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Content WORD PLAY:
THE LIVES AND WORK OF FOUR WOMEN
WRITERS IN HOLLYWOOD’S GOLDEN AGE
by
Ann L. Warren
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May 1988
Copyright 1988 Ann L. Warren
UMI Num ber: D P23139
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
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under the direction of h.iY. Dissertation
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quirem ents fo r the degree of
m
This dissertation, w ritten by
D O C TO R OF PH ILOSOPH Y
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date March 14, 1988
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study could not have been written without the help of many
people.
For their cooperation, helpful suggestions, and patient searching
out of old documents and scripts, I would like to thank the librarians
and archivists at the Huntington Library, the Academy of Motion
I
j Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute, the University
*
j of California at Los Angeles, the State Historical Society of
Wisconsin, and the University of Southern California.
For their help in locating and contacting writers who knew the
women and the era, my thanks to the Writers Guild of America West.
Many of those writers and their relatives gave me hours of their
invaluable time and memories, and I enjoyed every moment of it. To
those who allowed me to interview them, my special thanks: Catherine
Heerman, Caroline Saltzman, Laura Kerr, Allan Rivkin, Marguerite
Roberts, Albert Hackett, John Houseman, Henry Ephron, George Sklar,
Michael Gordon, Mr. and Mrs. Dale Eunson, and Vera Caspary.
I am greatly indebted to Dr. Barbara Herman, Dr. Paul Alkon, and
especially Dr. Jay Martin, who gave of their valuable time and
experience to help me bring shape and order out of what often seemed
hopeless chaos. For their personal and professional support, I am
deeply grateful.
ii
My deepest appreciation to my family and friends, who suffered
through this with me and gave me, at every stage, the encouragement
and support I needed.
j And to Zoe Akins, Vera Caspary, Lillian Heilman, and Dorothy
I
I Parker: Thanks for being so interesting.
I
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.............................................. ii
INTRODUCTION...................................................1
1. ZOE AKINS...................................................15
2. VERA CASPARY............................................... 57
3. LILLIAN HELLMAN............................................ 118
4. DOROTHY PARKER...................... 185
5. BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................... 236
INTRODUCTION
In 1928, Hollywood was a boom town. The strawberry fields that had
lined Hollywood Boulevard had been replaced in the last few years by
■stores and office buildings. The orange groves that had dotted the hills
that rose above the town were giving way to luxurious homes as real
estate developers, scenting money, bought up huge tracts of land in the
canyons and laid out streets. There were millions of dollars to be had,
and thousands flocked to Hollywood hoping to grab a chunk of fame as
\
well as fortune. They had to be housed, too, so hundreds of small,
economical homes were built south of Sunset Boulevard, which was still
mostly bordered by bean fields. Hollywood and Vine was the home of a
used car lot and a cigar store; within the next few years, the Pantages
Theatre would be built there. The year before, a few blocks west,
Grauman's Chinese Theatre had been built, and across the street from it,
the luxurious Roosevelt Hotel had opened its doors.
Movie studios, the basis of all this development, no longer
operated out of shacks and barns on empty lots. Now they had huge plants
with dozens of buildings housing offices, production facilities, and
dressing rooms. In the next few years, dozens of sound stages would be
built, for 1928 was the year when sound established itself firmly as
part of the movie-making process. The year before, The Jazz Singer had
been released. A1 Jolson talked; A1 Jolson sang; audiences loved it;
Warner Studios made millions (although Sam Warner, who had backed the
film despite tremendous opposition from his brothers, died the night
1
before its premiere, and never knew what a sensation it had created).
After some initial resistance, the other studios saw that sound was the
path to even greater profits. "Silents" were on the way out; "talkies"
were in.
But now that the movies talked, they had to have something to say.
It was no longer good enough to have movement on the screen, with a few
titles thrown in here and there. Although there were a few competent
scenario writers who were able to make the transition to sound, it was
quickly discovered that new talent was going to be needed to write the
kind of coherent and sustained dialogue demanded by this new kind of
movie.
And so the search was on. Anyone with a shred of a pretension to
writing ability was invited to give screenwriting a try. Journalists,
free-lancers, novelists, poets, playwrights, would-bes, and people’s
hard-up relatives swarmed to the studios. Herman Mankiewicz sent his
friend Ben Hecht a telegram from Hollywood: "Will you accept three
hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures. All expenses paid. The
three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your
only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around."^ Those who came
to Hollywood found all the glamour they expected: sunshine, movie stars,
endless parties, chauffeured limousines, champagne and caviar for
breakfast, swimming pools, mansions, beach houses at Malibu, butlers and
maids and wine cellars and evening gowns and tuxedos and flashbulbs
popping at premieres. As Ben Hecht said, "And whatever the weather
elsewhere in the world, it rained only gold in Hollywood."^
2
But the glamour was only one side of the picture. The other side—
the very large cloud behind the silver lining— was the work. Many ■
writers came to share John Fante's opinion: "Hollywood is a bad place.
O
Jt kills writers. They die young and violently there." Hundreds of
writers passed through the studios in the next few years; only a few
dozen stayed to make a name and a living— only the toughest. By the
early Thirties, the studio system was firmly in place, and the writer
was just another employee.
Writers were hired by, and answered to, producers. Producers were
almost uniformly hated by writers. "[The producers] owned you; you were
a commodity; they were paying you so much a week and you belonged to
them. And there was never any kidding about that." ^ Writers were, like
any other employee, required to clock in at their offices at the studios
no later than nine or ten in the morning, and leave no earlier than five
or six at night. They worked a half a day on Saturdays. They took no
more than an hour for lunch. A writer was expected to put out ten to
twenty pages of material a week— up to four scripts a year, and
sometimes more. Rush jobs and emergencies, of course, required overtime
— as much as it took to get the job done on time.
What hurt most was having to write to order. "No other writers—
from cub reporters to successful Broadway playwrights— were so highly
paid, and no others were required to betray the autonomy and creativity
which characterize their profession."^ Ben Hechtfs experience in writing
for the studios was typical:
3
As a writer in Hollywood, I spent more time
arguing than writing...My chief memory of movie
land is one of asking in the producer's office why
I must change the script, eviscerate it, cripple
and hamstring it? Why must I strip the hero of his
few semi-intelligent remarks and why must I tack on
a corny ending that makes the stomach shudder? Half
of all the movie writers argue in this fashion. The
other half writhe in silence, and the psychoanalyst's
couch or the liquor bottle claim them both.
The producers seemed to hate the writers just as much, although
they seldom wrote or spoke about it as articulately as the writers did.
Their main reason seems to have been fear. Irving Thalberg, at MGM, saic
once to Anita Loos, "Damn it. I can keep tabs on everyone else in the
studio and see whether or not they're doing their jobs. But I can never
tell what's going on in those so-called brains of yours.And many
producers felt intimidated by writers, because they seemed to come from
a different world where there were different and disorderly rules.
Acting, producing and directing required
technique and skill, of course, but you could
acquire these things on the job or, in a pinch,
'by the seat of your pants'...But by and large
screenwriting demanded a degree of training, talent,
and intelligence which excluded from its practice
anyone 'passing through' on the way to something
higher...one could not acquire the fundamentals
of literacy and imagination while standing on the
set. Writing for the screen could not be faked or
picked up or imbibed...Intelligent, educated, and
literate in ways that most actors, directors, and
producers were not, the movie writers' importance
and personal unoiqueness discomfited co-workers.
There could be no denying that in spite of his low
status, ill-treatment, and impotence, a writer's
influence was decisive.
J
Like many employers who feel inferior to their employees, but also
have huge egos to satisfy, the producers did their best to make the
writers' lives miserable. Constant regimentation and demands for changes
and rewrites were common complaints among writers. Another was the
"assembly-line" method of writing and rewriting: Leonard Spigelass
recalled, "There were six of us writing Shearer, six of us writing
Garbo, six of us writing Ruth Chatterton, six of us writing Robert
Montgomery, and six of us writing Clark Gable. Which one [of us] would
they choose? It was a great lottery."^ Few films, therefore, were ever
credited to a single writer, and in most cases, it is impossible to
figure out exactly who wrote what parts of a script. Some didn't let
this bother them: "There was small responsibility," according to Ben
Hecht. "Your name as writer was buried in a flock of 'credits.' Your
literary pride was never involved. What critics said about the movie you
had written never bothered you. They were usually criticizing something
you couldn't remember."'*'® Others just tried not to take the work so
seriously, and then the mutilations of their writing didn't bother them
as much: "Well, I was probably a more flexible writer than most,"
Marguerite Roberts remembers, "because I didn't have an exalted idea of
writing. It was not a sacred chore to me. It was a way to make money, it
was a business.Many tried to affect this pose, but few really meant
it. Most writers— even those able to distance themselves in this way—
took their work very seriously, and it hurt to see it mangled.
One of the most frustrating experiences for a screenwriter was the
story conference, where, as Ceplair and Englund say, "the scripter's
5
ideas, treatments and drafts were decimated like Indians in a
1 9
Western.' At story conferences, the writer met with one or more
producers, who then gave him "suggestions" about how to improve his
^work. The writer knew that if he refused to make the suggested changes,
someone else would, and there were other penalties for refusal as well—
one could be suspended without pay, or simply ignored and given no work
for months, or worst, be given only the most hopeless, tenth-rate
projects. The writer also knew that the producer ordering the changes
had absolute power, and no skill, experience, or sense of plotting
beyond the most cliched situations. Producers didn't like originality:
There are different kinds of producers in
the studios, ranging from out-and-out illiterates
to philosophers and aesthetes. But all of them have
the same function. Their task is to guard against
the unusual. They are the trusted loyalists of the
cliche...In the court of the movie Owner...none
dared speak of art. In the Owner's mind art was
a synonym for bankruptcy. An artist was a saboteur
to be uprooted from the company's pay roll as
quickly as a Communist with a pamphlet...The job
of turning good writers into movie hacks is the
producer's chief task... I can recall a few bright
ones among them, and fifty nitwits. The pain of
having to collaborate with such dullards and to
submit myself to their approvals was always acute.
Years of experience failed to help. I never became
reconciled to taking literary orders from them.
I often prepared myself for a producer conference
by swallowing two sleeping pills in advance.
So if it was so awful, why stay? Most of the writers were not
dependent on Hollywood alone for income, and could easily have left.
The most obvious reason was money— "tremendous sums of money for
6
work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle," Ben Hecht
recalls:
^ Of the sixty movies I wrote, more than half
were written in two weeks or less. I received
for each script, whether written in two or
(never more than) eight weeks, from fifty thou
sand to a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
I worked also by the week. My salary ran from
five thousand dollars a week up. Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer in 1949 paid me ten thousand a week. David
Selznick once paid me thirty-five hundred a day.
Not all writers made this much, but most of them made far more than they
could have made at any other kind of writing job.
The lure of making one's mark in a new and exciting medium was
another reason many stayed on to write for the studios. The
possibilities of the movies seemed endless in the early Thirties, and
the fact that they reached an audience of millions could not have failed
to cross the mind of even the most unambitious writer.
The company of other writers was also a major consideration for
most of those who wrote in Hollywood. You could socialize with your
colleagues at the studio during the day, and at night, when there was
more time (and, because of your salary, more money) for fun, at Musso
and Frank's, Luceys's, the Formosa, the Brown Derby, Stanley Rose's
bookstore, and others. John Sanford said, of Musso and Frank's, "It was
our preserve; it resembled an eating club; there was no other place to
eat dinner. 'Meet you for dinner,' meant Musso's. Between six and nine
in the evening everyone you wanted to see was there; you would know at
7
least eighty percent of the people dining in the back room. We liked
each other. We read and respected each other's work."^
And certainly not least, the writer was not as isolated as he could
^be writing a novel or play. Most movie writing was a matter of
collaboration; Ben Hecht recalls, "Even without collaborators, the
loneliness of literary creation was seldom part of movie work. You wrote
with the phone ringing like a firehouse bell, with the boss charging in
and out of your atelier, with the director grimacing and grunting in an
adjoining armchair. Conferences interrupted you, agents with dream jobs
- I
flirted with you, and friends with unsolved plots came in hourly." To
someone who has sat alone in a room for a year, trying to write a novel,
this might well sound like paradise.
Given all the obvious attractions, it is not surprising that
Hollywood lured and hooked so many writers, among them some of the best
of the twentieth century: Maxwell Anderson, Robert Benchley, Stephen
Vincent Benet, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West,
Moss Hart, Ben Hecht, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, S.J.
Perelman, George S. Kaufman, Herman Mankiewicz, Charles MacArthur, Marc
Connelly, Francis Faragoh, John Dos Passos, Donald Ogden Stewart, Samuel
Ornitz, P.G. Wodehouse— the list numbers in the hundreds.
A lot has been written about the male writers who spent time (or,
as some of them felt, did time) in Hollywood, but not much has been
written about the numerous women writers who, at the same time, were
also invited to write for the studios. Many of them were just as
successful as the men, and there were dozens of them: Frances Marion,
8
once the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood, Bess Meredyth, Anita
Loos, Dorothy Farnum, Lorna Moon, Salka Viertel, Doris Anderson,
Gertrude Purcell, Jane Murfin, Sarah Y. Mason, Laura Kerr, Marguerite
Roberts, Frances Goodrich, Ayn Rand, Mary McCall, Jr., Gladys Lehman,
t
Phoebe Ephron, Zoe Akins, Dorothy Parker, Vera Caspary, Lillian
Heilman, and many more.
Screenwriting was one of the few jobs in which there seemed to be
almost no discrimination against women, even as early as the Twenties.
This is not true of other areas of the movie business: there were, and
are, very few women directors or producers. But screenwriting was
different. First, it was a skill which, if used properly, could bring
the studios a lot of money. Even someone like Louis B. Mayer or Samuel
Goldwyn could see that the skill they were buying was more important
than the sex of the person who possessed it. Or, to be more blunt, they
wanted profits, and they didn't care who made them; if a woman could
produce a money-making vehicle for the studios, that was fine with them.
They were willing to pay what they had to in order to get her. There is
no evidence that women screenwriters were paid less for their skills
than men, or that they were treated any differently at all.
And second, writers were of very low status in Hollywood, anyway,
especially during the 1930s. Many producers considered the job a
necessary evil. Since writers had no power anyway, what could it hurt to
give a woman the same job as a man? Interestingly, as the writers formed
unions and gained more status and power, there were fewer women
screenwriters.
9
The four women who are discussed here— Zoe Akins, Vera Caspary,
Lillian Heilman, and Dorothy Parker— all spent time in Hollywood during
iwhat has been called by some its ’ ’golden era," the 1930s and early 40s.
;A11 of them were still there when the Red Scare began, and all were
affected in some way. All of them became successful at a time when it
was unusual for women to have career aspirations. And all became
successful as writers in other genres first; in fact, all were asked to
write for the studios because of their success at other forms of
writing. Zoe Akins had several hit Broadway plays, and had also
published poetry and a novel. Vera Caspary was a prolific novelist and
free-lance writer. Lillian Heilman was a dramatist, and Dorothy Parker a
journalist, short story writer and poet.
So why these four women, of all the dozens who wrote for Hollywood?
Their experiences were typical of those who, as autonomous, respected,
and admired writers, came to Hollywood to work under contract for the
studios. Like most other writers, whether men or women, they chafed
under the studio system, and were shocked and dismayed to find that they
had given up control over their work, and thus, to a great extent, over
their lives. The contradictions and ironies in the Hollywood system were,
not lost on them:
art/profit, innovation/standardization, refinement/
vulgarity, expertise/instinct, specialization/
integration, creativity/predictability...The
great historical irony which every screenwriter
had...to brave was that the very forces of production
which had called him into existence and defined his
crucial task denied him the artistic authority and
creative satisfaction which directors and stars had
10
once tasted and which his apparent importance would
seem to demand. Success in the form of high salaries
and steady employment failed to compensate a signifi
cant minority of screenwriters for their constant
subordination and artistic debasemnent in a business
where their contribution was essential.
A
Another form of dislocation was geographic. Many of the writers
came from New York, which they still regarded as the center of life.
They itched to get back there as often and for as long as they could;
for many, to settle in Hollywood was a sellout— an admission that you
had given up your high standards and sunk into complacence and
mediocrity. So they shuttled back and forth, rented, rather than bought,
lived in hotels like the Garden of Allah, the Hollywood Plaza, the
Chateau Marmont, the Beverly Hills Hotel, out of suitcases for months at
a time, until they had made enough money to go "home." But the lure of
the money to be made, and the other, more intangible benefits, drew then
back time and time again, irresistably.
And of course, trying to do your best writing on something for
which you had, at most, only a sneaking, grudging kind of respect, and
then having to denigrate your hard work among your fellow writers,
produced another sort of frustration. Writing something you felt had
value, and then seeing it ruined by a dozen other writers, directors,
and producers, produced a special kind of agony. Perhaps the worst
frustration came, though, for most screenwriters, from the knowledge
that there were good producers, who could recognize quality when they
saw it and who gave the writer control over his work; but that they were
not working for those producers. "The writer's frustration thus,
11
ironically, resulted from the taste of artistic success and the wish for
more, not the failure ever to taste it...writers...escaped from their
jailers often enough to feel really frustrated about the time they had
1 Q
tto spend behind bars."
Of the four women discussed here, Lillian Heilman was the only one
to retain any unusual amount of control over her work. She was of the
elite: she worked at producing high-quality films for Samuel Goldwyn, at
a high salary even for screenwriters, and very few changes were made in
her material without her permission. In addition, she got to choose her
own projects. Dorothy Parker, equally as famous, received no such
control. She was just another writer, working on projects assigned to
her, making the changes "suggested" by producers, and having her scripts
rewritten by other writers after she was finished with them. In this,
she was more typical of other writers who came to Hollywood. Like most
of them, she bitterly resented the loss of control and lack of respect:
her involvement in political causes unpopular with her studio bosses was
as much an act of rebellion and withdrawal as her excessive and self
destructive drinking. Zoe Akins also resented the lack of respect, but
her rebellions were more direct: open insubordination to her studio
bosses caused her to be "loaned" to other, inferior studios to work on
inferior projects several times— this was a favorite form of punishment
with the producers. Like Dorothy Parker, she expected that her
reputation and obvious skill would entitle her to work on the best
projects; in this, like most other writers, she was disappointed. She
was given, with no regard for her talent, pedestrian stories and
12
expected to work eight hours a day on them. Of the four, perhaps Vera
Caspary handled the situation with the least resentment. She deeply
disliked working for the studios, like most writers, but she was more
typical of those who had not been as well-known, and therefore did not
expect so much from the studios. She made her living as a writer, and
was quite practical about it; having worked as a journalist and ad
copywriter, she was less used to having absolute control over her work,
and she was more used to deadlines and heavy workloads. This is not to
say that she was content working for producers who mangled her scripts
and made unreasonable demands; she, too, longed for New York and escaped
whenever possible to work on another novel.
The experiences of these four women are typical, in different ways,
of the experiences of most Hollywood screenwriters, especially women
screenwriters, and of the dualities and contradictions inherent in and
controlling all their lives.
13
Introduction--Notes
•^Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Ballantine Books,
1954) 435.
^ ^Hecht 445.
°John Fante, letter, 16 June 1934, quoted in Michael Moreau, "My
Mentor, Mr. Mencken," Los Angeles Times Magazine, 26 April, 1987: 24.
^Donald Ogden Stewart, quoted in Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund,
The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) 16.
^Ceplair and Englund 16.
6Hecht 442.
^Anita Loos, Kiss Hollywood Goodbye (New York: Ballantine Books,
1974) 120-21.
^Ceplair and Englund 10-11.
^Ceplair and Englund 9.
10Hecht 435.
■^Personal interview with Marguerite Roberts, 11 June 1985.
1 n
Ceplair and Englund 6.
13Hecht 443, 440, 444.
^Hecht 436.
^^Ceplair and Englund 14-15.
16Hecht 449.
^Ceplair and Englund 2-3.
• * - 3Ceplair and Englund 14.
14
CHAPTER 1— ZOE AKINS
When Zoe Akins was a small child, she told her mother a gruesome
fairy tale, making it up as she went along. Her mother was horrified.
"'Mamma is going to take fairy-tales away from you,1 she said. 'She
!
'doesn't want her little daughter to imagine things."
Later, when Zoe was in school, her friend Sara Teasdale (who later
became a quite prominent poet) said to her soon after they met, "Don't
jwrite plays. Save yourself for poetry."2
She was not the only one who did not approve of Zoe's
playwriting: "'Mother hopes you'll never write another play'— I was
told when I was lost in my poetical version of the Tristan and Isolde
legend: 'It makes you so drawn and haggard, and Mother finds you so
O
much more attractive when you're amiable and animated."
But Zoe was not easily discouraged. She kept on making up stories
and plays and during the 1920s became one of the most successful
playwrights on Broadway.
Even as a child Zoe had a very strong will and she had decided
very early that the main purpose of her life was to be a writer. "'I
cannot remember when I did not care more for the sheer game of the
theatre than for anything else in the world.She wrote both poetry
and plays and read everything she could get her hands on, especially
the books her grandfather had collected; the most fascinating were the
plays by Shakespeare. Then one afternoon her nurse, Belle Gray, took
her to see a play at the Opera House in St. Louis:
15
Those barnstormers playing Trilby— the fright
ening farce of a wandering Svengali— ranked in my
suddenly awakened imagination with those lovers
and kings and queens and clowns who spoke in
measured lines on those printed pages. All were of
a piece to me. All were akin in their unreality;
yet all were somehow more actual than the shadowy
> real people who were all about me.
She often felt different from other girls her own age, especially
after she started school, and that was painful, "...and yet— and yet—
there was nobody I envied, nobody with whom I would have changed
places, for I had thoughts and dreams that took me beyond them all."6
When she was fourteen, she decided never to marry.
'It’s all some girls can do,' I said, 'but I can
write.' Domesticity seemed abominably dull— as a
career. Even then I loved freedom...At the age of
fourteen I felt— as I have felt ever since— that
there was nothing any man in the world could give
me, by way of money or position, which I would
have lifted my hand to take...What I wanted, what
I hungered for, was something nobody could give
me but myself— the realization of myself as an
artist and a personality.
Zoe Akins was fiercely independent. She took great pride in the
fact that she could support herself and her family financially. She
was also proud of the fact that she was autonomous in her work. As a
playwright, novelist, and poet, she wrote what she wished, when she
wished, and refused to make changes unless there was a valid artistic
reason, no matter what the professional or financial consequences.
She believed in herself, but at the same time was plagued by doubts
about her talent and her ability, and about her own value as a human
16
being. As a teenager, she was often rebellious. As she grew older, she
became snobbish. Both qualities were masks to hide, from herself as
much as from anyone else, the insecurity which threatened to undermine
her independence.
Zoe was born in Humansville, Missouri, a small town in the Ozark
Mountains, on October 30, 1886.8 Her mother, Elizabeth Green Akins,
was the daughter of Duff Green, a southern newspaper editor who had
been appointed Public Printer in 1829 by President Andrew Jackson.
Zoe's father, Thomas J. Akins, was quite prominent in the affairs of
the Republican Party in Missouri; he was elected State Chairman of the
Republican Party when Zoe was 12. He then became a national
committeeman and controlled the federal patronage coming into the
state.
When Zoe was a child, the family lived on a working farm called
Ford Place; they had cows, pigs, chickens, mules, and fruit trees.
They were not isolated from the city, though. Thomas Akins spent a
good deal of time in St. Louis attending to political business and his
family usually went with him. Finally, when Zoe was twelve, her mother
got tired of staying in hotels and they took a small house in St.
Louis.
That year, Zoe began attending school at Monticello Seminary in
Godfrey, Illinois. When she was fourteen, she went to Hosmer Hall, and
graduated two years later. At Hosmer, one of her classmates was Sara
Teasdale. They spent a good deal of time together because of their
mutual interest in writing. At Monticello,.and later at Hosmer, Zoe
17
wrote plays which, to her delight, were sometimes chosen by the
students to be performed.
When she graduated from Hosmer Hall in 1903, she began writing
poems for the St. Louis Mirror and the St. Louis Times. She also began
i
rebelling against her parents' strict authority. She hated the fact
that she was not even allowed to go to dinner with friends without a
chaperone. "Like many of my generation I was already in flight... from
my fond and conventional parents...I dreamed of the free air of
Bohemia— a Bohemia where no one knew me or cared what I did— where I
could know whom I liked— 'interesting' men particularly— even if they
were married.Finally she became engaged, to William Marion Reedy,
editor of the Mirror. Her parents hated both Reedy and the idea of Zoe
marrying a man who was not only more than twice her age, but a
Democrat.
