In November of 1899 Vera Caspary was, as she liked to say, “born in the nineteenth century by accident.” Her mother was in her forties, and Vera was eighteen years younger than her oldest sibling. A simultaneously spoiled and intimidated “baby,” she grew up on the south side of Chicago in a family of Portuguese-descended Jews. Her father, who was a buyer in women’s hats, wanted her to attend the University of Chicago, but shy and bookish Caspary thought she lacked the feminine wiles for co-ed life. Eager to write and be independent, Caspary got her foot in the door as an ad-agency stenographer. She pestered her bosses for writing assignments and answered job openings for writers with her initials, only to be turned down when she appeared. The year American women got the right to vote, Caspary began writing ads.
Caspary wrote her first headline—“Rat Bites Sleeping Child”—for an exterminator. In the early twenties she left full-time copywriting to freelance and begin her first novel draft (Caspary 1979, 3, 6, 26–27, 51, 71–74).
Caspary’s nineteen books, including the Edgar award-winning autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, sold well and were widely reviewed. Twenty-four movies were made from Caspary’s scripts, screen stories, and novels. The directors of these movies included Dorothy Arzner (Working Girls, 1931), Joseph Mankiewicz (Letter to Three Wives, 1949, which won two Academy Awards), Fritz Lang (The Blue Gardenia, 1953), and George Cukor, whose film, Les Girls (1957) earned Caspary a Screen Writers Guild award. Nominally single, in 1949 Caspary married a man of whom her family would have approved, though they would not have sanctioned her long affair with him. The Viennese-born producer Isadore Goldsmith, or “Igee,” became the love of Caspary’s life until his death in 1964. This was the life Caspary dramatized in her fiction, centered in women characters’ struggles to exercise the freedom of choice that jobs provided.
In many of her novels, Caspary effectively merged women’s quest for identity and love with murder plots. She declared openly that she was not a “real” mystery writer, meaning she didn’t like crime fiction, and had no interest in private eyes and police procedures. She preferred character studies more than intricate plots that finally reveal “the sweet old aunt or a bird-watcher who ruthlessly kills half a dozen people to get hold of the cigarette case with a false bottom that conceals a hundred-thousand-dollar postage stamp” (1979, 104). After completing a trio of forties murder mysteries—Laura (1942), Bedelia (1945), and Stranger Than Truth (1946)—she declared herself “on holiday from murder. The fact is,” she said, “I’m not nearly as interested in writing about crime as I am in the actions of normal people under high tension” (Caspary 1950). Her novels revolve around women who are menaced, but who turn out to be neither merely victimized dames nor rescued damsels. Independence is the key to the survival of such protagonists as Laura; lack of choice engineers the downfall of her villains, among whom Bedelia is paramount.
Since Caspary wrote her mysteries from the forties to the seventies, before the widespread development of female detectives, her reading of “detective” throughout her writing career was gendered as unattractively male. She wasn’t impressed by the tough private eyes of the thirties or by the male protagonists emerging in forties noir fiction and film—cynical loners manipulated by women and/or manipulators of women. Caspary pointed out that Mark McPherson, her police detective in Laura, was not hard-boiled, but sensitive and imaginative. When Otto Penzler asked for an essay on McPherson for The Great Detectives, Caspary chose to discuss Laura’s condemnation of detectives as the moment Mark came alive. Shortly after her reappearance in the novel, Laura tells Mark that detective stories contain two types of characters, “the hard-boiled ones who are always drunk and talk out of the corners of their mouths and do it all by instinct; and the cold, dry, scientific kind who split hairs under a microscope”(77). In her article for Penzler Caspary echoes Laura that both types are “detestable,” which was why, until Laura, she “had never glorified a detective” (Caspary 1978, 144-45).1
Yet murder, as Caspary said in a 1970s working draft of her autobiography, was “another matter.” “I see now,” she mused, “that my [screen] stories were the extension of a long series of murder fantasies, not that I’ve ever pulled a trigger or wielded a knife, nor identified myself with the detective. Like Laura, I hate detectives.” But she liked to make up plots as an “observer” and “witness” (“Discards,” 577), a stance she would later apply to creating multiple narrators and viewpoints in many of her novels and scripts. Caspary made murder a context in which both male and female characters resolve their own mysterious lives, as though the crime itself were a metaphor for the conundrum of relationships versus independence.
Jane S. Bakerman discusses at length the lives of Caspary’s working girls in Chicago rent districts, offices, and speakeasy settings. She notes, “Much of the frustration [of Caspary’s characters] arises from the duality of their concept of the American dream, for while struggling to establish identities for themselves as wage earners, they believe, simultaneously, that they will have no identity at all unless they are indispensably desirable to the man” (1984, 83). Caspary similarly recalls the heady mix of wage-earning and flirting she experienced. “Working among men,” she says candidly in Secrets, “I had discovered that a girl need not be beautiful, not even particularly pretty. She had only to be a girl.” Caspary had grown up seeing herself as clever but unattractive. She quotes her somewhat competitive mother as having frequently said, “You wouldn’t be so bad looking if it weren’t for your nose.” Vera herself called this the “harsh Caspary bone structure.” Though she turned out to be a striking woman, it was a revelation to her that “The compliments of accountants and macaroni salesmen assured me that I had feminine power” (1979, 27, 44).
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”).
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).
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.
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” 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” (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).
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 (Laura, 82). 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.
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.
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.”
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, 7). 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, 8).
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, 87), 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, 171).
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.
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 (“Correspondence,” 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.5 Caspary 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” (“Correspondence,” 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” (“Correspondence,” 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
1.Caspary 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).
2.In a script not used, both Mark and Laura had voiceover narrations, paralleling Waldo’s voice that still introduces the film (Preminger 1978, 77).
3.Some 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.
4.I 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.
5.The 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).