Bedelia (27 page)

Barrett started to speak, but Ben shook his head and raised his hand for silence.

“You must be crazy!” Ellen shouted at Ben.

“I'm not surprised,” was all he had to say. He went into the hall and closed the door before he used the telephone.

In the kitchen Mary sang as she washed the dishes. Barrett took a cigar out of his pocket, looked at it, looked at Charlie, and put it back. Ellen went to Charlie, crossing the room softly, stopping only on the rugs and avoiding the spaces between them. She did not speak nor touch him, but stood there with her head bent and her right hand in the fur-lined glove resting on the printed linen that Bedelia had chosen for the love-seat when she came from Colorado as Mrs. Charles Horst.

THE END

I
n 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.