The marriage was finally called off, but even in the midst of her
sorrow, Zoe noticed that a broken engagement seemed to have bestowed
upon her a measure of maturity, at least in the eyes of her parents,
and they begamn to give her the independence she wanted. Her parents
even let her go on a trip to New York alone, hoping this would help
her forget Reedy. The trip changed her life:
...when I saw New York— so tall, so beautiful, so
gleaming white— from the ferry...a new emotion
sprang to life filling me with wonder. At that
moment I had no love at all— no passion for
anything or anyone— except the city itself which
stood there against the sky— waiting, with all its
riches, its legends,its mysteries— for me.
18
Zoe spent three unsupervised months in New York and then went
home for Christmas. She longed to go back, but she was not financially
j
jindependent yet and her parents refused to pay her expenses. She says
jthat this was one of the lowest points of her life: she felt as if she
|would never be a success as a writer. Her proof was that, even though
|she was almost 20, she had not yet had a play produced on Broadway.
Returning to the supervision of her parents was also difficult
after a taste of freedom. In response, she rebelled even more. Sara
Teasdale remembers going one evening to a party with Zoe in the rooms
of the Comtesse de Venturini where, to her mind, decadence reigned:
The gods, but she's a decadent looking creature
— small, dark, with very pale skin and a brilliant
vermillion mouth (evidently painted), eyes painted
around with charcoal and wild fuzzy black hair...
with a big black velvet rose in her girdle— all
dreadfully Baudelairish.
The countess, Teasdale was told, was the author of "Le Journal
Erotique"; Teasdale thought her "unwholesome." And then there was Zoe
who, "with a cigarette, legs crossed in a delicately revealing
fashion, and her most Frenchy manner...quite rivalled Madame la
Comtesse." Zoe willingly recited her poems; Sara declined to recite
hers. Then Zoe produced and began to read some suppressed poems of
Baudelaire, in French, which had been lent to her; "Several of the
poems are about Sappho and her 'girl friends' as Mr. Man calls them,
and Zoe was quite ready with unpleasant details..
Teasdale obviously didn't enjoy this party, but Zoe loved it and
19
other parties like it. The more outlandish the people, the more fun
she had. (Given Zoe's personality, it is possible that she took
Teasdale to the party and discussed such topics in front of her for
the pleasure of shocking her.) New York had shown her how
"conventional" St. Louis was; Zoe wanted to be a sophisticate. She was
trying not to be "normal" and "ordinary." (To that end, she even
cultivated an odd accent, which she thought was English; but Ethel
Barrymore, upon first meeting her, thought she was Polish.) She was
going to be a writer, and a writer should rebel against outdated and
Victorian morality, attitudes and manners; a writer should associate
with as many creative, artistic and energetic people as she could
find; she should explore every avenue, experience everything. And
above all, she should maintain her independence. Marriage was out of
the question; the Reedy fiasco had shown her that men could not really
be trusted. But eschewing marriage did not mean that she had to give
up romance and love; that is a subject a writer must understand: "Even
if a woman is proud and imaginative and sufficiently sophisticated to
know that temperamentally she is unsuited to marriage she still ought
to drain the experience of love of all its benefits. Otherwise she
shirks realizations without which she is immature and bewildered."
For several years she travelled with this sort of crowd, writing
poetry and plays by day and partying by night. But in 1909, she
developed a persistent cough, and was diagnosed as having incipient
tuberculosis. The doctor recommended that she go to California to
recuperate. She spent nearly a year on a convalescent ranch in the
20
Sweetwater Valley, east of San Diego, in the California desert. The
illness changed her attitude toward life:
I wanted to live; the imagined sorrows, the lack
of personal independence, the emotional turbulence,
the responsiveness to the contagious morbidity of
much of the literature of the day and to certain
gloomy personalities— among them Sara Teasdale's—
in short, the penalties of being young and too
impressionable, were cancelled out by my face to
face meeting with death.
Because of the diet she had to eat in order to recover, her
weight climbed from 105 to 130 pounds. From then on, she always
weighed more than she wanted to, and insecurity about her appearance
was added to her other fears. As she got older, she gained more
weight. She hated being fat, but never seemed able to lose the weight
for any length of time. All of her friends knew about her constant
battles in this arena, and some used to try to help her out by sending
her diets which had worked for thewm, or which they clipped out of
newspapers or magazines. By 1940, Zoe had a bulging file full of diets
from people like Sir Horace Rumbold, George Cukor, Veronica Dengel,
Clark Gable, Mary Pickford, and Princess Elizabeth, among others.
For a time after her illness, in the interests of taking life
seriously, she became interested in socialist politics. She went to
hear Emma Goldman speak and got to know her well and admired her
tremendously. Zoe even wrote a play, The Meddler, in which a young
Russian woman joins a league of anarchists to try to alleviate the
poverty and injustice in her country. In "Seven Years and Seven
21
Plays," and autobiographical piece written in 1924, she says that she
was thoroughly in sympathy with Goldman’s ideas: "I was very radical
in those days."14
As time went on, however, her political beliefs became quite
conservative, more like her father's, until it was hard for her to
even remember that she’d been so committed to socialism. In Others
Than Myself, an autobiography written years later in 1956, she says,
"While understanding Emma's earnestness, and feeling that she deserved
a certain respect— fair treatment from the press, for instance— I
remained outside her persuasion, politically."-^
But Zoe’s interest wasn't really in politics. That phase soon
passed, and in her subsequent plays she returned to themes that had
interested her from the start: the tension between human nature and
social mores. She wrote best of things she knew firsthand, taking her
charcters from those she saw around her: "I cannot personally
understand how one can be obsessed by psychological oddities...Out of
normal life only can those conflicts emerge, those extremes of feeling
1 f \
which have the classic grace of artistic propriety."
In 1912, her first volume of poetry, Interpretations, was
published. She revelled in the praise she was receiving; it was
wonderful, but not enough for Zoe. Why, she wanted to know, weren't
her plays being produced? Playwriting was her first love; why was her
poetry more successful? She seriously considered giving up writing
plays altogether. But writing poetry did not satisfy her as completely
as writing plays, and she kept on.
22
Finally, in 1916, one of her plays was produced in New York. The
Magical City, a one-act melodrama, was produced at the Bandbox Theatre
for its 1915-1916 season by the Washington Square Players, and the
reviuews were good.^ This was the cause of much wild exuberance and
celebration; Zoe was sure she'd breached the walls of New York theatre
at last. But although The Magical City was a moderate success, it was
not the big break she’d hoped it would be. Indeed, the play she wrote
in 1917, Did It Really Happen? was never produced or published.
Zoe didn't give up, though. By now she had achieved two of her
dreams: a play she had written had been produced in New York, and she
was actually living in New York herself. She was not yet self-
supporting, and the knowledge that her parents could bring her home at
any time by simply refusing to send her any more money was always
hanging over her head. She was determined to work even harder, to
achieve full independence from them.
By 1917, her life had settled into a fairly stable routine:
during the last year and a half of World War I, she spent the evenings
with friends, visiting or going to the theatre if they could afford
it. On Sunday evenings, she would give her friends supper at her
"little apartment" at 130 East 67th Street, "where we afterwards
played charades with great seriousness and considerable wit." The days
were spent writing and suffering through one disappointment after
another, as deal after deal to produce her plays rose, then fell
through.
Finally, in 1919, Papa, a play she'd written in 1912, was
23
1R
produced. It opened April 10, 1919, at the Little Theatre. ° It was
not a success. Zoe was tremendously disappointed. But through the play
she met a woman who was to become her closest friend.
Jobyna Howland played the part of Mrs. Blythe in Papa. She had
had to be talked into taking the role, but finally agreed to accept it
because, she said, no one else could ever do anything with "that
bit."^ Living up to her own expectations, she did a wonderful job
with the part. Jobyna (or Joby, as Zoe called her) was a "tall
ruthless handsome woman." Zoe recalls that they met at Bridget
Guiness' house one Sunday afternoon, after Zoe mentioned the poems of
Arthur Stringer. "’Did you know he was my husband?’ she demanded. I
didn’t. 'He used to be wonderful,’ she told everyone listening, adding
somewhat naively, ’when he was married to me. Before he began writing
9 n
trash."1 Joby was nearly six feet all, and had a powerful
personality. Emily Stevens once said of her, "Joby’s not a person but
a crowd.
After the failure of Papa, Zoe’s finances were in very bad shape.
Her parents wanted her to come home to St. Louis and her father
refused to send her any more money. Joby solved the problem for her
for a while by lending Zoe her house in the Berkshires for a vacation,
and paying her fare to get there. The house and its surroundings were
lovely, and Zoe’s spirits rose. Although she had vowed (again) never
to write another play, she began writing. The first act of Declassee
9 9
"almost wrote itself." She finished the second act quickly, returned
to New York, and gave it to her agent, Alice Kauser. Miss Kauser took
24
it to Ethel Barrymore's agent, telling him the play had been written
for Barrymore. He read it and agreed. Barrymore grudgingly agreed to
read it. She read the first two acts, becoming more and more excited
as she went along. The next day, she went back to her agent and
demanded the third act. She was in such a hurry to read it that she
insisted upon going to Zoe's apartment, where Zoe was, at the moment,
writing it. Zoe recalls taking it down to the car to her when she
arrived and handing it in through the window. Barrymore was so
impatient that she didn't even say hello; she just opened it and began
OO
to read.
As soon as Declassee was sold, the ups and downs began. Zoe had
scarcely deposited her $1000 advance in her bank account when the
actors strike began in July of 1919. It was a tense and frustrating
time for Zoe: in principle she was in sympathy with the actors; at the
same time, she was terrified that her "Barrymore play" would never
make it to the stage. Fortunately the strike ended soon, but the
rehearsal schedule had to be changed if the play was to open on
schedule. Instead of rehearsing four weeks and playing two weeks out
of town, they rehearsed less than two weeks and played three dismal
performances in Atlantic City.
Declassee opened in New York on October 6, 1919, at the Empire
Theatre. On opening night, Zoe's moods alternated wildly; one moment,
she was certain of a hit; the next, remembering the tryouts, she was
sunk in despair. As the evening went on, it became evident that the
audience loved the play. Later that night, when the newspapers came
25
out, it became clear that the critics loved it too. Declassee was one
of the most important plays of the season. It ran for 257 performances
on Broadway, and it made Zoe Akins' name well-known to the theatre-
0 A
going public.
It also made her rich. For the next three years, she received
royalties averaging about $2000 per week; altogether, she made about
$300,000 from the play.^
Zoe was thrilled by her success and enjoyed it thoroughly. She
loved the attention and the warmth. But she didn't let it get in the
way of her work for long. For the first time in her life, she was
financially independent. More important, she had achieved success. But
she knew how fragile and ephemeral those things can be, and she was
determined not to lose them. "It is so easy to became a success in
America," she said years later, "so difficult to maintain that
standing.
This is not to say she was unhappy; she wasn't. The fears were
buried deeper and deeper under mounds of work, and the resulting cash
allowed her to live independently and generously. She surrounded
herself with those who had what she loved: success. Her parties were
packed with the rich and famous. And she was dazzled by aristocracy,
maybe because titles are inherited and cannot be lost as easily as
wealth and fame. She cultivated those with titles, even when they were
penniless.
It is a well-known fact that Zoe was a snob in this way. But it
is not likely that she thought of herself as a snob. If she had
26
thought of it at all, she would most likely have felt that one of the
rewards of success was moving in higher social circles. She wanted to
be upper-crust, both socially and intellectually, so those she
entertained fit that description. As she became more conservative
socially, determined to hang on to the status she had acquired, so she
became more conservative politically, leaning more toward political
opinions that would preserve and protect her way of life.
But, as John Houseman pointed out, snobbery was not regarded than
as being so reprehensible as it is now; and despite her penchant for
the rich, famous, and titled, Zoe was well-liked. Her snobbery doesn’t
seem to have bothered many people— perhaps because it was
overshadowed, among those who knew her, by her loyalty, her sense of
humor, and her intelligence.
Hardly a year went by in the next nine that didn’t see a Zoe
Akins play produced on Broadway. Zoe was working all the time, and the
money was rolling in.
It was rolling in from Hollywood by now, too. Several of her
plays had been bought by movie studios and turned into silent films,
including Declassee. The studios paid higher prices than usual for the
rights to Zoe’s plays ($35,000 for Declassee, for example), which was
97
an indication of how highly her work was regarded.
In 1928, like many other writers at the time, Zoe succumbed to
the lure of Hollywood herself. She said she was rundown and feared a
return of her tuberculosis; but despite her ill health, she barely
interrupted her work or social life. Many people she had known in New
27
York had settled in Los Angeles in the last couple of years, and two
months later, Jobyna also moved to Hollywood. When Zoe first arrived
she stayed for a while at the Garden of Allah, and later at the
Chateau Elysee in Hollywood, before renting a house in the Hollywood
Hills. After her day at the studio, she came home to work on plays.
Morning Glory, a play she wrote in 1929, was about stars in the
theatre who rise to sudden greatness, only to disappear just as
suddenly, never to be seen again. Obviously, now that she was starting
what amounted to a second career, attaining success and trying to hang
onto it were once again on her mind.
Zoe loved California, and after moving to Los Angeles in 1928,
never lived permanently in New York again. When she wrote about
Hollywood itself, she was lyrical:
My impression of Hollywood? Bohemia by sunlight...
a new core of the musical, dramatic, literary acti
vity of the world...The talking movies— a modern
Commedia del'Arte— a new medium for all sorts of
improvisations on old themes— puppet play in which
all things are possible except for the intimate
actuality of the thing reproduced...And what a
place to live!0What natural- wonders and beauties
and blessings.
Zoe was as fascinated by the creative possibilities of movies— at
first, anyway— as she was held fast by the prospect of the money to be
made. But the reality of writing for the studios was frustration,
disappointment, and a constant sense of lost opportunity and
debasement of one's work:
28
...the most seductive feature of moving picture
authorship is not the money;...It is the vast
possibility of the screen itself— the fixity of the
performance, once it is filmed. The room of three
walls within which the modern drama must spin its
spell opens out into a panorama as wide as the
world. Mountains can be real mountains, seas real
seas. The confines of the actual traditional
theatre no longer exist. Instead a one-world-
theatre for a one-world-audience is at hand.
The imagination is touched and aroused...It is
really criminal that it is not allowed to soar, but
that the masked money-dealing powers clip its wings,
and harness it like a draft-horse to pull a toy
entertainment for [the] ’fourteen-year-old mental
ity* with a dollar in its pocket.
Ironically, it is in Hollywood, where the writer makes the most
money, Zoe discovered, that she loses her independence: "...most
writers, once their enthusiasm is destroyed, their pride humiliated,
their hopes gone, let their standards go too; learn not to fight the
nitwit interference; become callous and tired; and accept the
OA
exigencies of picture-making— and all its silly formulas...1 "I
feel that it is impossible for any sensitive writer to rise to his
true level without the privileges of independence and isolation and
O 1
even the most golden awards can compensate for their loss.’
Zoe was used to discipline, to working hard; but movie writing
was tiring because she, like all other Hollywood writers at the time,
had so little control over what she wrote. She could not even choose
her own subject. And eventually, like all other work that is
undertaken for money rather than for love, it became tedious and
grinding.
Nevertheless, by 1931 she had firmly established herself as a
29
reliable screenwriter, and was making $1750 a week. She decided it was
time to find a permanent place to live. She bought an Edwardian
mansion in Pasadena, furnished it opulently, and hired a staff of
British servants. "There, Zoe presided with such prestige that Peg
[Talmadge, Norma's mother] used to complain, 'I'm always afraid she'll
OO
order everyone to leave the room except dukes and duchesses." Zoe
called her new home Green Fountains, because of all the trees
surrounding it, and she loved it. It was a lavish four and one-half
acre estate. She spent thousands of dollars and countless hours buying
furniture and mulling over and making improvements to the house. She
was especially proud of her gardens; there were at least fifty
different species of trees on the grounds, not including different
varieties of the same species, and there were hundreds of bushes,
shrubs, and flowers.
Zoe was still working hard, but her writing habits were
irregular. She hated having to go to the studio every day, and avoided
it whenever possible. And her social life cut into her working time,
as well. She often lamented that planning luncheons and dinner parties
and keeping up on one’s shopping could be very time-consuming.
One of Zoe's greatest pleasures in life, aside from her writing,
was entertaining. By now, she was more choosy about her guests and
more concerned about respectability. She still loved glamour, and
deliberately cultivated those with titles, even more so than she had
in New York. Her guest list was large, monied, and fashionable:
30
Lilyan Tashman wore dresses imported from Main-
bocher in Paris; the Talmadge girls sported the
more flashy styles of *Lucille,' who, to Zoe's
delight, was actually Lady Duff Gordon. Her
ladyship's sister was Elinor Glyn...The gentlemen
on Zoe’s guest list included Lionel and Jack
Barrymore, Adolphe Menjou, Edmund Lowe, and Lowell
Sherman, all of whom were models of London tail
oring from Saville Row...
The monthly bar bill sometimes reached as high as $2500.
John Houseman recalls being at one of her dinner parties; the
guest list included Evelyn Waugh and Ethel Barrymore. Waugh, according
to Houseman, spent a good portion of the evening lamenting the passing
of royalty, saying it was the only decent, moral, and proper form of
oc
government. Zoe agreed with him.
At one of her dinner parties in 1932, Zoe met Hugo Rumbold. She
was 45 years old and had given up on the idea of marriage. But Hugo
changed her mind.
Hugo Cecil Levinge Rumbold was from London. He had been a captain
of the grenadier guards and was the son of Sir Horace Rumbold, former
Ambassador to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His older half-brother, Sir
Horace Rumbold, was also in the diplomatic service in Berlin, and his
nephew, Sir Anthony Rumbold, served at the British Embassy in
Of-
Washington for a short time and later was stationed in Prague. Hugo
had all of the qualitites Zoe loved: he was British, an aristocrat,
eccentric, dedicated to having fun, and most important, he loved her.
According to Anita Loos, when Zoe met Hugo, he was "in his early
forties, handsome and witty, and his old-world manners gave spice to a
31
o7
very masculine charm.1 Hugo "had established his own reputation in
the arts as a painter, scene designer and musician. He had staged most
of Sir Thomas Beecham's operas at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, and
had designed a production of Arms and the Man at the Duke of York1s
Theatre under the personal supervision of George Bernard Shaw."^®
Zoe thought Hugo was wonderful; others were more skeptical. Hugo
had a reputation for being irresponsible and a womanizer, and he was
always in debt. He also drank too much. According to Anita Loos,
Hugo's main handicap was his lack of interest in work. He was
completely dedicated to having fun. John Houseman referred to him as
"that unfortunate husband," and he had the impression that Hugo had
spent a lot, if not all, of Zoe's money.^ It is certainly true that
he began paying off all his creditors only after he married Zoe.
Jobyna, too, disliked and distrusted Hugo. She was convinced that he
was dishonest, at the very least, and worried that he would hurt Zoe.
But Zoe was in love, and once Jobyna realized that she was not going
to be able to change Zoe's mind, she decided that the least she could
do was make sure the wedding went off smoothly.
Zoe's heart was set on a romantic wedding under the
bower in her rose garden. But, to quote Jobyna, "a
groom like Hugo could louse the whole thing up." So
on the wedding morning Jobey drove out to Pasadena,
barged into Zoe's boudoir, and issued an ultimatum.
"Push that lazy gigolo out of bed, so he can arrive
at his wedding respectably, through the front gate!"
32
And that's the way it was done.^®
Zoe and Hugo were married on March 12, 1932. Zoe was ecstatic.
She wired everyone she knew to tell them of the marriage. Willa
Cather, a close friend for years, wired back to say the news was a
delight and gave her "the wildest surprise." Later she wrote to tell
Zoe that, of all her friends, she was confident that Zoe would be able
to make matrimony work. She said Zoe always had a "golden glow" about
her, a natural power for enjoying life, and that she was "elastic" and
"not fussy about trifles": qualities Cather felt were necessary in a
41
marriage.
Cather may have been right about Zoe's qualitites, but there is
evidence that the marriage was not all idyllic. Several years earlier
Zoe had written, prophetically,
It seems to me that all the realities of love
must be disappointing to women of imagination and
literary sophistication. In my own life I have come
constantly upon a heart-breaking deficit between my
own conceptions of things— human relationships,
particularly; and their actuality...This habit of
the imaginative mind— of giving to everything dear
to itself a fictitious counterpart, a separate and
superfluous image of the original, endowed with
merits and beauties which it does not possess—
makes an unsubstantial foundation indeed, VRon
which to build with any hope of security."
All of Hugo's letters to Zoe contain either apologies for some
poor behavior of his, or criticism of Zoe. One letter opens, "Please
forgive your drunken husband of last night. He is not always so, and
/ * 3
is terribly ashamed." In October of 1932, Hugo's visa expired; he
33
was in Mexico at the time, and was not allowed to reenter the United
States until the whole business could be straightened out. He was
staying at the Hotel Playa in Ensenada while both he and Zoe tried to
get through the necessary paperwork that would allow,him back into the
country. Hugo seems to have blamed Zoe for the mess, and one letter he
wrote to her from Ensenada in November was full of criticism and self-
pity:
I cannot say I found your letter devastatingly
loving, but perhaps you write better love-scenes
for the theatre than for your own husband...To
begin with, you cannot contest the fact that your
petition (if it appeared to you at all important)
should have been carefully read over in the first
place— and complied with. I understand that you
would not dream of typing a complicated theatrical
or movie contract without going over it minutely—
and as you pretend to want me at home, I would
really have thought that you would take the thing
fairly seriously, and give it a moment of your
valuable time. In the meantime, I am stranded
alone...I cannot tell you how deeply I resent all
this foolishness. I had imagined that not only was
I going to have an ideally happy married life, but
I also thought I had married a woman with a very
capable head on her shoulders. With all my follies,
it appears to me that I am more clear-headed than
you...Whether I see you again or not appears to me
problematical, as the impression I get is that you
are not overanxious to see me; but in any case, you
can believe that I have loved you more deeply than
any other woman in my life.'
Before Zoe had a chance to work out any of these difficulties
with him, Hugo died. He and Zoe had been married barely seven months.
Hugo's death occurred on November 18, 1932. "His obituary in the
New York Times of Nov. 20, 1932 chronicled the cause of death as 'the
34
effect of wounds received in the World War.' The effects of alcohol
might have been nearer the truth. At any rate, a letter from the
attending physician dated 20 May, 1933 gave the cause of death as
'acute hepatitis with probably secondary cholecystitis.'"^
The funeral was held a few days later. Anita Loos attended with
Constance, Norma, and Peg Talmadge, and she recalls that "Jobyna met
us in the baronial hall. But grief had softened Jobyna, and her face
was streaked with mascara over the loss of a man she had so often
defied. Her tears now gave evidence of a sneaky, underlying fondness.
'Come into the parlor and see Hugo,' Jobyna sobbed softly. 'He looks
so distinguished, the goddam pimp!'”46
Albert Hackett recalls going to the funeral with his wife,
Frances Goodrich; he says that Hugo's chest was covered with medals,
and he and his wife wondered privately (as did others) where all those
medals had come from.^ It was very simple: according to Loos, Zoe
had gone to the prop department at MGM and borrowed them. "Before the
obsequies could begin...there was an awkward pause while the medals
were retrieved so they could be returned the next day to the prop
department. Then the bier was wheeled into the garden, for a ceremony
beneath the same rose-covered bower under which Hugo and Zoe had so
romantically exchanged their wedding vows."^ Zoe, status-conscious
even at a time like this, wanted to be sure Hugo had the distinction
in death she would have wanted him to have in life.
