dissertation., University of Southern California, 1988.

  About the Author

  VERA CASPARY is the author of twenty-one books. Her early novels drew on her experience growing up a conservative Jewish family in Chicago. Later works focused on career women who balance work, a love life, and even marriage, with a desire for independence. Caspary is best known for her skillfully-crafted and psychologically-complex murder mysteries. Several of her books were made into films, including Bedelia and Laura. Enormously popular in her time, she was also a playwright and screenwriter, with such classics as Fritz Lang's The Blue Gardenia and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Letter to Three Wives having been adapted from her screen stories. Reviewing her autobiography, The S
ecrets of Grown-Ups, The Washington Post called Caspary's life "a Baedeker of the 20th century. An independent woman in an unliberated era, she collided with or was touched by many of its major historical and cultural events: wars, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War . . . Hollywood in its romantic heyday, Hollywood in the grip of McCarthyism, the footloose of the artistic rich, publishing, Broadway."

  Also Available

  Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-twentieth century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

  SKYSCRAPER

  Faith Baldwin

  Afterword by Laura Hapke

  eISBN: 9781558617872 | ISBN: 9781558614574

  Lynn is an ambitious young woman who loves her job in a gleaming new Manhattan skyscraper. Soon, Lynn falls in love with Tom, the young clerk down the hall. They are so in love that if they don’t get married, something improper is bound to happen…. But her company has a strict new policy: Any woman who marries will be immediately fired. First published in 1931 as a serial in Cosmopolitan—the same year the Empire State Building opened its doors—Skyscraper marks the advent of a new kind of romance, and a new kind of heroine. This Sex in the City for its time was made into a pre-Code Hollywood movie starring Maureen O’Sullivan.