Zoe never admitted to anyone publicly that her marriage was not
all she had hoped for. But years later, when her great-niece Zizi was
35
contemplating what her parents and Zoe considered an unwise marriage,
Zoe's experience prompted her to write, "Personally, if you were in
love for the first time...I'd say 'trust your own instincts; you have
to live with this person.' But how can you trust your own instinct? I
never could mine. When I think of the men I almost married or wanted
to marry, I almost get into a cold sweat!"49
Her instincts about men may not have been very good, but her
writing ability was unimpaired. During and after her marriage, she
barely interrupted her work schedule and some of her best work was
done at this time. After Hugo's death, she worked even harder, both to
escape from her thoughts and to make money, which she badly needed;
Hugo had gone through quite a bit, and she was practically supporting
her family. Her mother had come to live with her after Zoe's father
had died, and Zoe bought her a house. Zoe regularly sent money to her
sister, whose husband was an alcoholic and was rarely employed. She
also paid for the schooling of her nieces and nephews. And although
she was making quite a lot from her work at the studios, she hadn't
had a successful play in some time; she badly needed a hit.
In 1935, she got one. The Old Maid opened at the Empire Theatre
(where Declassee had played) on January 7. It was her most successful
play ever, running for 298 performances. It won the Pulitzer Prize
for Drama the next year, and Paramount bought the motion picture
rights for $40,000, the most for which Zoe had ever sold a play to the
movies.
But in the midst of all the celebrating, Zoe lost her best
36
friend. Jobyna Howland died June 7, 1936, of a heart attack, at the
age of 56. Zoe was heartbroken. Without Hugo, life had seemed
difficult enough, and now to lose Joby, too...She was crushed. Gone,
at least for now, were all the memories of the times she and Joby had
fought or disagreed. She remembered only the good things: "I never
knew her to lie and I never knew her to owe a cent, and I never knew
her to spend money foolishly— except perhaps for flowers. One reason
she loved California was because she could have all the flowers she
wanted— great masses of them— and send them to people she cared
for..."52
Zoe kept on working, but she was getting fed up with writing for
the studios. Each play, she hoped, would be the one that would set her
free, make so much money that she would never have to write for movies
again. But they never were that successful. Finally, in 1941, she
thought she had made it. She was in New York to oversee the
publication of her new novel, Forever Young, and the production of two
of her plays, The Happy Days and Babylonian Lulluaby. This was one of
the best times of her life. She was very optimistic about the future.
She wrote to her mother, who was in California, "I want you to be
comfortable, have your own way, your own money, and indulge yourself
in every possible luxury— and I'm prepared, to that end, to furnish
money always— as I can always make it. (Sometimes more easily than
C O
others, but I can always count on it.)
In a newspaper interview given at the time of the novel's
publication, Zoe said that Forever Young "is a declaration of
37
independence. Never again will I write for motion pictures under a
long-term contract and under conditions forced on the writers out
there. I cannot tell you what a release this novel has been. It has
made me free; it has made me appreciate the value of words. After a
Hollywood experience you cannot know what a privilege it is to write
down on paper whatever you want to say.""^
This turned out to be a singularly unwise statement, since
producers never forget, and Zoe ended up having to write for the
movies again for money quite soon.
But she was right: she never again wrote for motion pictures
under a long-term contract. She couldn't know that this was the last
high point in her career, and that it would all be fading from this
point. From here on, more of her plays achieved only moderate success,
at best, and most of them failed dismally. It also became harder as
time passed for her to get movie work on any regular basis. She wrote
more and more on week-to-week contracts, for less than she had made
ten years earlier.
Finally, in 1944, she had to let her beloved mansion, Green
Fountains, go. She was nearly bankrupt. She sold it for back taxes and
used what money she had left to buy a house in Hollywood. It was a
big, old, shabby house in a "no longer fashionable" neighborhood. She
moved in with her poodle, her dachsund, her Polish gardener, and her
Filipino cook.~*^
After 1945, things picked up a bit: she got better jobs and more
money for a while. But then her career slowly slid back into its
38
decline. She was convinced that the reason for her failing career was
that she had been blacklisted by the film industry. She had had many
connections with Germans before and during the war, and some of her
close friends had been known before the war for their strong Nazi
sympathies. She herself was known to be an avowed anti-communist, and
might have been thought to be pro-Nazi because of that. There is very
little evidence to support her theory. She found it easier to believe
that, however, than to face the heartbreaking fact that her style was
outdated, that her ability was fading.
From 1951 on, she wrote fairly often for television. She enjoyed
the work even less than she had her movie writing, but it was
necessary: she needed the money. No one wanted her plays, no one
wanted her to write for movies, and the few royalties she still had
coming in from old plays were eaten up repaying loans she had gotten
from her agency, Samuel French, Inc. The unpleasant fact was that no
one was interested in Zoe Akins..
But she didn't stop writing. She wrote with more difficulty, and
from 1950 on, there were more and more projects that went unfinished.
Her friends tried to give her moral support and keep her spirits up.
She wrote in 1956 about her good friend, Sonya Levien, "She has been
such an angel in helping me through these empty days when everything
I've written seems to evoke nothing more encouraging than an echo in a
r/:
hollow space."
By the time she wrote this letter, she was deep into the last
major project on which she ever worked, her autobiography. She
39
corresponded with Carl Hovey, Sonya Levien's husband, regularly about
it. Hovey had nothing but praise for the book, and Zoe felt it deeply,
since she hadn’t had many encouraging words lately. In a letter to him
in May of 1956 she wrote:
Your letter meant so much to me it was discon
certing! I’m still trying to orient myself to the
importance you have given to the book (or half
book). I felt it, of course, very deeply when I was
writing, but one never knows if a work has the
mystery of communication until it goes out to an
impersonal audience. If I could sweep everything
else away which clutters my time I think I could
finish it quickly. However— like every- one else— I
am often nervous and troubled and I won't let my
self write on this unless I can shut everything
else out and feel alone with it— a kind of clear
ance in which my mind can move freely. At the
moment I am almost at that point. Once these mer
cenary chores [she is speaking of the television
writing she has been working on] are out of the way
I'll go back to it— sustained and full of interest
in recapturing its mood, encouraged to do so by
your appreciation.
The autobiography of which she is writing, Others Than Myself, is
beautifully written and entertaining. But like so many other projects
she worked on at this time, the book was never finished.
On October 26, 1958, Zoe wrote one of her most beautiful poems:
The long green terrace edging the long gracious house
Between the cypress hedges overlooking the hollow garden,
And beyond, the pools, the fountains, the oleanders,
and the pavilion,
Are beautiful in the moonlight.
The sounds of the violins,
The dancers interweaving
Make life.
Beyond the caged monkeys and strange birds
And the massed trees
Look towards the lighted pavilion and the bright terrace
Out of the shadows.
But there will be nights when no candelight or torches
or violins
Make life on the terrace.
Instead la pluie sa tombe, sa tombe—
Washing the green terrace with soft waves—
Reaching through the green surf of the hollow
gardens
To the root-mat under,
Bringing from leaf and bark of the dark trees
The scent of the earth, of life.
And she who will stand a while
Beyond the glass wall of the gracious house,
Will open a door, and walk on the rain-washed
terrace
As aware as the thankful roots
Of the earth scents and the strong slant of the
rain in the air;
As the sod and the flowering darkness
And be happy—
Without the torch or candle or violins or moonlit
souvenirs,
Because this, too, is life.
On October 28, 1958, Sonya Levien wrote to Hugh Kahler of Ladies
Home Journal about Zoe. She said, "She wrote the enclosed poem, LA
TERRACE DANS LA PLUIE two days ago and asked me to send it to you. It
is touching, because it is probably her swan song. Zoe is fatally ill.
It is cancer. So, if you find you can use it, a telegram would make
e r o
her very happy.1
But before Hugh Kahler received the letter, Zoe was dead. She
died the next night, on Wednesday, October 29, 1958.
Zoe had been in pain for several weeks before her death, but she
had never stopped writing. She would wake early every morning, at
about 5:00 a.m., and write in bed.^ Like most other writers, her
41
attitude toward writing was complex and contradictory. "The hardest
part of writing for me," she once wrote, "is sitting down and
f \ C S
beginning." At another time, though, she wrote,
In spite of its seeming nonsense, I can only
say that the moment has always come, sooner or
later— if an idea has stayed with me, has
teased my mind— when the impulse to get it on
paper seems to activate my arm...The sensation
is one which I have always experienced with a
glow of happiness, regardless of the worth or
unworth of what has resulted."
She loved writing for its own sake. It was a compulsion, but an
incredibly fulfilling one: "It’s a wonderful retreat— that world of
f\9
one’s own made of paper words."
By the time Zoe Akins began writing for the movies her style and
interests were well-developed. Writing for Hollywood did not change
them. The same themes which arise again and again in her plays also
appear in the screenplays she wrote. One of her best and most typical
plays was Declassee, written and produced on Broadway in 1919. Its
setting is England; its main characters are members of the
aristocracy. Her 1934 screenplay, Outcast Lady, has the same setting
and the same types of characters. Even the stories are very similar:
both plots revolve around strong women who give up everything—
friends, family, money, and social standing— to maintain their
principles.
The main character of Declassee is Lady Helen Haden, who leaves
her intolerant husband, goes broke, and is eventually scorned by most
42
of her friends. She nearly marries a man she does not love out of
desperation, but finally realizes she can’t go through with it. The
play ends with her death.
Outcast Lady bears a striking resemblance to Declassee: Iris’
husband kills himself on their wedding night. Trying to protect his
memory, she refuses to tell what she knows of his reasons. Because of
the hint of scandal, she is shunned by most of her friends. As in
Declassee, the facts and rumors about Iris are revealed through casual
gossip among other people who see her enter a night club in Paris (in
Declassee it was the lounge of a New York hotel). As in Declassee,
those who knew her in the past choose not to acknowledge her now— they
say she is letting down England and her class, in words almost
identical to those in the play. A young woman even says to her
/* o
companions, "Don't blame Iris if she's declassee."
Both the play and the screenplay end with the heroine's death:
Lady Helen Haden is hit by a car in an accident which has definite
suicidal overtones about it; and Iris drives a car into a tree.
Given Zoe's well-known snobbery, it is ironic that the target of
both the play and the screenplay is the limitation and destructiveness
of a social system that casts out the honorable on the basis of their
income or marital status. But Declassee was written in 1919, before
Zoe became rich and famous; when she was still outside looking in, it
was easy enough to criticize.
Declassee, although it condemns such snobbery, also explores it.
The characters are not simply one-dimensional types; the audience can
43
understand their motivations and points of view, even as it sees their
limitations. Often their snobbery comes from their own inadequacies:
CHARLOTTE
I— I don't believe I'd know what to say if I
should meet her.
LADY WILDERING
I'm afraid it would be awkward— almost painful
— meeting her. What could one say?
Dr perhaps it comes from deep patriotism, and strong beliefs, no
natter how mistaken or narrow:
SIR EMMETT
But it's just because she's an Englishwoman
and our own kind that we must be stern with
ourselves about her. She has a great name,
great traditions, great charm, great gifts,
and in God's name what has she done with
them? For her personal misfortune one might be
sorry— one is sorry, sorry beyond all words;
but as the representative of my King, I can
not forgive an Englishwoman for making, in
a strange country, a sneer of her class, a joke
of her rank, and a miserable adventure of her
life.65
Their own hypocrisy is obvious: they were the ones who said, in
the beginning of the play, that Lady Helen should leave Sir Bruce
Secause of his cruelty. They were the ones who pointed out that she
lad no money of her own upon which to live. Yet they refused to have
janything to do with her when she did leave, and now condemn her for
"going about with all sorts of queer people and living by her
wits..."66
44
Outcast Lady was written in 1934, and its condemnation of
snobbery is clear, but the behavior of the snobs is somewhat mitigated
by their honest belief that Iris is at fault in her husband's suicide:
GERALD
Boy’s dead— and she killed him! Why shouldn’t
she be blamed!
They are not let entirely off, however, for it is made clear
that, having known Iris for years, they should have had more faith in
her.
The difference between the play and the screenplay is
significant: by 1934 Zoe accepted the principles held by the sort of
people who made Lady Helen's life miserable; so in Outcast Lady, the
characters could not be condemned for this kind of behavior. Instead,
she gave them a logical excuse to behave as they did. The emphasis is
no longer on the flaws and narrow mindedness of the social system, but
on weakness of character.
In both Declassee and Outcast Lady, the women, because of
society's social prejudices and economic restrictions, are made to
bear the brunt of any wrongdoing, while the men who caused their
problems in the first place get off scot-free. The economic and social
dependence of women on men was something that Zoe despised and tried
to avoid in her own life. This theme recurs in almost all of her
works.
In Declassee, Lady Helen Haden stays with her abusive husband for
45
years. Charlotte Ashley is of the opinion that Lady Helen should
leave, but Harry Charteris reminds her that Lady Helen has no money
and no skills:
HARRY
Don't forget that you're talking, and thinking,
as a woman who can make a jolly good living on
the stage; but there is nothing, nothing at all,
that Helen can do.
Later, Lady Helen nearly marries a man she does not love because
she has no money left. Iris, in Outcast Lady, does marry Boy Fenwick
even though she doesn't love him, because he loves her and has money,
and the man she loves, Napier Harpenden, loves her, has no money, and
is afraid to marry her without it. Iris is willing to be poor with
Napier, but his father, Sir Maurice, thinks that would be a disaster:
he tells Iris she will ruin Napier's life if she agrees to marry him,
/fn
because she "hasn't a penny" and is "of rotten stock." y Iris tries to
argue that none of that matters, but he finally convinces her, and she
marries Boy instead. The wrecking of her life and the lives of her
brother Gerald, and Boy, and Napier, are caused by that decision.
In Zoe Akins' plays and screenplays, the women almost always have
stronger characters than the men. In Outcast Lady, it is Iris who has
the courage to do what is right. Gerald cannot stand to be alive after
his idol, Boy, has died, and drinks himself to death in a slum. And
Napier twice is given the chance to stand up for what he believes and
marry Iris in spite of his father's disapproval, and twice fails:
46
NAPIER
You are the only thing I've ever really wanted
in my life; and I wasn't strong enough to take
you and keep you. You were right to leave me.
In Declassee. Lady Helen knows what is right and does it, even
when it means losing everything. When she discovers that Ned Thayer
was cheating at cards, she demands that he apologize to her husband,
Sir Bruce. Thayer, faced with public disgrace, threatens Lady Helen:
he will shoe Sir Bruce letters thsat prove that she and Thayer were
having an affair. But Lady Helen refuses to be blackmailed, and
insists on the aplogy anyway, knowing it means he will divorce her and
she will be penniless:
LADY HELEN
He was right...I was wrong. Of course, I'll
tell him; and I expect you to apologise to
him before everyone who heard him apologise
to you...Have you never heard of fair play?
Both Iris and Lady Helen represent a way of life that is
disappearing from the world. In 1919, when Declassee was written,
World War I had just come to an end. With it, it seemed to many, ended
a way of life and a system of values and beliefs that were more
gracious, more kind and principled, than those taking their place. To
Zoe, what was ending was "a golden time— the era of peace which began
in Queen Victoria's reign and ended when Germany marched in 1914."^
What replaced that golden time seemed to many a new and ruthless
world, where right and wrong were superseded by whatever worked, where
47
romanticism was supplanted by pragmatism, and where people like Lady
- 7 0
Helen's family, the "mad Varicks, and Iris' family, the Marches, no
longer had any place.
Both the Marches and the Varicks are doomed. In Outcast Lady,
Iris' death is foreshadowed from the start: she drives fast and
recklessly, once deliberately tempting fate by driving directly at a
tree and swerving away only at the last minute. Her brother Gerald
says at her wedding, "Wishing one of the Marches happiness is like
thumbing your nose at Fate."^ The family motto, inscribed on their
father's ring, which Iris always wears, is "Mor vincit pudorem"— Death
before Shame.^
Akins firmly places Iris in the old, romantic world. When she is
arguing with Sir Maurice about marrying Napier, she says:
IRIS
You know how my father died of pneumonia and
laughter and defiance when the doctor told
him he couldn't keep on drinking and live. But
I admired him very much. I want to be like him.
He was a gentleman...
Iris is willing to sacrifice everything for her principles. She
refuses to tell the truth about Boy's motives for suicide because she
knows that would destroy Gerald's illusions about Boy. She believes
Gerald needs those illusions to live a sane and happy life, and is
determined to see he keeps them even if it means losing her friends:
"I'd have no future if I had destroyed his; as it is, the memory of
having done a decent thing will be good company when I'm lonely.^
48
Sir Maurice thinks these sorts of ideas are foolish: "The head of
a bankrupt house can’t afford to be so deuced romantic. There’s no
place in a sensible world for romantic dreamers."7®
Iris doesn't agree. She is as attached to her ideals as Gerald is
to his, and like Gerald, she dies for them. Gerald, like his father,
drinks himself to death. Iris, when Boy's secret is exposed, is
crushed. Napier thinks he has done her a favor by telling everyone:
now they will all know Boy's suicide was not her fault and will take
her back with open arms:
IRIS
As if that mattered! When you've taken from me
the only gracious thing I've ever done in my
life.79
Discovering, as well, that Gerald has no faith in her is too much to
bear: she gets into her car and commits suicide by driving it into a
tree. To make sure the audience gets the point, the last shot is of
the ring on Iris' finger bearing the legend, "Mor vincit pudorem."®®
Like the Marches, the Varicks are destined to die out, and Lady
Helen Haden is the last of that line. From the start of the play her
death is foreshadowed. She herself says about the Varicks, "We've
always died...I think we've rather liked dying..."®^ When she leaves
Sir Bruce, with no prospects for the future, she says, "A fantastic
love of justice happens to be one of the things for which the mad
"op
Varicks have died.
No matter what the temptations and desperation, she keeps her
49
dignity and refuses to compromise her principles. When Rudolph Solomon
proposes that she become his mistress she turns him down, even though
she has only one more pearl left:
LADY HELEN
...it's a part of the adventure to keep one's
courage, and not to care too greatly how the
wheel of fortune turns; for we must all go
from the game, empty-handed at the end, and
if we've played fairly I don't believe that
we will mind, really, when the moment comes
to blow out our candles, and sleep.
Lady Helen has no regrets for her actions; she wouldn’t have
changed anything. But she remembers the old days nostalgically:
LADY HELEN
It's sometimes very difficult to realize that
this is a serious world— and that life is
something more than a hilltop in the sun,
with an adventure lurking back of every flower.
There are so many things to make one smile,
and the older one grows, and the more one is
alone, the oftener one smiles to oneself. I
don't say that they are always happy smiles...
Rudolph Solomon understands a little more clearly what is at
stake. He is of the new world, and is expresses its new ideas:
progress, industry, pragmatism, and the all-important position of
money:
SOLOMON
I was thinking that there are better things in
than cruising beneath the stars on the South
Seas, even...— Purpose— for instance; the
progress of one's spirit upon a pilgrimage of
50
achievement; the building of one's life after
the plan of one's dream...
He knows that the new world will go forward, no matter what. But
in Lady Helen, he recognizes what will be left behind. She has, he
says, "something of the incommunicable technique of magnificence."
When she realizes she cannot marry Rudolph Solomon, and has no
money and no prospects, she leaves his house. She is hit by a car in
the street. Although this looks like an accident, the audience knows
better. It is, if not suicide, at least Destiny.
When Lady Helen dies, the beauty and grace and ideals she
represents die with her. Sir Emmett says, when he sees her:
SIR EMMETT
I should be seeing ghosts— ghosts of the Mad
Varicks racing their phantom horses down the
winds of eternity; swift riders with their
plumes streaming and their armour flashing,
their phantom hounds leaping before them, a
great race— warriors, courtiers, sportsmen,
riding into oblivion...And Helen, the last o
their line, following— a ghost of tomorrow.
51
Akins— Notes
^Zoe Akins, Others Than Myself, ts, Zoe Akins Collection,
Huntington Library, 20.
O
Akins, Others 40.
^Akins, Others 40.
^Zoe Akins, "Playwriting," ts, Zoe Akins Collection, Huntington
Library, 4.
Akins, Others, 20.
^Zoe Akins, ’ ’ Marriage and Myself,” ts, Zoe Akins Collection,
Huntington Library, 1.
^Akins, "Marriage" 1.
®For general information about Zoe Akins' life, I am indebted to
Zoe Akins, Others Than Myself, ts, Zoe Akins Collection, Huntington
Library.
^Akins, Others 10-11.
Akins, Others 63.
^^William Drake, Sara Teasdale; Woman and Poet (New York: Harper
and Row Publishers, 1979), 53-54.
Akins, "Marriage" 13.
Akins, Others 99.
^Zoe Akins, Seven Plays and Seven Years, ts, Zoe Akins
Collection, Huntington Library, 10.
Akins, Others 109.
•^Akins, Others 211.
■^Robert E. Morsberger, Stephen 0. Lesser, Randall Clark, eds.,
American Screenwriters (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1984) 10.
■^Zoe Akins, "Interview," ts, Zoe Akins Collection, Huntington
Library, 1.
Akins, Others 233.
52
Akins, Others 232.
^Akins, Others 1.
33Akins, Others 240.
oo
Ethel Barrymore, Memories (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955)
217.
34Akins, Seven Plays 14.
o c
Akins, Seven Plays 14.
3^Benson Inge, "The Author of Twenty Plays, Zoe
Another," New York Herald Tribune, 11 May 1941: 26.
Akins, Adds Still
27
Zoe Akins, Contract with Famous Players-Lasky,
Zoe Akins Collection, Huntington Library.
5 December 1922,
28
Zoe Akins, Autobiographical Fragment, ts, Zoe
Huntington Library, 1.
Akins Collection,
3^Zoe Akins, "What's Wrong With Hollywood," ts,
Collection, Huntington Library, 1.
Zoe Akins
30Akins, "What's Wrong" 2.
3^Akins, Others 241.
82
Anita Loos, The Talmadge Girls (New York: The Viking Press,
1978) 99.
33Loos 99-100.
34Ronald Albert Mielich, "The Plays of Zoe Akins Rumbold," diss.,
Ohio State University, 1974, 42.
35
Telephone interview with John Housman, 5 June 1985.
3^Gertrude Ruhnka, "Report on the Zoe Akins Collection," Zoe
Akins Collection, Huntington Library.
37Loos 100-101.
38Mielich 142.
OQ
^Telephone interview with John Housman, 5 June 1985.
40Loos 103.
53
4^Phyllis Robinson, Willa: The Life of Willa Cather (Garden City,
New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1983) 183.
4^Akins, "Marriage” 12.
I ^
Hugo Rumbold, letter to Zoe Akins Rumbold, n.d., Zoe Akins
Collection, Huntington Library.
44Hugo Rumbold, letter to Zoe Akins Rumbold, n.d., Zoe Akins
Collection, Huntington Library.
4^Mielich 47.
46Loos 103.
^Personal interview with Albert Hackett, 28 March 1985.
4®Loos 104.
4^Zoe Akins, letter to Zizi Maginty, 23 March 1951, Zoe Akins
Collection, Huntington Library.
• ^Notable Names in the American Theatre (Clifton, N.J.: James T.
White and Company, 1976) 53.
■^Zoe Akins, Contract with Paramount Productions, Inc., 24 July
1935, Zoe Akins Collection, Huntington Library.
r o
Zoe Akins, "In Memory of Jobyna Howland," ts, Zoe Akins
Collection, Huntington Library, 2.
ero
Zoe Akins, letter to Elizabeth Green Akins, n.d. (circa January
1941), Zoe Akins Collection, Huntington Library.
^4Douglas Gilbert, "Zoe Akins," New York World-Telegram, 27 April
1941: 26.
~^Zoe Akins, "Keep That Big House If...," ts, Zoe Akins
Collection, Huntington Library, 4,
Zoe Akins, letter to Carl Hovey, 8 May 1956, Zoe Akins
Collection, Huntington Library.
~^Zoe Akins, letter to Carl Hovey, 8 May 1956, Zoe Akins
Collection, Huntington Library.
CO
Sonya Levien, letter to Hugh Kahler, 28 October 1958, Zoe Akins
Collection, Huntington Library.
■^Telephone interview with John Houseman, 5 June 1985.
54
^Akins, Seven Plays 16.
^Akins, Others 236.
6^Zoe Akins, letter to Carl Hovey, 17 March 1956, Zoe Akins
Collection, Huntington Library.
^Zoe Akins, Outcast Lady, screenplay for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
1934, 56.
^Zoe Akins, Declassee, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, and Greatness: A
Comedy (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923) 37.
^Akins, Declassee 46-7.
^Akins, Declassee 38.
Akins, Outcast Lady 45.
^Akins, Declassee 6.
^Akins, Outcast Lady 17.
^Akins, Outcast Lady 78.
71
Akins, Declassee 32.
Akins, Others Than Myself 10-11.
^Akins, Declassee 14.
^Akins, Outcast Lady 37.
7 * 5
Akins, Outcast Lady 24.
i ^Akins, Outcast Lady 16.
^Akins, Outcast Lady 52.
Akins, Outcast Lady 13.
^Akins, Outcast Lady 116.
^Akins, Outcast Lady 118.
Akins, Declassee 15.
®^Akins, Declassee 17.
®^Akins, Declassee 62.
' tr rr
Q/
Akins, Declassee 58.
OC
Akins, Declassee 59.
®^Akins, Declassee 65.
07
Akins, Declassee 37.
CHAPTER 2— VERA CASPARY
Vera Caspary’s autobiography opens with a description of a
skinny, shivering girl waiting in a windy Chicago El Station. "She is
eighteen or nineteen and convinced that her life is a failure." She
is terrified of being an old maid; she is a snob and a hypocrite; she
is dull and boring; she is a mere stenographer, trapped in a dead-end
job among men interested only in profit. "Saddest of all, she is a
writer among those secretly writing in locked bedrooms the poem, the
short story, the novel that will never be published." This is, she
says, the "caricature of my showcase image," the voice that lives
inside her despite the confident image she presents to the world, and
undermines her belief in herself by reminding her that she is,
herself, all the things she fears and despises. "Like everyone else
in this contradictory world, I have two definite and well-developed
sides, one that I show off and one that I am afraid to see plain.
Vera’s father was her first idol. He was passionate about
honesty. "Do you know what your name means?" he'd ask. "Truth. A
girl named Vera can never tell a lie."^ She never forgot. Her respect
for the truth, her integrity, her values and strength of character,
and her independence, she attributes to her father.
But it was her insecurities that drove her to succeed, that gave
her the energy to sit up late night after night, typing her novels
after a full day’s work in an ad agency, and later, after a full day's
work at the studio. Her fear of failure drove her to write more and
57
more, to cement the success she was never wholeheartedly sure she
deserved.
Vera Caspary was born November 13, 1899. At the time, her family
lived on Rhodes Avenue on the South Side of Chicago; this area later
became Chicago's Black Belt. In fact, the first blacks who came to
live in the neighborhood lived in the other half of the Casparys'
double house. There was an outcry from neighbors, who circulated
petitions. Vera's father was the head of a small group of local people
who opposed the petitioners. He had been an Abolitionist in Wisconsin,
and it was his contention that the neighborhood was honored by the
presence of Judge Barnett and his wife, Ida Wells Barnett, a lawyer
and leader of social causes. He felt that the neighbors had no right
to consider themselves superior,
Vera was a late child of her mother. She had two brothers:
Arthur, who was 18 years older than she, and Danny, 17 years older;
and a sister, Irma, 15 years older. When her mother first became
pregnant, she regarded her condition as shameful, and at first was
embarassed by the new baby. But very soon she came to regard Vera as a
miracle, and so did the rest of the family. Caspary says she was
spoiled as a child; she was also, because of her age difference, much
like an only child. She spent a lot of time alone in her room on the
second floor of the house playing with her imaginary companions, "twin
sisters who wore accordion-pleated dresses of pink and blue silk with
matching hair ribbons and slippers and accompanied me on adventures
more wonderful than anything my grown-up siblings even dreamed
58
about.
One incident took place in her childhood which, as Caspary
recalls, changed her life dramatically. It was seemingly
insignificant, important only in Vera's mind.
One day a friend of my sister’s brought to me
a book called Spark, a_ Dog. The story
began, 'Bow-wow-wow, My name is Spark. I am a dog.'
Tame stuff after Hans Brinker and Zauberlinda,
the Wise Witch, but distinguished because it
said on the cover 'By Rosalie G. Mendel,’ the name
of the lady who had brought it to me. The magic words
taught me that stories did not just grow in books but
were written by someone I knew. At once I began printing
miniature books, pinning together tiny folded sheets
and lettering unevenly on the cover A STORY BY VERA
LOUISE CASPARY.4
In this case, being spoiled was a blessing: the adults around her
didn't discourage her imagination; they indulged and encouraged it.
Her mother helped set places at the table for her imaginary friends,
plan menus, decors, and trousseau for her dolls' weddings, upholster
furniture and make lace curtains for her doll's house. Once when Vera
had the measles, her sister Irma painted pink dots on all her dolls.
Irma also drew pictures for the magazines Vera handprinted and sold to
her aunts and cousins for 5 cents a copy, and Vera's father brought
ribbons, remnants, buckles, gold braid, feathers, and artificial
flowers home from his millinery workrooms for her to put on costumes
for the plays she wrote and staged. "I've been writing ever since I
could put a sentence together. I can remember at three telling myself
stories. I don't know a better way to amuse yourself. I must write.
59
As a child and teenager, Vera’s dreams were "stories of love,
sacrifice, and devotion. Never in the first person. The characters
were made up and shaped to whim and desire. I told myself stories in
full sentences. At a time when my reading was undiscriminating and
diversified, my dreams combined the styles of Bulwer-Lytton and James
M. Barrie with a touch of E. F. Benson or George Barr McCutcheon.
All of her close friends had a lot of imagination. One was
Eleanor: "I ate dinner at her house, stayed overnight and often,
standing silently in the hall, looked through an open door to watch
her mother, the authoress, sitting up in bed with a clipboard, writing
®L book."^ During their first year in high school, Vera and Eleanor
haunted Essanay Studios on Chicago’s North Side, hoping to catch a
glimpse of Francis X. Bushman, the silent screen matinee idol, who was
under contract there. All that year, Eleanor wrote letters to Vera
about her fantasy romance with him, in which she met, was courted by,
quarrelled with, reconciled with, and married him. During the semester
she gave him a number of children. When they, along with the rest of
the country, via the gossip columns, discovered that he had a wife,
Eleanor wrote a new series of letters, in which Bushman divorced his
wife and married Eleanor. When the newspapers announced that he really
was divorcing his wife to marry his leading lady, Beverly Bayne, they
dropped the fantasy, disillusioned. (Apparently, most of the women in
the country felt as Eleanor and Vera did: the scandal ruined his film
career.)
Balancing all of this adolescent fantasy was another man Vera
60
greatly admired and respected, Dr. Emil Hirsch, a rabbi at Sinai
Reformed Congregation and her teacher in Sunday school and later in
confirmation class. Outside of her family, he was one of the strongest
influences on Vera. He
devoted his sermons to social questions, politics,
philosophy, and book reviews. He loathed cant,
deplored complacency, railed against hypocrisy,
and never hesitated to use a culprit’s name. In
a congregation supported by the rich he castigated
landlords, industrialists, and merchants who
exploited the poor.
One day he asked her a question in front of the entire congregation.
She was intimidated, and blurted out the wrong answer. "'Totally
wrong,’ he said, and— while I forced back tears— added, 'but you
think. Learn to use your brain, Vera Caspary.'"® He pushed her to
work and think harder by always expecting more of her.
As a child, Vera had been outgoing, but as a teenager, despite
her growing intellectual awareness, she became shy and self-conscious.
"In the study of English, history, and public speaking I did rather
well, in mathematics and science managed to scrape by, but when it
came to the study of the adolescent male, I was definitely retarded."^
Every school day, after she said goodbye to her mother and sister, she
went to the bathroom, put on the Dorine cake rouge that she and a
friend had bought at Walgreen's for $.51, hid the rouge, and then
dashed out of the house before she was seen with a painted face. But
even this artifical armor did not supply her with any confidence:
61
Convinced of my lack of charm, unable to
show myself as cute or kittenish, certain that any
prince would pass me by without a second glance, I
decided to become an onlooker, witness to the romantic
achievements of my friends, enjoying rather than
envying their romances. I began consciously to shape
myself to this pattern, to become a spy on the side
of humanity, to observe and learn, to grieve and
rejoice over the affairs of others. Such habits were
not hard to acquire. As the family's baby I had
always sharpened my ears to the actions of grown-ups
and tuned my ears to their secrets. It was good
training for a novelist...
Perhaps it was good training for a novelist, but it didn't help
Vera much in developing any confidence in herself or her abilities.
Upon graduation from high school, she decided not to go to college.
She used the excuse that her father was old, and that it would be a
strain on him to have to pay her tuition and living expenses for
another four years. Actually, she was afraid of failing.
So, in the summer of 1917, the week after her high school
graduation, Vera’s father enrolled her in a six month course in a
business college, where she learned secretarial skills. After
graduating from the business college, she held a series of secretarial
positions, changing jobs frequently but always moving to a better
position and a better salary.
She did not change jobs just for the money, however. She was
bored. She was still hoping to be a writer, and scoured the want ads
to find a job as a reporter— in vain. Because she had read somewhere
that advertising offered training to young writers, she began
answering ads for copywriting jobs. Of course, in 1919, there were no
62
ads for female copywriters. Even so, she sent out letters detailing
her experience, signing them "V.L. Caspary.” Many agencies, impressed
by her letters, called her in for an interview, but ”when a ninety-
five pound, five-foot-one girl turned up, the advertisers were angry
or amused. None gave me a job,"^
But Vera was persistent. She kept answering ads. And whenever she
was not at work or out on a date, she wrote: light verse, short
stories, skits. But she still didn't have enough confidence in
herself, yet, to attempt anything as intimidating as a novel.
On November 11, 1918, Armistice Night, Vera went to "Bohemian”
Chicago with her friend Eleanor, whose boyfriend was a poet:
That night, after we'd...had dinner with wine
at a Greek restaurant, we went with the poet to
the studio of a young woman famous for the number
and achievements of her lovers. I admired her for
the frankness with which she admitted to her reputa
tion, but was shocked by her allowing a seven-year-
old to stay up until midnight, and by discovering
that she kept a sugar bowl under her bed.
About a year later, she incorporated this incident into a revue
skit she entered in a contest. "It was called The Wild Egg and was
intended to be a satire on Bohemian life with the sugar bowl under the
bed.”*^ She won first prize, and spent the money— $100— on her first
typewriter.
Vera and her friends, Eleanor and Jeannette, spent their extra
money going to nice restaurants and to the theatre: they saw almost
every play that opened in Chicago. But all plans with other female
63
friends could be cancelled at a moment’s notice if there was an
invitation from a man. Vera had lost her adolescent shyness. In
January, 1920, Prohibition, and the Roaring Twenties, began. Vera
bobbed her hair, against her family’s protests, and began going to
speakeasies. Chicago was world-famous for its gangsters, and Vera saw
a gunfight outside a restaurant, and once was taken by friends to a
gangster’s hideout. But she and her friends spent very little time
thinking about such things. ”We liked to talk about the plays we saw,
about the books we read, about men and sex and our ambitions.” As they
always had, Vera’s fantasies took her far beyond the boundaries of her
limited world.
I dreamed of New York, London, Paris; of writing
books; of earning the companionship of gifted men;
of becoming like the enchantress of Greenwich Vil
lage, a flaming thing...It was not easy to burn
one’s candle at both ends while living with one’s
parents and meeting only cheese and olive-oil
salesmen, insurance brokers and accountants.
Finally, Vera got her first job in an advertising agency, as a
copywriter. The job taught her craftsmanship; how to manipulate
language, how to write quickly, and how to take criticism. Eventually
she got her boss's job, and was paid $35 a week. (He had been paid
$125 a week, but she was too proud and happy to care.) One of her
first jobs was to write The Sergei Marinoff School of Classical
Dancing correspondence course. The students who signed up and paid
their fees by mail didn’t know that there was no Sergei Marinoff, and
64
that all of the lessons were written by Vera. But years later, Vera
met people who swore they'd studied with him in person.
She also wrote The Van Vliet Course in Photoplay Writing, another
correspondence course to teach screenwriting. She'd never written a
screenplay, but she later used the lessons she'd made up to write
highly profitable screen stories and scripts.
She began writing her first novel in 1921, working at night and
on weekends on her portable typewriter. It was an autobiographical
story about a girl growing up in Chicago. A year and a half later, it
was finished. She submitted it to Bobbs-Merrill, but it was rejected.
Anne Watkins, the agent, wrote her a letter saying that Vera wrote
well enough to be published, but that the book was too personal. But
Vera had little time to brood about her failure. A year earlier, she
had quit her full-time job at the ad agency, bored with writing
repetitive, dishonest copy, and was now doing freelance work editing
and writing articles and copy. Her father had had a slight stroke— he
was over seventy by this time— and Vera was assuming the
responsibility of supporting her parents.
Several months after the rejection by Bobbs-Merrill, in May of
1924, her father died.
I can see him in his bulging leather chair, see
his big nose, his crooked smile, the twinkle of
humor in his teasing eyes, the brave tilt of his
head, the shoulders that had never bowed. He left
me, among other valuable things, the duality in
my nature: enduring discontent and compulsive
happiness.*
65
After her father’s death, Vera assumed the sole financial support
of herself and her mother, and almost immediately they moved to New
York. Vera accepted a job as assistant editor of Dance Lovers
magazine. At first, she believed that ’’sincerity and good grammar
could improve a McFadden magazine. After three years in the
advertising business, I should have known better.” She didn't get
along with her editor, Fulton Oursler, and eventually quit, going back
to freelancing. A year later, she rejoined the "factory" when Oursler
was replaced. During the next two years, she occasionally wrote short
stories for the magazine to fill in for writers who failed to meet
their deadlines. "The Queen's Last Fling" was her first acknowledged
fiction— "a nauseating story,"-1 she calls it. Eventually, Oursler
returned to the magazine, and their conflicts resumed. Finally, after
rashly making some comments critical of the magazine, she was fired
for disloyalty.
She was humilated by the incident, but later realized that the
firing couldn't have worked out better: shortly after, she submitted
the manuscript of Ladies and Gents to the Century Company; they
accepted it and gave her a $500 advance. "Ladies and Gents was not the
serious novel I had hoped to write but a flippant story begun as a
serial for Dance Magazine. a n d most likely would have been
published there if she had not been fired.
She started work almost immediately after that on a new novel,
The White Girl. This book she took seriously. It was about a black
girl passing as white. Soon, it obsessed her, and she quit her
66
freelance jobs to work nonstop on it. It took her less than a year to
finish it. The novel was accepted by a new and undistinguished
publisher, Sears and Company, and was rushed into print— but only
after Vera had made the changes "suggested” by the publisher:
The story had ended on what I believed was a note
of wry honesty. The heroine, who had deceived and
lost her lover had, like all working girls, to keep
on with her job. The publishers wanted the story to
end sensationally. Publishers and editors, I thought,
must certainly be wiser than any young writer. I
changed the ending.
Actually, Vera’s judgment was correct: the tragic ending strikes the
wrong note, whereas Vera’s original ending— life going on— would have
been more realistic and more consistent with the tone of the book.
Nevertheless, when The White Girl appeared in January of 1929,
the reviews were good, and the book went into a second printing.
Rumors circulated that the book was the autobiography of a black girl,
written under a pseudonym, and for a while there was talk of turning
it into a play. But nothing came of this plan, and Vera didn’t make a
lot of money from the book, as she'd hoped.
The quality of her work, and the recognition, or lack of it, were
important to Vera. But since she alone was responsible for supporting
herself and her mother, money had to be a major concern:
If I talk too much about earning and spending,
it is because money was the basis of all decisions.
I was never greedy, never wanted money for show,
could quit or turn down a job if it did not please
me. Relations and family friends called me Bohemian;
67
Bohemians said I was bourgeois. The bourgeois side
demanded comfort, cleanliness, pleasant sur
roundings, a small degree of security. In an emer
gency I had no one to turn to... y
Working full-time on The White Girl had used up all of Vera's
savings, and the week it was finished, she took a job "writing reviews,
editorials, and interviews for The Metropolitan Guide, a free weekly
given to guests in New York hotels. It wasn't the kind of writing Vera
wanted to spend her time on, but one of the fringe benefits was that
she got lots of free tickets and passes. Vera loved to go to plays,
alone or with friends.
Early in 1929, Vera began thinking of a new story. She quit her
job in April and moved to a working girls' home under a false name to
do research on the girls living there. Eventually the story turned
into a play, Blind Mice, about the lives and loves of a group of girls
living together. She sold it almost immediately. Winifred Lenihan was
to be the director, but the play needed revision, so she began working
with Vera, trying to correct the mistakes that Vera's inexperience as
a playwright had caused. "Winnie's analysis became not only the basis
of the play's revisions, but the foundation of my later work as well.
She taught me to build excitement rather than escape it; that a crisis
at the opening should not exceed the action that follows; that
conflict must put down roots before it flowers; that minor characters
can't be manipulated for the playwright's convenience; that every
90
entrance and exit must have a reason."
The tryouts of Blind Mice began Labor Day, 1930, in Atlantic
68
City. There were problems from the start, not only in the structure of
the play, but in the fact that Vera, inexperienced and lacking
confidence, allowed the backers, and just about anyone else, to make
endless changes, which for the most part only diffused the power and
focus of the play's action. When the play finally opened in New York,
on October 15, 1930, at the Times Square Theatre, the reviews were
21
only lukewarm, and the play closed after only 13 performances.
Paramount Pictures, however, liked the play enough to buy the
rights; the screenplay was written by Zoe Akins, and the movie,
retitled Working Girls, was released in December of 1931. Vera didn't
approve of the way Zoe Akins handled her play: "She really wrote the
wrong screenplay. She acted as if working girls were dirt. I have them
as running around having dates, a good time, but getting into trouble,
but she wrote them with a snobbish look down. They had to be society
9 9
people for her."
Nevertheless, the money from the sale of the rights bought Vera
the trip to Europe she'd always longed for. She stayed several weeks,
travelling, sightseeing, and looking up her mother's relatives,
particularly her mother's sister, Hannah, who made a deep impression
on her. When she came home, she immediately began work on another
"serious" novel, inspired by her aunt's life and stories, called
Thicker Than Water. It was bought by Liveright and published in 1932.
But although the reviews were good, Liveright was going bankrupt, and
there was no money for advertising or promotion. The book faded
quickly into obscurity and was forgotten— and once again, Vera did not
69
make the big money she'd hoped for.
But by then, it didn't matter as much. Some time after finishing
her novel, Vera had gone to the Algonquin for lunch. By chance she met
Laura Wilck, then story editor for Paramount Pictures, in the lobby.
Laura mentioned that they needed good material, so over the weekend
Vera wrote Suburb, a forty-page original screen story, using the
lessons she'd made up years before for the Van Vliet Course in
Photoplay Writing. Paramount bought the story for $2000. (The movie
made from Vera's original, The Night of June 13th, was released in
September of 1932. ) Vera was ecstatic about the success and the
money. She and her mother rented a house for the summer in Brookfield
Center, Connecticut, where she began her next novel.
Later that year, sick of the cold and wanting a change, Vera went
to New Orleans. There she met Gwen Bristow, a feature writer on the
New Orleans Times-Picayune. Gwen and her husband, Bruce Manning,
became Vera's close friends. Manning worked in radio, writing,
directing and acting. He and Vera began collaborated on several
projects; some of their stories were later sold to film studios.
When she arrived back in New York, D. A. Doran, who was the story
editor at Fox Studios, asked her for another original like Suburb.
This time, the deal included a four-week stint in Hollywood, during
which time she was to write a treatment for a screenplay.
She arrived in Hollywood in 1933. Vera was a snob about movies.
"The best of them I considered inferior to the worst live
qo
entertainment." This attitude softened a bit later, but never
70
i
entirely disappeared. Despite her misgivings, the money was too good
to turn down.
Her office was in the new Writers Building at Fox Studios. "I had
expected to learn all about movie writing, but all this experience
taught me was that a new writer who has neither a famous name nor
0 A
friends in the studio is shunned like a typhoid carrier.” The social
atmosphere in Hollywood bewildered Vera. She was a straightforward
person who said what she meant, and the hypocrisy of film people
puzzled and angered her. "I went to parties at the Hacketts* [Albert
Hackett and Frances Goodrich, screenwriters], and people said, ’Oh,
I’d like to know you. I’ve always wanted to know you,’ and then they
didn’t talk to me."25 By the end of the four weeks, she was glad to
leave.
That summer, she and her mother again rented the house in
Connecticut. Sam Ornitz came to stay with them, and he and Vera
collaborated on a play. She’d met him several years before in Chicago;
now, they struck up a friendship which was to last many years.
"Sam Ornitz meant more to me than any hero of
mattress or reverie. I have never known a more
interesting man, a man so dramatically divided.
He could be crueller than anyone I’ve ever known
and more compassionate. Cruelty came of his anger
at the world’s vast cruelty and the complacence of
comfortable citizens. He was a socialist who dreamed
of a fortune, a poet whose talent was corrupted by
indignation and politics...I used to wonder why a
man as brilliant and busy as Sam gave so much of
his cherished time to me. I think now it was because
we shared profitless pleasure, responded at the
same instant to irrational, irrelevant, crazy no
tions, while each recognized in the other's gaiety
71
the hidden desperation, the waiting, the wishing
and the fear."
The play was never produced, and in October, Vera went back to
New York, where she and Sam wrote another play. He had been working
successfully in Hollywood, and finally, sick of the cold, talked her
into going there with him. The money from Suburb and the other
originals was running low, and if she stayed in New York she’d have to
take a job. But if she came to Hollywood she could live in his house
while they worked on the play, he argued. Finally, she agreed, and
returned to Hollywood in 1934.
Almost immediately, she realized that Sam had talked her into
making the right move. In a single week, she sold three originals to
various studios and got a contract at Columbia starting at $500 a
week. In addition their play, once finished, was sold quickly.
Geraniums In My; Window opened October 26, 1934, at the Longacre
Theatre in New York. It was not a success. It ran for only 27
o / r
performances, but her disappointment at the failure of this play was
tempered by the studio work she was doing and the salary she was
earning.
The money was one of the few compensations, she felt. During her
first few months in Los Angeles, she was restless, but always tired.
"It was like the first day of flu, like spring fever that went on all
year."37
And, like many Columbia writers, she complained about Harry Cohn.
"He always denigrated you, trying to get you to feel low, so you knew
72
he was a big shot.” She said she had the worst fight of her life with
97
him, about a script, ”1 didn’t win. The writers never win.” And he
was crude, as well: "...Cohn called together all the creative people
on the studio payroll. In a fighting mood, he made a brief address.
Things weren’t going well, and it was time to get down to basics.
'Lemme tell you what this business is about. It’s about cunt and
n o
horses!...Oh, excuse me, Miss Caspary,’ he added..."
Finally, after refusing to work on scripts she thought were
terrible, she asked to be released from her contract. She stayed in
Hollywood a few more weeks, then returned to New York in the spring of
1935. During the next few years, she made occasional trips to
Hollywood to work on originals, adaptations, or screenplays, when she
needed the money; but she spent most of her time in New York and with
her mother in a house she had built that year with her "movie money"
in Connecticut. When her mother died the following year, Vera buried
the ashes in the garden of the new house.
More and more of her time now was being taken up by political
work. Her growing socialist convictions were fueled by the influence
of Sam Ornitz, and by world events: the Spanish Civil War, the growing
turbulence in Europe and Asia, the spread of Fascism under Hitler’s
influence. Eventually, she joined the Communist Party in New York, and
stayed with it for several years.
Years later, in her autobiography, she wrote that, looking back,
she could see that her political beliefs were naive, and says that she
was never quite comfortable with the lies, the evasions, and the
73
absolutism that went with belonging to the Party. But like many others
at the time, she felt strongly enough to donate both her money and her
time to causes she felt were important. She supported the Republican
cause in the Spanish Civil War, along with such others as Lillian
Heilman, Dorothy Parker, and Ernest Hemingway. She also served as a
member of the advisory board of the newly organized Frontier Films.
Frontier Films was run by Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz, who
planned to make documentaries about living and working conditios in
the U.S. After seeing The World Today and The Wave, both liberal
political films, Vera offered to write a script for Frontier. George
Sklar, a New York City playwright and socialist, became her
collaborator. He recalls that Frontier made an appeal for
screenwriters to write for them.
"And Vera volunteered. Vera was always ready
to volunteer to do anything. So she had an idea
for a screenplay, but she never could handle— or
she believed she couldn’t, of course she could—
the technical end. She didn’t think she could
break it down into a shooting script. She could
tell the story in narrative form, but to break it
down into dialogue, and to indicate location,
atmosphere, whom should be shot from where, and
so forth, she just threw up her hands completely.
She said, ’I need a collaborator. I need someone
who can do the technical end.’ And I was working
on a play at the time, which I wasn’t too happy
about, and I got this call, and they said, ’Will
you collaborate with Vera Caspary?...We can’t pay
you much of anything, but it is for a good purpose,'
And they offered me fifty dollars a week. Well,
in those days, in the thirties, fifty dollars a
week was the equivalent of probably two or three
hundred dollars a week now. So I said* 'Yeah, I'll
do it,’ And that’s how I met Vera."
74
George and his wife, Miriam, invited Vera over for dinner so they
could all get acquainted and set work hours, and they all hit if off
immediately. After working for a couple of weeks in New York, Vera
suggested to George that, to get away from the phone and other
distractions, they go up to her house in Connecticut and work. "She’d
built herself a most beautiful house, right beside...the Gristmill
River, and there was a bridge, and there was a dam where we used to go
swimming, and it was just a terrific place.There was also a
Filipino servant who took care of the cooking, shopping, and other
chores so they could work. Vera and George would work in the morning
and early afternoon, and then Miriam would come up from the city after
work (she was teaching children at the University Settlement House).
Together, Vera and George wrote a film called Pay Day.
Pay Day was to be Frontier Films' first release. It was a three-
reel dramatization of child labor and sweatshop conditions. In late
December of 1937, Vera and George turned in a script that both were
pleased with. They had shown it to several others, including Donald
Ogden Stewart, all of whom praised it. From Hurwitz and Strand,
however, there was no acknowledgement for a month; then, Sklar
recalls, Hurwitz called a conference and announced that he and Strand
had succeeded in turning it into a "shooting script." Caspary and
Sklar didn’t object to the changes they’d made in shooting directions;
what infuriated them both was the fact that Hurwitz and Strand had
rewritten dialogue. "They treated us worse than a Hollywood producer
would have. A Hollywood producer would at least have employed a
75
professional to do the rewrite.”^ Worse, the changes were bad:
”...instead of its being a natural flowing dialogue, it was stiff and
OO
wooden,..1 There was an argument, and finally a compromise: "They
finally restored our dialogue, with some changes that they wanted,”
OO
changes made by Caspary and Sklar. J But even so, the film was never
made: Frontier Films had run out of money.
In April of 1939, Vera made a trip to the Soviet Union. She
departed with a rosy picture of communal, cooperative life, and
returned disillusioned but unwilling to give up her beliefs. But in
August of 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed the non-aggression pact,
her doubts grew too strong to ignore, and in December of that year she
resigned from the Communist Party. She remained in the Anti-Nazi
League, the League Against War and Fascism, and the League of American
Writers, and volunteered her labor to raise money for various causes.
In January of 1940, needing money as well as a change of scene,
Vera returned to Hollywood and began looking for work. She wrote
several originals and worked for a time under contract at Republic on
a John Wayne feature, then at Paramount,
Then, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. War
was declared the next day. A week later, Paramount announced that it
was cutting production. Vera took a voluntary layoff and threw herself
into work for the Hollywood Writers Mobilization.
"Hollywood came alive in the war years. Political
energy was not confined to the Left. The middle
of the road hummed with activity, while the
righteous Right formed into groups of belligerent
76
[____________________________________________________________________________
defiance. For the Left these were fruitful years.
From employed members fat tithes were collected.
Meetings were held in houses with rumpus rooms
and swimming pools. Almost every night there were
fund-raising parties, benefits, and concerts.
There was a steady influx of new people coming
to work in the studios— actors, writers, directors
from New York, refugees from Europe.’
One of these refugees was Isadore G. Goldsmith, a European
producer under contract to Columbia. Harry Sokol, a friend of Vera’s,
wanted to introduce them, but she resisted. She had finished writing
her novel Laura, and at the time, she was working on adapting it for
the stage, collaborating again with George Sklar. He recalls that they
quarrelled, and decided to take a week off to cool down. She went down
to Malibu to stay with one of her friends, Lester Cole, also a
screenwriter (later jailed as one of the Hollywood Ten).There, she met
Goldsmith.
Of that meeting, Vera recalls, "I knew we were going to have an
affair. I looked into his face, and he looked into mine, and we both
o i r
knew there was something going.' Igee (her nickname for him) had
borrowed a boat from Humphrey Bogart and was going to row out into the
ocean. He asked Vera to come along, and she accepted. Before long,
they were living together.
They moved at first into the Garden of Allah, where they stayed
until they moved into a Mexican farmhouse on Horn Avenue, up a steep
hill off Sunset Boulevard. Humphrey Bogart’s house was opposite
theirs, and Lena Horne lived up the hill. At the bottom of the hill
was an undertaker’s which had, outside, a clock with no hands. (The
houses have now been replaced by apartment buildings and the
undertaker’s is a Tower Records.)
During the next months Vera wrote originals for studios, did her
’ ’ war work"— she knitted "frantically", she says— and worked on a new
: novel. She and Igee had ups and downs, and even separated once, but
i
j were shortly reconciled. On the whole, however, they were very happy
I
! together. Vera had started her new, novel, Bedelia, and she asked Igee
1 to help her: although she didn't really need any assistance, working
j together drew them closer. Igee was having a hard time finding work;
I
his contract with Columbia was not renewed, and although he had
enjoyed a great deal of success in Europe, he was finding it difficult
to get started in Hollywood. He needed to feel useful, and Vera
understood that. Their relationship flourished.
But late in 1943, Igee left to go to England. He was a native
Austrian but had fled Hitler and been naturalized a British citizen.
Now, he was being called back to do his war service. He left from the
Santa Fe station just before Christmas,
j He and Vera wrote often, but delivery was erratic. He urged Vera
to join him in London, and Vera was anxious to go, but all passports
had been cancelled, and civilian travel was forbidden.
Vera missed Igee desperately, and worried about his safety
constantly. To keep her mind off it, she kept herself as busy as she
I
i
| could, working. There had been several attempts to stage Laura; all
j fell through. Sick of the promises, false hopes, headaches, and
I
l
I failures of play production, Vera urged George Sklar to agree to sell
it to the movies, since once it was sold, they could forget it. Otto
Preminger was interested in it. Sklar finally agreed, and Preminger,
after a long battle, finally talked Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth-Century
Fox into buying it. Vera’s agent drew up
one of the worst contracts ever written. I signed
it as carelessly as a five-dollar check. As I would
be reminded in restaurants and parking lots, I'd
signed away a million dollars. Who would have
thought that a film which, for all its elegance,
was not expensive, whose stars were not then con
sidered important, would become a box-office smash,
a Hollywood legend?- ^
Laura was produced by Preminger under the supervision of Bryan
Foy, in a B-movie unit. A writer named Jay Dratler worked with
Preminger on the script; later Samuel Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt
O O
were brought in as well.
Although authors are not usually allowed to read screenplays,
Preminger gave Vera the first draft to read. She wasn't pleased with
it. "Why are you making a B picture of my novel?" she asked Preminger.
She felt it had been made into "a commonplace detective story" and
that Preminger had "dulled the characters, especially Laura." She
accused Preminger of having turned Laura into a "cute little career
girl," without strength or complexity. ^ "Hollywood producers simply
can’t visualize a girl who leads her own life, and in whom sex is not
uppermost. They always show the career woman as either frustrated or
freakish. I know lots of balanced professional women who can either
take love or let it alone.
79
Zanuck, however, loved the script: after reading it, he had Laura
promoted to an A-picture unit. Preminger directed.
The critics didn’t like the picture, but it was a huge box-office
success. It starred a relative newcomer, Gene Tierney, as Laura,
Clifton Webb, Dana Andrews, and Judith Anderson. The musical theme
] became famous, and Joe LaShelle, the cameraman, won an Academy
! Award.41
\
1 Meanwhile, Vera had been trying to figure out a way to get to
I
England to be with Igee. She cabled him that he could have the rights
to Bedelia if he could get her to London to write a screenplay for it.
After weeks of maneuvering with government departments and movie
studios, everything was finally arranged, and Vera left New York in
January of 1945. She arrived in February and stayed at Fleming’s Hotel
for the next seven months, despite government regulations setting a
i
two-week limit. She hadn’t seen Igee for over a year, and their
reunion was joyous.
Over the next weeks, she acquired a deep respect for the English:
"How undramatic, how well-behaved they were,
queuing up at bus stops, waiting quietly in
line at the fishmonger’s or greengrocer's while
V2's roared overhead. Who knew what the next
five seconds would bring?...through bombing
and death, fire and explosion, English gardens
bloomed...Throughout the ravages of war the
English kept their brasses polished...Through
the years of bombing and burning Londoners never
complained. Anyone who dared to speak of his
’incident’ had to pay his listeners sixpence.
Shortages of food and fuel seemed not to worry
them. All that was publicly mourned was the
shortage of liquor..." ^
Some of this stoicism rubbed off on Vera. When she returned to
Los Angeles, "Everyone said, 'Weren't you afraid to go to England when
they were having the raids?' And I said,'No. I drive a car in Los
Angeles. What have I to be afraid of?"*^
j These months in England were a busy time: while Vera was writing
j the screenplay for Bedelia, entertaining new friends in a new city,
J and enjoying her reunion with Igee, she was also trying to write
I
Murder at the Stork Club for Good Housekeeping. She'd agreed to write
it while she was in New York awaiting passage to England, and now she
felt obligated to finish it: Good Housekeeping had paid her expenses
in New York for nine weeks and allowed her to entertain unrestrictedlyj
at the Stork Club, in the interests of "research". When she complained
to Ben McPeake, Hearst's London publisher, of London's distractions,
he offered her St. Donat's Castle, owned by W.R. Hearst, and as
I
I luxurious as Hearst Castle at San Simeon. She and Igee stayed there
for a month in the spring.
1945 was a year of tremendous emotional upheaval for others as
well as Vera: in April there was the death of FDR, in May, VE Day, and
shortly after, the release of newsreel footage of concentration camps.
In August, there was Hiroshima, followed a few days later by Nagasaki.
By VJ Day, most people were too emotionally exhausted to celebrate
much.
I And in August, Vera and Igee were separated again. The screenplayj
i i
j was finished and there were no further excuses for her to stay in !
( !
i
j England. Vera's departure was determined by the Ministry of 1
Transport, but Igee was not sure when he could leave: at least not
until Bedelia had been filmed, and with all of the postwar confusion,
there was no telling when that might be.
I
1 Back in the States, Vera found it hard to adjust, not only to
I
J Igee's absence, but also to the abundance and warmth of Los Angeles.
5
I
| There were also problems with Bedelia: throughout August and September
Vera interviewed actors and actresses, but in the end, British stars
! Margaret Lockwood and Ian Hunter were cast. The setting of the story
| was changed from Connecticut to Yorkshire, and the time period from
]
pre- World War I to the present. Vera fought the decision to make the
story contemporary, "for I’d written the book about a period when
’nice girls'expected husbands to support them and 'working girl’ was a
term of derision, socially the basis of the heroine’s character and
crimes.Because of these and other script changes, Vera was
"bitterly disappointed"^^ in the finished picture. But she tried to
hide her disappointment for fear of ruining Igee's homecoming.
Igee returned in May of 1946. Vera met him in New York and they
stayed for a time in a suite at the Hotel Pierre, overlooking Central
Park, then returned to Los Angeles. They bought a house at 1454 Blue
Ridge Drive, in the hills above Beverly Hills. Vera loved it, and
filled it with antiques, some of which had been in Vera's family, and
some of which they bought in antique stores or from people like Cornel
Wilde and Dorothy Parker.
[ Vera and Igee were very happy together during this time. When
they weren't working, she and Igee read or played Scrabble. Vera also
82
loved to take baths. Igee would look for her and not be able to find
her. Inevitably, she was in the bathtub. Igee would say to friends,
"One day, Vera will go down the drain. Vera had a flower garden,
j and Igee cultivated a strip of land near their house and planted fir
i trees there. They spent a lot of time outside, and ate on the patio
whenever they could. In the evenings, they would have friends over:
George and MiriamSklar, Albert Maltz and Bob Leas, who co-wrote the
Abbott and Costello movies, Bess Boyle, a screenwriter, Eileen Leslie,
i
j who lived down the hill and was writing t.v. soaps at the time, and
whom Vera encouraged to write a novel. Fritz Lang, an old friend of
Igee’s, came by often, along with Hy Kraft, a screenwriter, and many
47
others.
Vera and Igee had never married, partly because neither of them
felt a strong need to conform to the conventions of the day (in fact,
rebelling against the conventions in this way gave them a good deal of
satisfaction for a time), and partly because Igee was still married.
In September of 1949, however, Igee was granted a divorce from his
first wife, who lived in London. He and Vera were married less than a
week later. "After having flauted convention so loudly and lengthily I
j had achieved the respectable goal,"^® They were married in Judge j
Stanley Mosk's chambers at noon, October 5, 1949, with two close
friends as witnesses. Igee was fifty-four and Vera was forty-two at
the time. For their honeymoon, they drove up the coast to San
! Francisco, and through Yosemite.^ 1
: i
Shortly after their marriage, Vera and Igee decided to form their j
I
83
I
i
1
own production company. They were equal partners: Vera would take care
of the creative end, and Igee would tend to the business. They named
1 their company Gloria Films.
Gloria Films produced two movies: k_ Letter To Three Husbands and
The Scarf. Vera worked on the set, revised dialogue, cut words,
| introduced symbols, altered action, and generally enjoyed herself
; immensely.
! It was a happy time.
Whenever Hollywood exiles express nostalgia,
it is for the prosperity and tolerance of the
1940s. Before terror paralyzed the town, liberal
thinkers and conservatives mingled freely, and all
but a few diehard radicals and reactionaries
attended cause parties in hotel ballrooms, night
clubs, and the spacious homes of affluent enter
tainers. Jobs were plentiful, salaries high, con
tributions generous.
For Vera, as for so many others, the prosperity and the tolerance
j were about to run out. In 1950, A. Letter To Three Husbands previewed
t
in Santa Barbara; Vera saw it and went home to begin revising. The
problems were numerous, and the case was the same with The Scarf.
Gloria Films was also beginning to run into financial problems. Both
of the films were under contract to United Artists. Distribution dates
had been fixed when UA began to undergo internal management upheavals.|
Because of endless delays, interest payments, late distribution, and
j poor advertising, Gloria Films lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When Gloria Films finally collapsed, Vera discovered that she and
Igee were thousands of dollars in debt. Igee may have been a competent
producer, but he was a poor businessman. He had never taken the proper
legal steps to separate their personal funds from corporation funds.
On top of that, they couldn’t declare bankruptcy because since Vera
| was legally a partner, she would lose all future royalties on past I
I
work and all reprint payments. So she and Igee assumed the burden of
repaying the debts. "I am not sure of the amount we owed because I
1
j never quite believed it. I could not feel important enough to owe so
I much,” she said years later.
1
Actually, most of the financial burden— and the worries— fell on
Vera’s shoulders. For some time, she had been providing the majority
of their financial support, and most of the money to start Gloria
I
Films came from her earnings, since Igee was working very little.
Vera’s anger over the losses, and Igee's guilt and remorse, put quite
a strain on their marriage. Vera lost her temper and accused Igee
several times, and felt terrible about it afterwards. She finally
decided it had to be put behind them, and she never mentioned it
again. "So much is absurd that if we fail to observe its tragic humor
we are committed to a life term of self-pity. To find laughter
preferable to tears is to be relieved of the heaviest of burdens.
Eventually, their marriage recovered. In fact, their misfortune
I
drew them closer together in the long run.
On top of their financial problems, Vera's political past began 1
to catch up with her. As she says, "In 1951 Hollywood was a disaster
CO
i area." The Hollywood Ten hearings had forced several of Hollywood's j
top screenwriters either into jail or out of the country, or both, and
the blacklist had forced dozens of others out of work. Sam Ornitz, her
old friend, who had brought her to Hollywood, helped her, encouraged
I her, given her advice, steered her to producers, had been sent to J
! jail. Vera had given dinner to his wife, Sadie, several times while
I
j Sam served his term. This took courage in light of the atmosphere in
1 Hollywood at the time, when just being seen with the wrong person
I could get you blacklisted. She’d gone even further than that: she had
4 j
j once allowed George Sklar to spend a week at her house while he was !
I r /
hiding out from a subpoena (he never got it). Since Vera had left
the Communist Party before she came to Hollywood, no one testified to
having seen her at Party meetings, and she was never subpoenaed—
luckily, because she had decided to tell the truth, but to refuse to
name others' names; this course of action would almost certainly have
led to contempt of Congress charges and prison.
But in May of 1951, Vera discovered she was on a "gray list."
Kenneth McKenna, the story editor at Metro, for whom she had written a
number of things, called to tell her a Mr. Sidney wanted to see her;
she thought it was for a story conference. She was completely
I
; unprepared for the interrogation she received when she arrived about
her past political activities, and for the threat of a subpoena. For
the next few days, she hid in her house, terrified; several days
later, on the advice of her lawyer, she and Igee went to Europe, They j
I
| stayed there for the next three years, dividing their time between
i Amthof, Austria, where they lived in an old castle that had become a
86
hotel, and London, where they produced a musical, Wedding in Paris,
in 1954. The musical was a success, and by then the danger seemed to
have faded; they decided to return to Hollywood.
But the Hollywood they remembered was gone:
i
| The town was split between the Judases and the
I Martyrs. Old friends passed on the street without
| the slightest show of recognition. An unfriendly
1 witness would walk out of the room if a member of
the [Thomas] Committee entered. To innocents who'd
been abroad, it became an ordeal to attend a
screening or preview where friends of both sides
gathered in the lobby.
They stayed only six months: the atmosphere of fear, anger, and
distrust repelled them, and Vera still couldn't find work: her
political problems, combined with the general shortage of work due to
the increasing competition from television, made it impossible. The
rejections were polite, but definite. They returned to Europe.
I
The early 1950s were in some ways a terrible time for Vera and
Igee. The worry about money was constant, even when they were living
as cheaply as possible. They felt like exiles and didn't know when it
would be safe to return home. Project after project was rejected— or
worse, failed and lost them more money. But in spite of everything, !
i i
j I
they were happy. They were together and they were in love, and as they)
explored Europe together, their isolation drew them closer to one
another.
In 1956, for the first time in almost six years, Vera returned to
Hollywood to work. Her friend Sol Siegel had bought the rights to Les
87
Girls and wanted Vera to do an adaptation and screenplay about three
girls who danced as a travelling team with a male singer. But before
she was allowed to take the job, she had to clear herself politically
I
to the satisfaction of the studio heads at MGM, Finally, after much
negotiating and agonizing, she wrote a letter flatly denying that she
I
| had ever been a member of the Communist Party. For one who was not
I
i
used to lying for the sake of convenience, or even for sorely needed
I money, this was not easy. She felt guilty for years about the lie.
i
Vera claims her desperation to make money and get out from under
their debts was her reason for returning to Hollywood. This isn’t
entirely convincing. There are other ways for a writer to make money;
Vera had made a good, although not lavish, salary as a writer for
years before ever coming to Hollywood. So there must have been some
other attraction. Vera had lived in Los Angeles for years; many of her
friends were here, along with some of the best memories she had.
Despite all her complaints about the place, Hollywood was her home.
For the three years after finishing Les Girls, Vera and Igee
divided their time between Europe and Hollywood. Vera was always
writing, working on one project or another. The movie work had started
! to come in again on a more regular basis. Igee also worked, but
i ]
unsuccessfully for the most part. A project he'd had high hopes for j
(and into which he’d sunk a sizable chunk of Vera’s money) was a
picture called Wunderkind. It was a big hit in Germany, but a flop in
; the U.S. (where it was released under the title Aren’t We Wonderful?).
No matter what he did, Igee just couldn’t seem to achieve the same
kind of success he had had in his early career, and the failures hurt
him. Vera spent a good deal of her time and energy convincing him of
his importance and talent.
i
! Just as their financial situation became easier, there was
I another blow. Igee’s doctors told him that his lungs were full of
1
J cancer. He had two major operations, from which it took him months to
convalesce. Through all of this, Vera worked on a novel, _A Chosen
i „
j Sparrow. The stress of work relieved the stress of anxiety. Labor was
J more important than its product.
|
Eventually Igee recovered. To celebrate, he and Vera took a
leisurely trip through Europe. "This was a sentimental journey to
places we’d seen before and places Igee wanted to show me, indeed the
happiest of our travels because it celebrated the renewal and
appreciation of life,’’~^ The fact that it might be their last trip
i together cannot have escaped her.
When they returned to Los Angeles in 1963, Igee suffered a heart
attack after a walk in the hills with his old friend Fritz Lang. He
recovered quickly, then went alone to Palm Springs. Vera had
misgivings about letting him go by himself, but she had work to do,
and he seemed fine. He wasn’t. He had another heart attack in Palm
Springs, and she rushed there in a panic. When he recovered, she
j brought him home, aware that their time was running out. That fall,
J they took a trip through New England to see the leaves turn colors,
I
! and rented a house in Vermont. They were very happy.
: I
On the evening of October 7, they stood under the maple trees and!
took pictures of each other with the last film in the camera. Igee
died the next morning.
The next year, Vera returned to New York to live permanently.
i
]
I She has written several novels since:
|
f
i
I
j It is imperative that I go on with work that
i fulfills me. Nights are not so lonely when there
i are stories to be written, problems to be solved,
; paragraphs constructed and the companionship of
ornery, beautiful, wicked, exotic, irresponsible
characters...
She sees friends, goes to the theatre, and enjoys life, but it is
not the same, she says, as being young. To compensate for the losses
of age, Vera uses work: "Work is the saving grace. ’What does a woman
do when she doesn't write?' I used to ask myself when a job or book
was finished. We are the lucky elders who have work we enjoy.
She still lives in New York. She prefers it to Los Angeles, which
she says she finds boring and provincial. Until 1985, when she
suffered a severe stroke, she wrote every day, getting up by 7:30
every morning to sit down at her typewriter;
In my working years I’ve known rejection enough
to make a sane person quit but, having known the
raptures and torments of the storyteller, I can no
more stop writing than stop breathing. In the
morning with the first cup of coffee I read the
scrawl on the bedside table. At night in bare feet
I sneak to the desk to read the final paragraph of
the day, repeat the last sentence like an incanta
tion so that when I wake in the morning the next
sentence will be there, clear and precise, or that
a tangled idea will have straightened itself out
and lead easily to the next turn in the story.
90
When she gets close to the end of a book, she is tired, and
thinks that maybe she will take a long vacation, but it never seems to
work out that way:
' Do you know what I do when I finish a book?
I When I'm at work I promise myself that as soon
as I'm through with my book I'm going to be a
lady, get the house organized, and stay in bed.
The day finally comes when the manuscript is gone.
I stay in bed reading until near noon. The second
day I have to go out and buy enough toilet paper,
soap, facial tissue, olive oil, and canned goods
because when I'm writing I never go out. The third
day I may buy a dress— I wear pants when I write
and I'll probably be needing stockings. By the
fourth day I make a few notes about ideas that
| are buzzing in my head. I use grocery lists, old
| envelopes, anything. Then I start organizing my
bits of paper into files. Once they're there I may
never have to look at them again but I have to have
them written down. Then I'm writing again...I guess
it is a compulsion.
"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,
69
the profound love that made me a full woman."
And yet, the writing, rewarding and compulsive though it may be,
j never gets any easier:
You have, people say, a gift. Have I? If my talent
were half as great as my passion I'd be Jane
Austen. Behind the daily task is always the insane
hope that some miracle will cause the prose to flow
out of the untapped reservoir, clear, precise,
sparkling. I ought at my age to acknowledge the
improbability of miracles. Yet when they tell me
I’ve received a gift I know that life can bestow
nothing better than the ability to live by work
O
you love.
t
j
j
; Since the stroke, she finds it difficult if not impossible to !
; write, but has not given up hope of recovery; her work-in-progress, a
\ new novel, remains waiting on her desk.
i
i
In Caspary’s writing, the same themes and concerns appear
again and again: the truth as it is distorted by the passing of time,
or by the blindness of one who will not see; the conflicts caused by a
woman’s career (or lack of career); and the problems and conflicts
i
involved in dealing with love, sex, marriage, and loneliness in a
world where past traditions and conditioning are no longer adequate.
Two of her best novels, Bedelia and Evvie, examine different angles of
these ideas; she eventually wrote the screenplay based on Bedelia as
well, and it, too, deals with the same issues, but the style is quite
different.
Evvie is one of Caspary’s favorite novels, and her best. It is
1
set in the late 1920s in Chicago, and brilliantly evokes the wildness j
i
and joy of that time, and at the same time, is an expose of its
excesses and illusions. Perhaps because this is the time of Caspary’s
■ own youth, there are quite a few autobiographical correspondences:
l
Louise Goodman,the narrator, works for an advertising agency and
writes, among other things, correspondence courses; she holds a job
which, as her superiors point out to her repeatedly, is remarkably
! senior for a girl, especially a girl her age; she sometimes finds her
sex and age a problem, since clients refuse to take her seriously; and
she wants to be a writer, and spends her evenings working on her
novel. Louise is not married, and says, in almost exactly the same
! words Caspary uses in her autobiography, "I thought of schoolmates
; married to dull men. I would not have changed the clutter of the
!
J studio, my work and thwarted love for the richest of their
husbandsLouise’s mother is, like Caspary’s, simultaneously
scandalized and fascinated by the life her daughter leads. She wants
Louise to settle and marry a rich man, and at the same time lives to
boast to her friends of Louise's career successes.
In her autobiography, Caspary painted a portrait of her mother as
a pathetic woman, lost without her husband, and, without meaning to
be, a burden on her daughter. There are hints of the same woman in
Louise’s mother, but if the portrait of Mama in Evvie at all
corresponds to Caspary's mother, the autobiography does her a grave
injustice. Mama, in Evvie is a charming woman, who is fully aware that
her daughter sometimes finds her an embarrassment because her
independence is still a new, fragile thing, a woman who can be |
charming and at home in any company, but tries, for her daughter's
! sake, not to intrude even where she might be welcome. For Louise’s
1
twenty-third birthday, for example, Evvie decides to throw her a
i party. Louise's mother comes to help with the preparations, but
I 93
refuses to stay. "Evvie begged her to stay and enjoy the feast she had
helped prepare. ’Thank you for the invitation, dear,1 Mama cast an
oblique glance toward me, ’but I don’t believe I’d be comfortable with!
all those Bohemians. And my daughter doesn’t think the Bohemians would
be too comfortable with me.”^
Evvie vividly evokes the feelings and attitudes of the 1920s:
Prohibition, speakeasies, the drinking, the parties, the sexual
freedom, and most of all, the changing attitudes toward women and
work. Money no longer, for girls like Louise and Evvie, is just a
status symbol:
Nice girls who stayed at home and depended upon
their fathers until they found husbands to sup
port them could not afford the luxury of being
modern. Freedom was less a moral than an economic
fact...When, later, our lives were investigated
by the police and exploited by the newspapers
there was a lot of sermonizing about the decline
of chastity, but none of the lamenters ever hit
the basic fact. Evvie and I Jived our own lives
because we paid our own way.
And work has a value beyond money, as well; after Evvie’s murder,
Louise goes back to work: "These women who had never learned to
respect a job could not understand that work was my refuge. Without i
its discipline I would have been sunk."^
Being independent and "free" is not, however, without its
problems. Both Louise and Evvie have been conditioned all their lives
i
to think in a certain way about marriage and a woman’s place, and |
changing their behavior is a lot easier than changing their attitudes.]
This creates for them quite a few conflicts. They ask themselves all
the questions women have always asked themselves about men, and have
all the same dreams of finding love; but for them, this quest is
complicated by the fact that they feel an almost missionary zeal in
rebelling against old moral standards, and are therefore having to
test and establish new ones constantly. And they have not only to
I satisfy themselves, but to justify their choices for The World, So
their lives are an uneasy mixture of old with new, of guilt and false
sophistication with attempts to weed out hypocrisy and falseness. And
in the end, Louise discovers, she never saw the truth anyway, because
she didn't want to see it. She lied to herself.
Louise and Evvie share a studio in Chicago; the year is 1928.
They have an active social life, Evvie is beautiful, charming,
intelligent— "irritating and irresistible."^® Men fall for her easily,
1
and she takes none of them seriously until she meets Carl Busch,
Louise’s boss. Louise is infatuated with him, and dreams that he will
one day fall in love with her. Instead, he meets Evvie. To avoid
hurting Louise, Evvie tells Louise only that she is finally, really,
in love, but will not tell her the man’s name. She tells Louise every
other detail of their relationship, though, so Louise knows that the
i man is jealous and sometimes hurts Evvie; she knows also that the two
I
| of them find sexual excitement in their quarrels, until the man’s
!
jealousy boils over and he breaks with Evvie. Evvie is miserable for
months. Louise goes away on her vacation, and Evvie calls her to
decline an invitation to the country for the weekend: her lover, she
95
excitedly tells Louise, has agreed to a reconciliation. Louise comes
home after the weekend to find Evvie dead— murdered, apparently by her
mystery lover.
The rest of the novel concerns Louise's gradual realization that
Evvie!s lover, and probably her murderer, is the man she loves. She
i
| realizes that the clues were all there for her to see, but that she
I
| denied them: "I moved away from the truth. Perhaps the germ of it was
I there then and I feared the disease. Self-delusion was a tonic taken
f% Q
regularly to fortify weak female pride.'
Even her recollection of the story’s events may be flawed, she
says, since "Memory cheats...Yesterday is always seen through a glass
falsely, the tint of the lens determined by degrees of vanity,
prejudice, and guilt.
Despite their promises to be honest, truth proved to be
I
! impossible to accomplish. Louise lied to herself, and Evvie lied to
everyone. But despite the horror of Evvie's death,
j There were no regrets then, nor have there been
since, for the passion spent upon Carl nor the
waste of youthful ardor. Every moment of those
years had been alive. We had been high-spirited
j and often happy in the studio, and for Evvie I
J think there was surcease from the never-ending
I fear of loneliness. This was her undoing. Again
j and again in feckless panic, fearful of love’s
i failure, she had lied and cheated for the sake
| of an effect, a caress, a touch of tenderness,
; warm safety in a man’s arms.
I
i
t
96
Lies and deceit are central themes in Bedelia. The novel is set
in pre-World War I Connecticut. Its main characters are Charlie Horst
| and his new bride, Bedelia, whom he met and married on a vacation to
| Colorado Springs. Bedelia is beautiful and intelligent and has charmed
| all of Charlie’s friends, and Charlie is ecstatic that such a woman
■ would have married him: ”At this moment, ten minutes after five on
December twenty-fifth, 1913, Charlie Horst believed himself the
t
1
| *70
luckiest man in the world.’ But what Charlie believes and what is
true are quite different.
There are hints from the start that Charlie is deceiving himself
about Bedelia, but he refuses to see the truth until it is almost too
late. The theme of deception is introduced almost immediately. As the
novel opens, Charlie and Bedelia are awaiting the arrival of their
guests for a Christmas party. Bedelia is admiring a ring Charlie has
given her, and Charlie teases her about it: ”’How my little jackdaw
loves finery!’ Charlie said...When he was a small boy his mother had
sung:
’’ Things are seldom what they seem,
Skim milk masquerades as cream,
Jackdaws strut in peacock feathers.
Highlows pass as patent leathers.’
i
I
| All that Charlie knows of Bedelia is what she has told him, and
| even to him, that seems unreal; but he doesn’t see the significance ofj
! 1
■ his feelings. {
There were times when Charlie felt that he knew
nothing about her. All that she had told him of
her girlhood and first marriage seemed as unreal
as a story in a book. When she related conversa
tions she had had with people she used to know,
i Charlie could see printed lines, correctly para
graphed and punctuated with quotation marks. At
such times he would feel that she was remote,
like the heroine of a story, a woman he might
j dream about but never touch.
I
i
[ He puts his feelings down to the fact that they have been married such
! a short time.
j Other doubts he has, he puts down to imagination. Bedelia is
afraid of the dark, and each night she vows that having the light off
! will not bother her this time. Each night Charlie turns off the
light, and each night Bedelia is terrified, until Charlie turns the
light back on. After a time, Charlie finds himself having strange
ideas about the dark, too:
Gradually her fears had infected him. In the
daytime he resolved to harden himself against
contagion, but when she clung to him in the dark,
weeping, his mind filled with strange fancies and
his flesh, under the blankets, chilled. By day his
wife was earthy, a woman who loved her home and
had a genuine talent for housekeeping. In the dark,
she seemed entirely another sort of creature,
female but sinister, a woman whose face Charlie
had never seen.75
Ironically, Charlie sees Bedelia more accurately in the dark than in
the light; with the lights on, he is blinded by her beauty and her
charm.
By this time, the reader has heard too many refernces to
98
Bedelia*s dimpled, kittenish charm, and we are not surprised when we
see her lie to Charlie about a ring, for no apparent reason. Her story
wouldn't fool a child— but it fools Charlie.
His friends are all aware of his tendency to evade
unpleasantness. Lucy Johnson, one of the guests at the Christmas
party, gives him an ebony board on which are posed three monkeys. "One
held his paws before his eyes, one sealed his ears, the third his
; lips...Lucy chattered on. She had bought the three ivory monkeys
j
because they reminded her of Charlie...*See no evil, hear no evil,
speak no evil. Isn't that Charlie all over?’"76 But none of them see
Bedelia as anything but charming, either.
The only exception is Ben Chaney, the man who has rented the
studio near their house for the winter to paint. He is polite, but for
some reason, he seems mildly amused by Bedelia, and watchful, and he
makes her uncomfortable. A few nights later Charlie and Bedelia go to
his house for dinner, and immediately after, Charlie collapses. After
speaking with Chaney, and after examining Charlie, the doctor insists
that a nurse be hired to help out, and warns Charlie not to eat or
drink anything that has not been prepared by the nurse. Charlie is
furious about the doctor's insinuation that Bedelia is trying to
poison him, and defiantly refuses to believe it. But it plants a seed
of doubt in his mind.
When Charlie has recovered, Ben Chaney comes by to visit and,
while watching for Bedelia's reaction, casually mentions that he will
be having a visitor, Keene Barrett, who will arrive the next day.
99
Bedelia is terrified by the news, but covers up her feelings until
later that evening, when she suddenly and unexpectedly begs Charlie to
! go away with her. They could live in Europe, she says. She doesn't
| like it here anymore. Charlie, astonished, refuses to leave; he is
i
j surprised at her unreasonableness, and her growing hysteria seems all
' < out of proportion to the issue. Then she tells him not to believe
|
j anything Ben Chaney says about her, but refuses to explain. Completely
i
j bewildered, Charlie finally manages to calm her and get her to sleep.
I
| But later that night, he wakes and discovers that she has tried to run
away. He finds her collapsed in the snow outside the house and
frantically carries her inside. "He covered her with wool blankets,
the down quilt and the comfort his mother had stitched in the Snake
and Apple design.
As he is putting away her things, he finds a ring she told him
she had given away, and travel folders which reveal that her departure
was not as spur-of-the-moment as it looked. All of this upsets him,
I
i and he quickly packs it away. But the doubts have been firmly planted
now, and he can't stop thinking about the fact that she has lied to
him over and over. When he goes in to check on her the next morning,
I
| she is awake. He pulled down the shade. The light disturbed him. He
did not wish to look at Bedelia's face nor show his to her."^®
Later, he talks to her, hoping against hope that it can all be
j sorted out. She says she will tell him everything, but
I
I
I
I
j Now that he was close to the truth, Charlie was
; not sure whether he wanted to hear it. His fore-
! 100
finger traced the curves of a green calico snake
quilted into the white muslin of the comfort.
Better to live happily, he told himself than to
suffer painful knowledge. The trunks of the
quilted apple trees were russet-colored, the
foliage was green with small white dots. In every
fourth patch was stitched a round apple of scarlet
cotton. y
The detailed description here not only emphasizes the symbolism, but
slows the pace of the action and thus builds the suspense. By the time
the reader has gotten through these details, he is as anxious as
Charlie to hear what Bedelia has to say.
But Bedelia tells only part of the truth, and instead of the
clarity Charlie had hoped for, her story only reveals more lies. When
he asks her about the ring, she lies again; the reader is not fooled,
but Charlie is:
He had been certain that Bedelia told him she had
given the ring away. Was it only imagination? Was
his memory unreliable, his truth illusion, his
reality mere fantasy? One question honestly an
swered might have cleared away all the confusion.
But Charlie was loath to ask his wife about her
relations with Ben Chaney. How much happier he
would be if he attributed all suspicion to the
workings of an overwrought mind. The truth was
that Charlie did not want to know the truth, and
willingly allowed himself to be confused by Bede-
lia's air of innocence and melted by her charms.
The truth, however, is stronger than Charlie's will to resist it.
The next day, Ben Chaney comes to visit, and tells Charlie that he is
a private investigator working for an insurance company. Bedelia, he
says, has a method: she meets a man while he is on vacation, marries
101
him, makes him ecstatically happy for a time, and soon after he
increases his life insurance, she murders him, so cleverly that it
! looks like an accidental death. She has murdered at least three
husbands, maybe more, Chaney says. Has Charlie by any chance increased
I
! his life insurance recently, he asks. Charlie is horrified and
!
furious, and refuses to believe it. Rather than face what Chaney is
telling him, he attacks Chaney. But that does no good. "He saw that
the struggle had been senseless. Even if he had trounced Ben, he could
I
j not have changed any of the detective*s facts.
But Chaney’s guest, Keene Barrett, who can positively identify
Bedelia, has been delayed by snow; Charlie leaps at the chance that it
might, after all, be a mistake: "Faith is nourished not by
intelligence but by emotion, and emotion is the product of desire. By
OO
wishing hard enough you can make yourself believe almost anything,
1
i
j Finally, though, he confronts Bedelia with Chaney's allegations,
and her story, though confused, confirms his worst fears. He realizes
also that she is incapable of telling true from false: "He saw now
that certain gems of truth shone among her falsehoods, and understood
! that when she tried to tell the truth it was tarnished by deceit."^
i
She lies as easily and convincingly to herself as she does to others, j
"*I don't always remember unpleasant things,'" she says..."She had a (
1
strong enough memory for all her fancies; it was her sins that she
j forgot."®^ She lies to herself right to the end:
Looking down at his wife as she lay against the
pillows, white and pitiful, he saw that she was {
102
thinking of herself as an innocent woman, suffering
unjustly. She had planned a murder that morning,
but the memory had fled along with the memory of
her other crimes. The narcotic of self-pity had
freed her of the sense of guilt. They were to
blame, not she; they, the rotten men, the jealous
women.
j Charlie is finally forced to face the truth, and he realizes
| that, while Bedelia*s crimes were horrible, he, too, is not free of
I
j blame: "He felt sick with shame, guilty, as if he had been planning a
I
i crime for his own ends and had finally committed it.”° Bedelia was
i
written in 1944, as World War II dragged on; Caspary had very strong
political beliefs, and this is one of the few times those beliefs are
allowed to surface in her writing. She wants to be sure that the
social and political significance of the actions of men like Charlie
does not escape the reader:
To follow [the monkeys’] advice, Charlie thought,
to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, was
as weak as deliberately cultivating evil. The
careful avoidance of all that was unpleasant and
unsavory was not only Charlie’s greatest fault,
but the fault of his people and his class. By
turning their eyes and ears from evil, they nour
ished evil, gave it sunlight, fresh air, and the
space in which to flourish. The civilized man was
not the man who shut himself away from evil, but
who saw it clearly, heard its faintest rustlings,
exposed it, shouted about it from the housetops.
Caspary deliberately set Bedelia in pre-World War I Connecticut,
| because she wanted to make a point about the damage it can do to
individuals and to society when women are forced to be dependent on
«
103
men, not only emotionally but financially. Bedelia*s crimes are
clearly shown to have grown out of her lack of choices. She came from
poverty, and the only way out was to marry— even if it meant putting
I
j up with drunkenness and abuse. When Charlie asks her why she married
; someone she didn't love, she says, "'He had a good business and wasn't
j afraid of getting married."* For all her appearance of innocence, she
i
| is less naive about the world than Charlie. In the face of his shock,
1
| she tells him: "'There are a lot of things you don't know because you
QQ
donft know tough people. Bedelia has taken the only path she
' knows: she has no education, no training for a job, and even if she
had, women were not taught to think in those terms. She has always
been taught that men were the only source of financial security.
Of course, multiple murder is a bit extreme; but even women who
worked were forced to make unpleasant choices. Bedelia is contrasted
with Ellen Walker, one of Charlie's friends. She has been secretly in
love with him for years, but she is drab and works for a living,
writing for the town's newspaper. Her friend, Abbie Hoffman, speaks
j with unconscious irony when she is discussing their dilemma:
"[Bedelia's] the sort that men die for...What I
mean is that Bedelia's a man's woman. Men fall
in love with her because she's crazy about men,
and they sense it. She exists only for her man,
her whole life is wrapped around him. Without a
man she couldn't live...Unfortunately...you and
I, pet, have got too far from the harem. You
earn your living and enjoy it. I have an income
and live quite adequately alone. Men aren't our
lords and masters. And they resent us.
104
In the end, there are hints that Charlie might finally notice
j Ellen and eventually fall in love with her after all. But that is only
after he has had to face the fact that his wife planned to murder him,
and he is sickened by dependence and over-femininity. Not many men are
forced by such circumstances to notice the Ellens of the world.
| The feminist theme is not as strongly emphasized in the
| screenplay of Bedelia, partly because its setting and time were moved
j to Europe of 1938. Caspary fought those changes, but the film was
being produced by a British company for which her husband was working,
j and the only way she could get to England to see him during the war
was to get herself hired to write the screenplay. She was desperate to
get to him, and was thus not in a position to hold out.
As a screenplay, Bedelia is good, but it lacks the depth and
complexity of the novel. It is also less subtle. In the novel, very
!
little is said directly, and the reader must draw conclusions about
characters' motivations from small gestures, clues, hints, details,
and from wording and sentence structure. But in a screenplay there can
be no narration or exposition; everything must be shown by the I
l
] characters' actions and words. As the screenplay opens, for example,
Bedelia and Charlie are in Monte Carlo on their honeymoon. We see them
talking fondly and showing affection to each other. In the novel we
are told how happy Charlie is, so there is no need to show the
i ,
honeymoon, but in the screenplay, we must be shown why Charlie is so j
I i
I |
! in love with Bedelia. I
| I
I Sympathy for the characters is also created in diferent ways in
1 105
the novel and in the screenplay. In the novel Charlie is a good man
' whose weakness, his tendency to lie to himself, is offset by his
sincere desire to do the right things and to create a perfect life for
himself and his wife. Caspary details the ways in which he goes out of
!
j
| his way to be the perfect husband: his concern for Bedelia, the joy he
| takes in doing the housework and cooking for her when she is ill, and
i his loyalty to her in the face of evidence of her crimes. He is stupid
j about Bedelia, but his reasons for wanting to lie to himself are made
I
clear to the reader by constant expository references to the effect
Bedelia's beauty has on him, and to the fond memories they share.
But Bedelia's wheedling would look obvious and manipulative on
screen, and Charlie, if he fell for it, would look too stupid, since a
movie audience would have no way of knowing all this background. So in
(
the screenplay Charlie is made stronger, more assertive, not as easily
fooled and manipulated by Bedelia. As they are leaving Monte Carlo,
for example, Bedelia wants to take with them a Siamese cat she has
befriended; she says they could easily smuggle it into England and get
J
] past the quarantine laws. "No you won't. Not when you're with me,"
Charlie says, quite decisively.®® The Charlie of the novel would have
hemmed and hawed, and if he eventually got his way, would have felt
horribly guilty for depriving Bedelia of any pleasure— and the movie
; audience would have despised him.
I Ironically, the only time Charlie in the novel shows any real
strength is at the end, when he forces Bedelia to drink the poison she|
I
| was planning to use on Ben Chaney. But while his actions seem at least'
I
! 106 ;
understandable and logical to a reader, an audience would be much less
j likely to find murder justifiable. So in the screenplay Charlie just
i leaves the poison on her bedside table, and lets her make the decision
to drink it.
Charlie is also given a less German-sounding name for the movie,
i
l
j since the film is being made in 1946 in England. In the novel he is
Charlie Horst; for the screenplay, he becomes Charlie Cameron.
1
j Ellen Walker's attributes are also made more noticeable in the
screenplay. In the novel, she is drab and boring on first
acquaintance; her positive features and qualities surface very
gradually, and the contrast between her and Bedelia is made explicit
by Abbie's comments. No such speech is needed in the screenplay, since
the contrast between the two women will be visually obvious. And since
i
j the pace of a screenplay must be faster than the leisurely progress of
a novel, Ellen's goodness and sincerity must appear immediately. So
Ellen in the screenplay is not a writer, but Charlie's very competent
business partner. We are told through a conversation between Charlie's
housekeeper and her sister that Ellen is in love with Charlie, but is
doing her best to like Bedelia and to sincerely wqelcome her. She has
even bought a cat and helped redecorate Charlie's house in preparation^
I
f (
for the couple s homecoming.
By the time Ellen is introduced the audience has seen examples of
! Bedelia's dishonesty and manipulation of Charlie. So the description
I
of Ellen is clearly a compliment: "She is twenty-five, rather pretty,
but disinclined to make anything of it. She is honest, straightforward
! 107
and natural in her manner, and has no female wiles or subterfuge.
She is allowed to be a bit attractive, since anyone as drab as the
Ellen in the novel would never interest an audience, not would it find
j
, her plausible as even impled competition for Bedelia.
Just as Charlie and Ellen must be improved, Bedelia must be made
I
j less appealing. In the novel, Bedelia's corruption is only gradually
I
I revealed. In the screenplay, she lies repeatedly almost immediately:
I
j she deliberately knocks Charlie s camera into the water so he can t
take pictures of her, she tells him a valuable ring is only an |
I
| imitation, and later tells him she has given it away when she has not,
and she wants to steal the Siamese cat from the hotel chambermaid and
smuggle it into England. After Charlie refuses to let her do this, she
says, "...but all women smuggle a bit. Didn't you know?"^ The Bedelia
of the novel would never be allowed to say such a thing, especially in
! the opening pages; the Bedelia of the screenplay is more openly
sneaky. The novel's Bedelia is sweetly polite when she doesn't like
someone; in the screenplay, she is openly cold, almost rude.
Her reaction to Charlie's home, and her jealousy of Ellen, also
; make her less likable. When she sees the cottage for the first time,
she says she likes it. But as she looks around, she is mentally
valuing the contents. She "picks up one of a pair of silver j
Q O j
candlesticks and looks at the hallmark"; this is the first thing she
j
| touches. ,
k I
Ellen is there, and when Charlie comes in Bedelia clings j
possessively to his arm, signalling to Ellen that he is now hers.
108
Then, to more firmly establish ownership, she moves the coffee table,
j then the settee that Ellen had just had placed in front of the
I fireplace. Nothing is said openly but Bedelia's jealousy of Ellen, and
j her cattiness, are obvious to both women and to the audience (Charlie,
| of course, doesn't notice). In the novel, Bedelia was never jealous of
i
Ellen; she was too secure in her possession of Charlie.
In the screenplay, Bedelia's jealousy of Ellen emphasizes the
contrast between the two (beautiful but evil vs. plain but good) and
serves to remind the audience once again not to trust Bedelia.
The audience is also made much more strongly aware early in the
story that Bedelia has a deep secret, by the presence of Ben Chaney.
In the novel, he is at first sight just a neighbor, and only later is
it revealed that he is an investigator. In the screenplay, he is the
first character we see, and he is openly watching and following
Bedelia. We know almost immediately that he is an insurance company
investigator. In the novel, Chaney never speaks openly to Bedelia
!
about his suspicions. In the screenplay, he confronts her:
BEN
(with cool impertinence)
j Would you never deceive your husband, Bedelia?
...Where’s that ring? That little forty franc
trinket...worth four hundred thousand francs?
In the novel, we see she is afraid of him, but all he does is
j
: watch, until well into the book, when he tells Charlie his suspicions.
I In the screenplay, he is overtly stalking her, testing her over and
i
I
1 109
over to see her reactions. For Christmas, for example, he gives her a
painting. It is one of his own, but he paints out his signature and
replaces it with that of her imaginary first husband, the artist. Then
t
as she unwraps it he watches for her reaction and seems to enjoy her
t
j shock. He is a much less likable character than in the novel, despite
the purity of his motives. But Bedelia has been shown to be so full of
‘ lies, tricks, and greed by this time that his tactics arouse no
; sympathy for her; instead, the audience is only made more curious and
the suspense is heightened.
Much more emphasis is laid on events in the screenplay than in
the novel, and those events are shown more graphically: we are shown,
and not told of, the value of Bedelia's ring, because we see her in
the jeweler's. We see her knock the camera off the rocks, instead of
reading about Charlie trying to remember it.
Other events are invented or made more extreme to heighten the
drama and create more visual impact. When Bedelia tries to run away in
the novel, Charlie finds her collapsed in the snow. In the screenplay,
t
he wakes up to find her gone, searches the house frantically, hears
the car’s engine, and rushes outside in time to see her crash into a
tree.
I
And when Charlie finds the ring in her bag that she said she'd
given away, instead of packing it away and trying to forget about it,
as he does in the novel, he puts it on her bedside table so she sees
i
I it instantly when she wakes and is afraid.
I
I
As the events of the screenplay are emphasized, and the
i 110 ^
characters altered, the thematic concerns are de-emphasized or
ignored. In the novel, Bedelia is like child, self-centered and free
of guilt because she is incapable of telling even herself the truth,
and she forgets her sins. In the screenplay, Charlie calls her a
j child, but the effect created is the opposite: it draws attention to
i
j just how clearly Bedelia is aware of what she is doing. And rather
| than place the blame, even obliquely, on society's restriction of a
I
| woman's choices, the screenplay put the responsibility squarely on
! Bedelia:
CHARLIE
(turns, impatiently)
Stop acting like a five year old. You know what
you're doing...You're acting like a child, (looks
down at her) Perhaps you are still a child.
BEDELIA accepts this as flattery. She looks up at
him archly, and flirts in a childlike manner.
CHARLIE starts moving off...
CHARLIE
It’s not charming or lovable. It's wicked...
dangerous.
BEDELIA
(watching, slyly; a scheming child) But you wanted
me for your wife, Charlie.
CHARLIE
A man wants his wife to be a woman.
BEDELIA knows he has rejected her. She is furious,
vindictive. She sits bolt upright on the couch,
slides her feet over the edge, watches him...her
outburst comes suddenly. In a different key en
tirely.
BEDELIA
I hate men!
Ill
CAMERA TRACKS BACK and takes in CHARLIE. CHARLIE
stares. He’s shocked. Her sudden vindictiveness
has revealed a new BEDELIA. The rest has been
playacting. All her charm, sweetness, humility
has vanished. She is a resentful shrew and MUCH
OLDER. Tense, trembling, her head shaking slightly,
her voice coarse and UNEDUCATED, she shrills her
bitterness...
BEDELIA
(coarsely)
They’re rotten! Beasts! I wish all the
men in the world were dead!
The closing speech, made by Ben Chaney while the camera is
focused on Bedelia’s portrait, puts the emphasis not on what will
happen to the story’s characters, but rather on the mysteries of
Bedelia’s personality:
There was no mystery about her motives. She
killed for money, planning like a businessman who
hopes to put away a tidy fortune. But there was
enigma, the enigma of the soul of a human being
who can commit murder. Why is one person incapable
of crime, another able to kill in cold blood? Why,
where, what is the cause of that delicate balance
between good and evil? This is the mystery beyond
all mysteries, the problem that neither detective,
physician nor psychologist has yet solved.
This speech asks questions, but gives no answers, and thus evades
making a social statement. It serves to wrap up the story, but avoids
drawing any decisive conclusions.
i
112
Caspary— Notes
^1 am indebted for general information about Vera Caspary*s life
to Vera Caspary, Secrets of Grown-ups: An Autobiography (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1979).
n
^Caspary 4.
^Caspary 6.
^Caspary 7.
^Ellen Batt, "There's No Mystery— It's Just Suspense," Los
Angeles Mirror-News. 1 September 1958.
^Caspary 22.
^Caspary 23.
^Caspary 11.
^Caspary 25,
^Caspary 35-36.
■^Caspary 44.
7 9
Caspary 48.
1 ^
^Caspary 46.
14Caspary 84.
15Caspary 89,
16Caspary 100.
■^Caspary 110.
*®Caspary 116.
■^Caspary 112.
^^Caspary 125.
^Edwin Bronner, The Encyclopedia of the American Theatre 1900-
1975 (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, Inc., 1980) 57.
^Personal interview with Vera Caspary, 29 March 1985,
113
^Jack Alicoate, ed., The 1932 Film Daily Year Book of Motion
Pictures (New York: The Film Daily, 1932) 185.
"^Caspary 156.
9 s
Personal interview with Vera Caspary, 29 March 1985.
9 f\
Bronner, p. 175.
^Personal interview with Vera Caspary, 29 March 1985.
^Max Wilk, The Wit and Wisdom of Hollywood (New York: Warner
Books, Warner Paperback Library, 1971) 228.
^Personal interview with George Sklar, 28 May 1985,
on
Sklar, quoted in Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The
Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) 320.
Ol
Personal interview with George Sklar, 28 May 1985.
"^Personal interview with George Sklar, 28 May 1985.
OO
Personal interview with George Sklar, 28 May 1985.
^Caspary 192.
o t r
Personal interview with Vera Caspary, 29 March 1985.
"^Caspary 200.
"^Caspary 207-208.
OQ
Otto Preminger, Preminger: An Autobiography (New York:
Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1977) 84-94.
■^Caspary 208-209.
^Philip K. Scheuer, "British To Film ’Laura* Author’s Latest
Novel,” Los Angeles Times, 23 September 1945, sec. 4: 1.
^Jack Alicoate, ed., The 1945 Film Daily Year Book of Motion j
Pictures (New York: Wid’s Films and Film Folks, 1945) 175.
^Caspary 214-216.
^Personal interview with Vera Caspary, 29 March 1985.
^Caspary 225.
114
^Caspary 226.
^Personal interview with Vera Caspary, 29 March 1985.
^Personal interview with George Sklar, 7 August 1985.
^Caspary 233-234.
^Los Angeles Times, 6 October 1949.
50Caspary 228-229.
“^Caspary 238-239.
-^Caspary 277.
■^Caspary 240.
“ ^Personal interview with George Sklar, 28 May 1985.
~^Caspary 259.
■^Caspary 269-270.
~^Caspary 270.
■^Caspary 280.
"^Caspary 277,
60Caspary 278.
^Batt 3.
^Caspary 280-281.
^Caspary 115.
^Vera Caspary, Evvie (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1960)
^Caspary, Evvie 124.
^Caspary, Evvie 64.
^Caspary, Evvie 319.
£L O
Caspary, Evvie 5.
^Caspary, Evvie 113.
115
^Caspary, Evvie 148.
^Caspary, Evvie 349.
^Vera Caspary, Bedelia (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1945)
: s.
1 7Q
I Caspary, Bedelia 6.
I /
1 Caspary, Bedelia 14.
| ^Caspary, Bedelia 32.
) 'Ifs
Caspary, Bedelia 10.
77
j Caspary, Bedelia 83.
^Caspary, Bedelia 85.
^Caspary, Bedelia 91-92.
^^Caspary, Bedelia 93-94.
O'!
Caspary, Bedelia 112.
^Caspary, Bedelia 121-122.
^Caspary, Bedelia 149-50.
®^Caspary, Bedelia 152, 154.
^Caspary, Bedelia 183.
^^Caspary, Bedelia 183.
^^Caspary, Bedelia 158.
j ®®Caspary, Bedelia 150-151.
I
j ^Caspary, Bedelia 54-55.
^Vera Caspary, Bedelia, screenplay written for John Corfield
Productions, London, England, 1945, 28.
^Caspary, Bedelia screenplay 49.
i QO
; ^Caspary, Bedelia screenplay 28.
f
go
Caspary, Bedelia screenplay 56.
116
^Caspary, Bedelia screenplay 48.
^Caspary, Bedelia screenplay 169-170.
^Caspary, Bedelia screenplay 185.
117
CHAPTER 3— LILLIAN HELLMAN
J
j Lillian Heilman spent her whole life trying to live up to
‘ Dashiell Hammett. Even before she met him, she was looking for someone
j |
like him to look up to, to emulate, to admire— someone around whom shei
i
j could center and focus her life. Until she found him, she had vague
l
I
| desires, principles, and ideals, but neither her life nor her work had
; !
; any direction. ,
i
j Even as a child, she had high, unyielding standards and
expectations of people, and she was quite rebellious. As she grew up
she developed vague ambitions of being a writer, but really had no
idea what she wanted to write, or how. She spent a good deal of her
time, especially after leaving home, socializing; she admitted, years
later, that she didn't really know where she was going: "...I was slow
in coming to certain conclusions. Slow in knowing myself, and
sometimes lazy, just plain lazy.”^ She was drifting: she was having a
I
good time, going to parties, meeting people, sleeping with whomever
she chose; she was restless and uncontrolled, mainly because she was
so dissatisfied with herself. She wanted to be Something, to be
Someone, but she didn’t know what or who. She had enormous potential
and talent, but she could not find her own direction, she could not J
order herself or discipline herself— and she wouldn't let anyone else 1
j do it, either.
No one but Hammett. But even Hammett didn’t change her— she
changed herself, to make herself, in her own eyes, worthy of him.
I 118 1
Hammett's greatest strength, in their relationship, was that he cared
less than she did. He loved her very much, and cared what she thought
of him, but by the time he met Lillian, he had a self-destructiveness
i
i
| and fatalism that made him see everything in life as ultimately
I
pointless. No matter how much he wanted something or someone, he would
never pursue it or work at it.
Lillian, on the other hand, cared very much. To her, everything
I
| mattered— especially Hammett. He was attracted to her, but then, he
J was attracted to lots of women. He talked to her, and slept with her,
i
but there were dozens of others willing to talk to him and sleep with
him, too. The competition was fierce, especially in Hollywood, where a
famous man is deluged with the attentions of young and beautiful
women. To keep his attention, to be more than just another quickie
affair, Lillian had to be special in her own right, and in a way
Hammett could admire. And she became special. Her drive and talent and
his influence on her combined to make Lillian Heilman, the political
activist, the screenwriter, the personality, and above all, the
writer.
Her life has generated much more controversy than most, both
before and since her death. It was her writing, certainly, that first j
brought her public attention, but more often than not, it was the {
i
strength of her personality that kept her in the public eye and at the j
center of various political and social storms. As the years passed, I
she deliberately created a persona for the public. Jackson Bryer sums
I
»
I
: 119
it up in his introduction to a collection of interviews with Lillian
Heilman:
Heilman's writings and her life were based on
the same qualities, qualities abundantly evident
in all these interviews. Whether she is talking
about The Little Foxes or her childhood in
New Orleans, about The Children's Hour or
her appearance before the Un-American Activities
Committee, about Watch on the Rhine or her
famous secret mission on behalf of her childhood
friend Julia, the characteristics on display are
the same— loyalty, honesty, dislike of sham and
pretension, a search for the truth, an outrage at
those who refuse to stand up for what they believe
...From first to last, she was herself.
Herself, as she wanted to be remembered by the public. But the
real Lillian Heilman was much different, and much more human, as
William Wright, her most recent biographer, points out: "She abounded
in contradictions: fierce loves and fiercer hatreds, grand gestures
and petty acts of vindictiveness, dogged adherence to principle and
underhanded maneuvers, rock-hard strength and frightened
O
vulnerability.” He might have added that she also had a deep and
compulsive need for the truth, and at the same time, the ability to
lie with facility and skill when the truth did not suit her.
Lillian Heilman was born June 20, 1905, in New Orleans, to Max
Heilman, a shoe manufacturer, and Julia Newhouse. The family lived in
i
j a boardinghouse at 1718 Prytania Street which was run by Max's two
I /
: unmarried sisters, Hannah and Jenny. In 1911, Max Heilman's business
i failed, and he took his family to New York City, where he took what
120
was to be a succession of jobs, mostly as a salesman, with various
companies. From then on, Lillian and her mother spent six months in
New York, and six months in New Orleans most years, although they
!
! often stayed in other, smaller southern towns with Max's relatives
| while Max was on the road. Lillian preferred New Orleans by far:
i
! discipline was much more lax than in New York, and the tenants in her
aunts’ boardinghouse and the residents of New Orleans were much more
interesting than the people she saw in New York.
Lillian was quite rebellious as a child, and even more so as a
teenager. She was often in trouble at home and at school, mainly
because she hated authority of any sort, and rebelled against it on
principle.
After graduating from high school, she went to New York
I
j
University, but was an unenthusiastic student: she quit after only twoj
i
years. She was quite intelligent and well-read, however, and managed
to impress an editor at Boni and Liveright Publishers, who offered her
i a job as an assistant. Through her job, she met Arthur Kober, a
i
theatrical press agent, who at one time had worked for Jed Harris.
Kober was friendly and easygoing; he wanted to be a writer, and was
trying to establish himself when he met Lillian. Years later, people
would wonder what Lillian ever saw in him, but what they would
t
j remember was the later, more developed Lillian. At 20, she had a
j strong personality, but her ambitions had not yet crystallized. She
! |
I had a vague desire to write, but was spending most of her time j
I I
| socializing and going to parties and the theatre. She was still, for j
I 1 2 1 !
the most part, directionless. In 1925, when she married Kober, most of
those who knew them thought them quite well-suited: they thought that
Lillian needed Kober*s cheerfulness and his stabilizing influence.
After marrying Kober, Lillian quit her job at Boni and Liveright
l
and took a succession of jobs in the theatre, most of which she
acquired through Kober's influence. She also reviewed books and
! desultorily wrote some short stories. In 1927, Kober was offered a job
i
1 as an editor for The Comet, a literary magazine based in Paris, so he
I
I and Lillian sailed for Europe. Lillian appears to have been little
influenced by the intellectual ferment taking place at the time,
although she did write a few short stories which were published in The
Comet.
In February of 1930, an event took place which was to change
Lillian's life drastically: Arthur Kober was offered a job in
: Hollywood, writing screenplays. Lillian hated the idea of moving to
Southern California, so she stayed on in New York for as long as she
could. When she finally joined him, they lived for a while in a one-
room apartment on Sunset Boulevard. As she had predicted, Lillian
despised Los Angeles:
j
i
I spent most of the day reading in a leather
chair and at night I was learning to drink hard.
I was out of place and the drink made uninter
esting people matter less, and, late at night, j
I matter not at all. I was twenty-five years old
j that June and I had stepped too early into
! solitude.
122
After a short time, unable to bear tripping over each other in
| their tiny apartment any longer, the Kobers moved to the Garden of
i
' Allah. At the time, among others, Harpo Marx and his family were
l
staying there, as was Lila Lee, Charlie Chaplin's first wife.
Sheilah Graham recalls, "Lillian was a sexy dish in those days. Ginger
Rogers, who lived there with her mother, remembers Lillian lounging
around the pool in what was then considered a skimpy swim suit, ready
' and eager for conversation."^ Lillian was bored to tears. By now, she
1
would talk to anyone, even people she didn't much like; anything to
break the monotony.
The Garden of Allah was just a stopover until something better
could be found, though, and after a short stay, the Kobers moved into
a rented house in the Hollywood Hills, above Hollywood Boulevard.
Heilman found the house ugly and dark, and it only increased her
malaise. For the first few months she spent in Hollywood, Lillian did
little except lie in the sun, read, meet the wives of other writers
for lunch, or play bridge or tennis. At night, after Arthur came home,
they would regularly go to the Brown Derby for drinks, where they
would meet their friends and go on to other clubs:
...we had pleasant evenings with our best
friends, Laura and Sidney Perelman and Laura's
brother, Nathanael West. The five of us, and a
few others [Marion and Nunnally Johnson, Sam and
Bella Spewack°] stayed close together not
only because we liked each other but because we
were in what was called 'the same salary bracket.'
Then, and probably now, if you were a writer who
earned five hundred dollars a week you didn't see
much of those who earned fifteen hundred a week.
123
That was O.K. with me because other, richer and
j more important groups puzzled me and made me dis-
! orderly: the remarkable gadgets in their houses,
I the then new swimming pools, the earnest talk made
! me irritable and nasty. It took me years to under-
i stand that it had been a comic time, with its
j overperfect English antiques that were replacing
the overcarved Spanish furniture and hanging
shawls; the flutey, refined language— one producer
spoke often of his daughter's 'perberty,' and Ham
mett phoned me one night from Jean Harlow's house
to tell me that she had rung the bell for the butler
I and said, 'Open the window, James, and leave in a
j tiny air*— and the attempt, running side by side
with the new life, to stand by the old roots: Jewish
mama stories and Jewish mamas proudly imported from
the East; French cooks and stuffed derma; and one
studio executive who lived in a Colonial house with
early American furniture and a mezuzah above the
door encased in pickled pine. And there was the wife
of a composer who had two ermine coats exactly alike
in case one should burn, and the ex-star, our
neighbor, who often came calling to show me the
knife cuts on her body put there the night before
by a very religious movie director, and over our own
fireplace in the ugly house there was a portrait of
j a lion whose eyes lit up if you pressed a button...
Finally, Lillian got sick of doing nothing and being no one and
began looking for a job. Kober asked Sam Marx, then story editor at
MGM, to find a job for her— his marriage was at stake, he said. Marx
hired her as a script reader. For $50 a week, she read possible
! properties and wrote clear synopses. (Fifty dollars a week was the pay I
t '
rate for readers with two languages; for readers with three languages,
the rate was sixty dollars a week.) Each morning she would drive to
Culver City, where MGM was located, and drive in through the
i
i
i
white colonnade that stretched for almost half J
a mile along Washington Boulevard. Such was MGM's i
imperial facade: fake marble columns of plaster j
124 !
i
and wood concealing acres of sound stages re
sembling four-story cardboard boxes, and buildings
with long balconies and iron railings and the
impression of a ’perpetual tightrope,' as Fitz
gerald observed in The Last Tycoon (1941).
To one film historian [Aaron Latham], MGM 'from
the outside looking in...has the air of the world's
most exclusive country club, but from the inside
it can have the air of a prison camp.
It certainly seemed that way to Lillian, who hated her job.
Twelve men and two women sat in a large room in
a rickety building on stilts, and every small
tremor— and California had a number of tremors
that year— sent the building atilt. When you fin
ished a manuscript (you were expected to read at
least two a day) you went into another large room
and waited your turn for one of the half-broken
typewriters...the days and months went clipclop
along, much as they had in the leather chair in
our ugly house, except that now, I was reading
junk when, alone, I had been with good books.
Lillian hated the dull work, the long hours, and the caste system
at MGM:
The producers had fourteen-carat gold name
placques on their doors while the writers' names
were typed on cards. A similar distinction pre
vailed in the MGM commissary, where writers such
as Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, Albert and Frances
Hackett, and George Oppenheimer occupied a table
against the wall while the producers lunched in
the center of the room.
Lillian, who knew most of the writers by this time through her j
i
husband, but, awkwardly, would not rate a seat at their table, 1
i
t
i
125 I
preferred to eat her lunches on the backlot, out of a small picnic
basket in which she would pack her lunch and a bottle of wine.
! I would, by one o’clock, have a vague headache
that would disappear as I ate my picnic on the
back lot of the studio and got fuzzy on the wine
j and the surrounding dream of old movie sets piled
' next to one another, early Rome at right angles
to the painted roses of a girlie musical, at the
left of a London street, side by side with a
I giant, empty whaling ship.
I
i
j But after lunch it was back to the same job. "...two and
sometimes three and four reports of plays and novels is a lot of work
for one day, and by four o’clock there wasn't a face in the room that
didn’t show the strain.
Despite her hatred for the job, she made excuses to stay late:
>
she’d say she had something to finish up, she was waiting for a call.
In truth, I was avoiding the ride home. I do
not know why that drive in the dark of six o’
clock was so terrible to me. Maybe because the
flat soggy land of the main road was the kind of
country I had never seen before, maybe the awful
speed and jerkiness of California drivers, maybe
the ugly house I was going home to, maybe because
I knew this shabby job had solved nothing. Maybe
all of that and maybe little of it, I don't know
anymore, but the drive had become so bad for me
that I would tremble as I got into the car and
would often have to stop the car and press my hands
together to stop the movements they were making.
Sometimes when I stopped I fell asleep for a while;
once I leaned from the window and screamed...I did
not know that fear, to many, was no disgrace. Like
most of the middle class I had been brought up to
swim, drive cars, climb around. Irrational fear was
no part of your own world and you had contempt for
the few times you had seen it in other people.
Now here it was, out in the open, and I realized it
had been with me before, and would now be with me
forever unless I did something...1 did nothing more
j than go home because I had no place else to go.
I
i
It is also quite possible that part of the reason she didn’t want to
go home was Arthur Kober: their marriage was becoming more and more
i
unsatisfying.
Lillian made no close friends among the other readers but,
according to Sam Marx, tried to organize them, in order to get more
i
j money. This is the first evidence of any interest in any sort of
politics that Lillian showed. Her attempt failed, but she apparently
caused enough trouble that Dorothy Pratt, the head of the reading
department, gave Sam Marx an ultimatum: either Lillian Heilman went,
or she would. Lillian was the one who went, mainly because she could
no longer stand the job.^
This sudden plunge into political activity, without warning, is
puzzling. Perhaps it can be explained in part by the fact that Lillian
had met Dashiell Hammett several months before. His intense political
attitudes may have influenced her to become more active, even in this
small way; or she may have been trying to impress him by taking on a
i project with which he could sympathize.
| She may have felt it necessary to make such an effort because,
| when they met, Hammett’s third novel, The Maltese Falcon, had just
| been published, was a best seller, and was getting quite good reviews,
j Like many writers whose work made a big splash at that time, he ended
I
| up in Hollywood. Hammett was thirty-seven when Heilman met him, and
i
i 127
Lillian was twenty-six (not twenty-four, as she said in her memoirs),
and had not yet accomplished anything. She was still drifting, lost in
a house, marriage, and job which didn’t satisfy her, but not knowing
j what to do about it. Trying to organize her fellow workers may have
J been her way of proving to Hammett, and herself, that she was capable
I
j of action,
i
But whatever her reasons, her attachment to Hammett by the spring
of 1931 was quite strong. They had met at the end of 1930; since
I
! neither of them could later remember the exact date, they arbitrarily
set November 25 as their ” anniversary”. They met in a restaurant,
1 7
Musso and Frank’s. "We talked of T.S. Eliot, although I no longer
remember what we said, and then went and sat in his car and talked at
each other and over each other until it was daylight.
Arthur Kober must have known about their affair, since Lillian
took no pains to be discreet. But this was not the first time she had
been unfaithful to him, and he didn’t take it seriously. This time,
though, it was different, and shortly after the affair with Hammett
began, Lillian left Kober. He was devastated. He returned to the
Garden of Allah to live, and eventually his natural good nature
reasserted itself. He and Lillian and Hammett, in time, became good
friends. (They were legally divorced in 1932.)
Although some of Lillian's other affairs lasted a long time, her
relationship with Hammett was to last for another 31 years— for the
rest of his life. There were things about Lillian that Hammett didn’t
i like: some of her friends, her laziness, and sometimes her
1 128
independence, about which he had mixed feelings. Her energy annoyed
him sometimes: "Dash used to say very peevishly, 'For Christ's sake,
sit down for two minutes and give my eyes a rest.'"*9 But the most
friction was caused by what Hammett saw as Lillian's unreasonable
| attitude to his infidelity to her. He seemed to feel that once he had
i
explained the situation to her (that's just the way he was, he said),
she should accept it. But she persisted in making nasty scenes about
20
his women. They were complimentary, in a way, but a nuisance, too.
i He would never have admitted that he gave her cause to be jealous, but
|
| he did. He wrote her constantly and honestly when she was away from
J him, although it was not always what she wanted to hear: "I have been
more or less faithful to you," he would write— leaving her to make the
obvious interpretation. She would sometimes come home from a trip or
work and find him with someone else. She would throw tantrums, scream,
I threaten. Once, she claimed, she called him in the middle of the night
I
from New York City and, when a strange woman's voice answered the
phone, she got on a plane, flew to Los Angeles, went to Hammett's
house and destroyed a soda fountain he had in the basement. Then she
went back to New York. (This story, although entertaining, is probably
n I
not true. ) Several times, she even left him— but she always went
back.
Of course, the fact that she, herself, was incapable of prolonged
i fidelity was irrelevant to her. She would claim that she only had
. affairs when she was on the outs with Hammett, or that she was just
<
*
1 paying him back. But she often started affairs even when they were
I 1
: 129 1
i i
getting along well, and many of her affairs were quite serious and
lengthy— too long to be motivated merely by revenge.
Anther major problem was Hammett's drinking. Although there were
| intervals of more or less drinking, nevertheless, for the next twenty
; years he drank constantly, and he was not always a pleasant drunk: he
I I
j could be sarcastic, cruel, even violent. She always denied that he had
I ever hurt her, but she was probably covering up for him: according to
| Diane Johnson, "The late Harold Flender, a writer who had dried out in
j
j the same sanatorium as Hammett, spoke to others of seeing Heilman come
j o o
to visit, eyes blacked, face battered." There were even more
quarrels over his drinking than over his women, and Lillian left him
several times over it; eventually, it destroyed their sex life: one
night in 1942 Hammett suggested they make love; he was drunk, as
usual, and Lillian, fed up, said she wouldn't sleep with him when he
was like this. He was deeply wounded; instead of giving up the
drinking, he gave up their sex life: according to Lillian, he decided
he would never again make love to her, and he never did.
But there were lots of good things, too, to draw them together,
especially at the start. Hammett liked the way Lillian wore beautiful,
i stylish clothes; she was educated, she was a good writer (or could be,
I
I if she weren't so undisciplined), her mind was quick and alert, and
23
she made him laugh. J Writer Harold Clurman summed up the traits that
t drew them together:
!
\
She might scoff at the notion but there is in
Miss Heilman a certain puritannical streak which ]
130
Hammett (raised as a Catholic) shared. He did not
like ’soft* talk; neither does Miss Heilman. When
either of them was on the verge of expressing emo
tion too overtly both were inclined to clip the con
versation by a curt *1 don't want to talk about
that'...In their relationship with each other, both
used endearments sparingly. They manifested their
feeling for one another with a certain acid bluff
ness. ..Both had dignity and courage (without
rhetoric)...Both of them reflect something of what
was in each of them: A determined truthfulness, and
tough realism, and above all a sense of justice and
honor.
Hammett’s influence on Heilman was profound. Without him, she
could easily have remained as she was before she met him: unhappy,
unfulfilled, restless, drifting in and out of affairs, drinking more
and more by the pool or in the clubs because there was nothing better
to do. William Wright, her biographer, says, "He was a collaborator in
the creation not so much of the plays as of Lillian Heilman
herself...Under his influence, Heilman realized herself as a creative
artist; her political nature was unlocked; and a rebelliousness that
| threatened as much havoc in her emotional life as in her professional
I o c
one was brought under control."
The relationship was not entirely one-sided, however. Lillian's
effect on Hammett was profound, too: she saved his life several times.
In September of 1931, Hammett was drinking heavily, but trying to
quit. He was thoroughly depressed and unable to write— he was working
on The Thin Man at the time. He decided to commit suicide. He was
living at the Knickerbocker Hotel, on Vine Street in Hollywood; he
I left there and got a room at the Roosevelt Hotel, on Hollywood
131
Boulevard across from Graumann's Chinese Theatre. Lillian caught on
to what he was up to and rushed to the Roosevelt. They talked for a
long time. Apparently, she shamed him out of trying to kill himself.
In May of 1938, Hammett had a complete breakdown. Lillian was in
New York, and he was staying at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel. He had
been on his worst drinking binge ever. By the time his friends, the
Hacketts, found him, his weight was down to 128 and he was so weak he
could not walk and could barely speak. They called Lillian and put
him on a plane, after bailing him out of the hotel (by this time, he
had run up an eight thousand dollar bill, and the hotel was
understandably reluctant to let him leave until it had been
0f\
settled). She met him at the airport with an ambulance and took him
directly to the hospital. When he was discharged two months later, he
was still weak, so she took him to Tavern Island to rest. But he
always did whatever he wanted, regardless of Lillian’s feelings, and
pretty soon he was drinking again.
In 1948, again, he had a breakdown caused by too much drinking.
Once again, even though she had left him because of his alcoholism and
they had been living apart, she got him into the hospital. This time,
the doctors said that if he didn’t stop drinking, he would be dead
within a month— -two at the most. He gave her his word he would never
drink again, and he kept it.
When his political activities landed him in jail, Lillian paid a
substantial part of his legal fees, and she later gave him a large
chunk of money to pay some of his back taxes. During the last ten
132
years of his life, he was broke, and she paid for most of his expenses
j and his medical care. When he began suffering a series of illnesses,
I
! she took care of him, and when his physical condition deteriorated so
I
badly that he was no longer able to care for himself, she insisted he
move in with her. He was totally dependent on her for the last three
years of his life, and he was ill for a good portion of that time:
, when he died on January 10, 1961, he was suffering from, among other
[
I things, a cancerous tumor on his lung, pneumonia, and diseased heart,
i 07
I liver, kidneys, pancreas, and prostate gland.
Lillian and Hammett discussed getting married a couple of times.
Once they even set a date, but the wedding never came off. When she
was asked by Nora Ephron after Hammett’s death why they had never
married, she said,
In writing about it I suppose I've forgotten
many of the bad times we had, I think it was my
stubbornness that kept us together. We did have
two periods of planning to be married. The first
time he disappeared with another lady. That’s not
really fair— I was disappearing too. We were not
faithful to each other at that time— we were dif
ferent generations, but we were both of that nutty
time that believed that alliances could stand up
against other people. I should have known better,
because I had a jealous nature...One of the reasons
we didn't get married the second time was that he
was drinking so heavily those years. I was fright
ened. After a time we never spoke about marriage.
It was just as well. I don't think either of us had
natures that were certain of the future.
But in Hollywood in 1935, the future looked bright. She had moved
! into the luxurious Pacific Palisades house Hammett had rented (this
I
i 133
was the one with the soda fountain in the basement). The house was
tended by Hammett's black houseman, Jones, and his older lover,
1 Winfield. There were incessant fights over Hammett’s "floozies," but
i Lillian and Hammett managed to have a good time anyway: they saw their
1 friends, including the Hacketts, went to the track, went out for meals
i and to clubs. Lillian saw a good deal of her friend, Dorothy Parker
I
I (although Hammett, who didn't like Parker, generally excluded himself j
i <
i
from these occasions). And they shopped. Lillian loved clothes, and
now that she had plenty of money, she spent a good deal of it on them,
buying designer creations by the closetful. Hammett, too, when he was
flush, bought people gifts. He bought Lillian jewelry constantly, and
also bought her several fur coats and stoles.
But they weren’t closing their eyes to what was going on around
them, and both began to become more heavily involved in both Hollywood
and national politics. They, along with John Howard Lawson, the !
Hacketts, Donald Ogden Stewart, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker,
among others, began working very hard to try to establish a union that
on
would protect the rights of screenwriters, the Screen Writers Guild. 7
They had meetings at the Garden of Allah, at the homes of various
members, and even used their lunch periods at the studios to try to |
!
persuade others to join them. It was heavy going, because the writersj
! j
| faced fierce opposition from the studios, who opposed unions unless j
I I
: they controlled them (which defeats the entire purpose of a union, of I
i
J |
; course). Many writers who were completely dependent on the studios for;
j i
income were afraid of losing their jobs and being blacklisted if they j
joined. Many of those who signed on at first, like Hammett and
Heilman, had outside sources of income. Those who didn't, and joined
despite the studios' threats, showed tremendous courage.
I
| The studios squashed the Guild temporarily in the summer of
j
I on
j 1936. Although it was reestablished the following year, this was at
i
the time a heavy blow, and many of the writers were bitter and
disillusioned. But many who had never before shown any interest in
i
politics were to remain active, and many moved much further to the
political left, and began involving themselves in national politics,
as well. There is no doubt that association with not only Hammett but
also the many others involved in the Guild fight who were left-wing
had a strong influence on Lillian. She became more and more political
after this time. Of course, there was more to be political about: by
1936, Franco had begun the Spanish Civil War, and Hitler was clearly a
i
threat. Heilman was made aware, as never before, of the fact that she
was Jewish; more importantly, she was drawn to the left by the fact
that the communists and socialists seemed to be the only ones actively
I
trying to defeat fascism and effect humanitarian reforms which would
alleviate many of the existing social ills.
One of the concerns of many at the time was the Spanish Civil
War, and Lillian took up the Loyalist cause enthusiastically. She,
along with John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish,
Clifford Odets, Herman Shumlin, and Dorothy Parker, formed
' Contemporary Historians, Inc., to help finance Joris Ivens in filming |
l
and producing a documentary on the Spanish Civil War from the Loyalist «
i
I 135
0 * 1
point of view. Heilman, at one point, even travelled to Spain to
help write it, but came down with pneumonia and had to leave. She also
offered her home for Andre Malraux to speak in an attempt to raise
OO
funds for the Loyalists.
By 1936, Lillian and Hammett had moved into a suite at the
Beverly-Wilshire Hotel; the rent was $2000 a month. "It was absurdly
09
large— six bedrooms.’ The suite had originally been designed to the
specifications of the King of Siam. Albert Hackett recalled that
Hammett, although he was 6’2”, looked like a little boy as he walked
around there, because of the enormously high ceilings, huge rooms, and
o /
lush furnishings. From this base, they began working to resurrect
the Screen Writers Guild. Getting new members to join, in the face of
their past failure and the threats from the studios, was quite
difficult. Frances Goodrich remembers Lillian coming out of a room
where she'd been trying to get Talbot Jennings, a writer at MGM, to
sign up. Lillian said, "Well, if I get Talbot Jennings to join this
thing, somebody’s got to pay for the abortion.
Jay Dratler was at the time a young writer, just starting at the
studios, and was still a bit naive. One day, he was asked to go to the
Beverly-Wilshire to get some information from Heilman and Hammett. He
had himself announced when he arrived downstairs; he was instructed to
"go right up," When he got upstairs, he knocked. Lillian's voice
yelled, "Come in." He finally found them in the bedroom, in bed
together. He had obviously interrupted something. They invited him to
sit down, and he did— on a chair. They didn't seem to notice anything
136
amiss, but Dratler was quite embarrassed. He tried to carry on a
| normal conversation, and eventually he got the information he'd come
1 of.
' for and left. He was never so happy to leave a room.
i
! At this time, Lillian and Hammett also served as members of the
i
j advisory board of Frontier Films. Ralph Steiner, who was vice
|
i president, commissioned Hammett to write a left-wing labor mystery
i
! film. Hammett loved the idea, but was drinking constantly and finding
it impossible to work. Finally, Lillian advised Steiner to drop the ,
idea.
Hammett and Heilman joined dozens of political organizations
during the next few years, and contributed money to more. For example,
they sat on the editorial board of Equality, a monthly magazine aimed j
07
atcombatting anti-SemitismLillian and Dorothy Parker, among
others, helped to found the Motion Picture Artists to Aid Republican
| O O
1 Spain and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee; and in June of
1937, Heilman, Hemingway, MacLeish, Shumlin, Luise Rainer, and others
formed a new group from the remains of Contemporary Historians, Inc.,
called History Today, Inc., to fund a second film for Ivens, called
O Q
| The 400 Million, about the Japanese invasion of China. . In August
1937, Lillian sailed for Europe, going first to Paris, then to
Moscow. By October she had reached Spain, but other than being caught
in a bombing raid in Valencia, saw no fighting.
I
! She was completely committed to her political activism; by now,
1 it was no longer a matter of pleasing Hammett by emulating his
1
| example. She was vastly more sophisticated and knowledgable than the
! 137 |
amateur who had tried to organize the readers at MGM just a few years
before. Years later she said of this time,
There were always X number of clowns, X
number of simple-minded fools, X number of fash
ionables who just went along with what was being
said and done, but there were also remarkable
people, people of belief, people willing to live
by their beliefs. Roosevelt gave you a feeling
that you had something to do with your government,
something to do with better conditions for yourself
and for other people. With all its foolishness,
the thirties were a good time and I often have
regrets for it.
But all of their political activity couldn’t halt the inevitable.
War finally came. Rather than stay home and make his contribution to
the war effort from a comfortable study, Hammett talked his way into
the army. Lillian, knowing how frail he was, was furious, but as 1
usual, he did what he pleased. While he was away for the next few J
years, she busied herself with political work— fundraising,
speechwriting, and victory gardening— writing, and an expanded social
life: when Hammett was away, she indulged her taste for people that
Hammett did not approve of: the famous and glamorous, wealthy
businessmen, and people he didn't like, with whom she wouldn’t have
spent time, had he been there. She also made a second trip to the
Soviet Union, with the consent of the United States government.
Lillian was thrilled to see Hammett when he returned home after j
the war, but things fell apart quickly when he began drinking heavily. 1
I
Finally she left him, unable to put up with the whoring and the !
violence. They saw each other frequently, though, since they were both
still heavily involved in the same kinds of political activities.
Now those political activities were becoming increasingly
j
j dangerous. The liberal atmosphere of the thirties was, in the wake of
I
I World War II and the Cold War, giving way to a conservative backlash,
; and Lillian and Hammett, along with many of their friends, were about
I
I
' to get stung by it. The Thomas Committee appeared in Hollywood; hungry
i for publicity, it focused its efforts on the movie industry, and
I
especially on the screenwriters. The Hollywood Ten had defied the
Committee and been jailed for their efforts, and the producers
capitulated to political pressure and agreed not to hire anyone who
was a communist or "a member of any group that advocates the overthrow
of the United States by force, or by illegal or unconstitutional
method.The Hollywood blacklist was now official. In response to
these events, Lillian wrote an impassioned article for the Screen
Writers Guild magazine in December of 1947, condemning the producers,
| the Committee, and anyone who collaborated with them; she called it
! "The Judas Goats";
It was a week of turning the head in shame;
of the horror of seeing politicians make the
honorable institution of Congress into a honky
tonk show; of listening to craven men lie and
tattle, pushing each other in their efforts to
lick the boots of their vilifiers; publicly trying
to wreck the lives, not of strangers, mind you,
but of men With whom they have worked and eaten
and played.
139
The pressure to cooperate with the Committee— to name names— was
great. A few years later, Elia Kazan, who became a friendly witness,
told Lillian, in an attempt to justify his actions, "I earned over
$400,000 last year from the theatre. But Skouras says I'll never make
t o
| another movie [if I don't cooperate].'
Just a few months later, Lillian learned that she had been
blacklisted. William Wyler was planning to do a film of Theodore
Dreiser's Sister Carrie. He wanted Heilman to write the screenplay.
Lillian was enthusiastic about the project, but one day Wyler called
her and told her that the producer, Barney Balaban, had vetoed her:
she was on the blacklist. No Hollywood studio would hire her.
In defiance of the blacklist and the threat it implied, Lillian
and Hammett stepped up their political activities. They worked on the
Henry Wallace campaign, for example, and were principal sponsors of
the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-
Astoria Hotel; this conference was later denounced by the State
Department as being pro-communist. Now that there was no work for them
| in Hollywood, they were spending more time at their place in New York,
I
j Hardscrabble Farm. They invited many people to visit them there who
j
might be compromising: Yugoslavians, Russians, others who had been
blacklisted or were far to the left.
They were daring the government to come and get them, and it did.
In 1951, Hammett was subpoenaed to testify in federal court about who
had donated bail money for eleven communists who had been arrested
| under the Smith Act in 1948. Hammett could honestly have said he
' i
1 140 I
didn’t know, but instead refused to answer the questions, on
principle. He was sent to prison for six months. During the entire
\ time, Lillian only got one letter through to him, since she was not on
j the "approved” list of writers.
i Hammett was released early in 1952; prison life had not been good
j
• for him, and his health was very bad. Lillian couldn’t take him to
Hardscrabble Farm, because she’d had to sell it while he was in
I
l
prison, partly to pay his legal fees, and partly to pay off the IRS,
which had descended upon them both and was demanding back taxes.
But the government wasn't through with them yet: Lillian had been
in terrible suspense for months, fearing a subpoena to appear before
the House Unamerican Activities Committee. When it finally came, on
l
February 21, 1952, she was terrified. She was afraid of going to jail,
i
I and she was even more afraid of being a coward. Hammett urged her not
to anger the Committee (although he didn't go so far as to encourage
her to cooperate), and told her prison horror stories. Before
testifying, she sent the HUAC her now-famous letter, in which she
expressed herself willing to talk about herself and her own attitudes
and activities, but not about others:
t
I am not willing, now or in the future,
to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past
association with them, were completely innocent
of any talk or any action that was disloyal or
subversive. I do not like subversion or disloyalty
in any form and if I had ever seen any I would
have considered it my duty to have reported it
to the proper authorities. But to hurt innocent
people whom I knew many years ago in order to save
myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dis-
141
honorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience
to fit this year's fashions...
She testified on May 21, 1952. When she was asked about her
imembership in the Communist Party, she denied that she had been a
j member for some years, and then took the Fifth Amendment when asked
i
about other years. The implication is that between 1937 and 1949, she
had been a member, but that she had not been from 1949 to 1951.
I
j Heilman always denied that she was a member of the Communist Party,
i
and would not even admit that she knew Hammett was a member. But the
I
evidence, while not conclusive, points definitely in the opposite
direction. Martin Berkeley, for example, became a friendly witness
before the HUAC; he testified that, in June of 1937, a group had met
at his home in Hollywood to organize the Hollywood branch of the
Communist Party. Heilman, Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, V.J.
Jerome, and Donald Ogden Stewart were there, among others, he said. In
her testimony before the HUAC, Lillian took the Fifth Amendment to
questions on this topic. The FBI claims that many of the organizations
she joined during the late 1930s were made up entirely of members of
the Communist Party. And several of those I interviewed about Lillian
I Heilman said they had seen her regularly at Communist Party meetings—
! too often to be just an interested observer, or someone's guest (these
people prefer not to be named, even now).
When Heilman's testimony was finished, she was excused, much to
her relief. Chairman Wood said, "Why cite her for contempt? After all,
, she's a woman.
I 142
Twenty years later, Bill Moyers asked her how she felt now about
those experiences. She said,
i
I
I Well of course it's such a complicated period,
because it simply wasn’t Joe McCarthy; everybody
now uses this word to sort of blame one man or
ten men or fifteen men. It was much more pervasive
than that. It even includes many, many liberals,
still living. And I suppose I feel more sharply
about them than I do about McCarthy...I had fool
ishly told myself that they would stand up in
such a period, and most of them did not.
She didn't write about this period until almost thirty years
later in her memoir, Scoundrel Time, and she never wrote a play about
it. "I’ve never known how to do it. It was a really clownish period.
It was full of clowns talking their heads off, apologizing, inventing
sins to apologize for. And other clowns, liberals, who just took to
the hills. Ugly clowning is a hard thing to write about. Few people
acted large enough for drama and not pleasant enough for comedy.
Heilman claimed in her memoirs that because of the blacklist and
I the uproar over her politics, she couldn't find work, and was
eventually so broke that she had to go to work at Macy's. According to
/ Q
William Wright, this is not true. But there's no doubt that her
career was damaged. She didn't work again in Hollywood for almost
| thirteen years.
j Ironically, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences asked
i
j her to present the Academy Award for Best Documentary on its 1977
| broadcast. She was given a standing ovation after she made comments
I
j
i
; 143
about how the Hollywood establishment caved in to McCarthy "like
mashed potatoes."^ In the audience, applauding her, were many who had
caved in in one way or another.
Throughout the whole ordeal, Hammett backed her up, and he was
immensely relieved when the Comittee decided to take no legal action
J
i against her. The cost for standing up for what they believed in was
I high: they lost Hardscrabble Farm, which Lillian had bought in 1939
i
with the profits from The Little Foxes, and which they both loved;
they were both in debt to the IRS; and they had lost their most
lucrative source of income. Hammett had spent time in prison, and both
of them had lived in fear for what seemed like years. But they refused
to give up their principles, and the play Lillian wrote that year, The
Autumn Garden, reflected their determination.
Lillian had been working on the play for months, since the summer
of 1950. It was almost finished, except for the speech by the retired
general at the end. She had written and rewritten it and rewritten it
again, but she just couldn’t get it right. One night, Hammett said,
"Go to bed and let me try." In the morning, she found the finished
|
‘ speech, which she used without changing a word, outside her bedroom
I
door:
That big hour of decision, the turning point
in your life, the someday you’d counted on when
you'd suddenly wipe out your past mistakes, do
the work you'd never done, think the way you'd
never thought, have what you’d never had, it
! just doesn't come suddenly. You trained yourself
for it while you waited— or you've let it all run
past you and frittered yourself away.
144
Hammett and Heilman obviously hadn't frittered it all away; and
they spent no time feeling sorry for themselves. Years later, in an
interview, Lillian was asked about the risks of being a writer; her
l
l
I response reflects her attitude not just toward writing, but toward her
! whole life: "You take your chances. The older I get the more convinced
; I am that if you pick a hard way, you pick it, that's all. And you
| might get walloped for it,— some people don't, some people do, but you
l f tf < ? 1
| understand at the beginning that s the way you picked.
| This sounds very noble, and is, in fact, an accurate portrayal of
one side of Lillian Heilman's personality. There is, of course, the !
less noble side, and over the past few years, there has been much
disagreement over Lillian Heilman's life. She has been accused of
manipulating the truth for her own ends, and every fact in her memoirs
t
has been called into question. Investigators have discovered numerous
discrepancies. Those who are willing to give her the benefit of the
doubt say that her memory must have been faulty; others are not so
forgiving. But while critics and biographers argue over her virtues
and faults as a human being, few deny her status as one of the best
American writers of this century.
] One of Hammett's greatest contributions to Lillian's life was
1
what he taught her about writing, not only by tutoring and supporting
her, but by his own example. During the first few years they knew each
other, Hammett was working on The Thin Man. At first he would
i I
I 1
i alternate bouts of writing with drinking binges, but eventually, when
he got down to serious work, according to Lillian,
145
Life changed: the drinking stopped, the
parties were over. The locking-in time had come
and nothing was allowed to disturb it until the
book was finished. I had never seen anybody work
that way: the care for every word, the pride in
the neatness of the typed page itself, the refusal
for ten days or two weeks to go out even for a
walk for fear something would be lost. It was a
good year for me and I learned from it and was,
perhaps, frightened by a man who now did not need
me. So it was a happy day when I was given half
the manuscript to read and was told that I was
Nora. It was nice to be Nora, married to Nick
Charles, maybe one of the few marriages in modern
literature where the man and woman like each other
and have a fine time together. But I was soon put
back in place— Hammett said I was also the silly
girl in the book and the villainess. I don’t know
if he was joking, but in those days it worried me:
I was very anxious that he think well of me.
It may have been partly this desire to have Hammett think well of
1 her, and partly boredom at being left alone, that made Lillian begin
I
j to write more seriously herself. During 1932, she collaborated on a
play with Louis Kronenberger called Dear Queen. ’ ’Dash used to say the
I
play was no good because Louis would laugh only at his lines and I
CO
would laugh only at mine.’ Hammett's judgment must have been right,
because the play was never sold.
In May of 1933, Hammett finished The Thin Man. Nick and Nora
Charles bore a striking resemblance to Lillian Heilman and Dashiell
i
I Hammett: "...all the women in it talked a little like Lillian, the j
' i
: banter of the hero and heroine was a little like talk between Lillian I
; i
i ;
• and Hammett, the drinking a little like their drinking, and the hero’s I
; i
i cynical and depressed attitude toward society quite a lot like j
Hammett’s own."~^ Albert Hackett and his wife, Frances Goodrich, wroteJ
! 146 i
the screenplay for the movie The Thin Man, and became good friends of
Lillian and Hammett. Hackett, too, noticed the resemblance between
Nora and Lillian: "Well, she was like Nora, because she was completely
jlike the idea— being feminine or coy or anything of the sort— you
can't imagine Lillian like that. She was more, saying, 'Those
cocktails. I think I’ll have those too.' Always with him [Hammett], I
think, she was never coy and simple, she was in there battling him all
the time, having her laughs...
If Lillian's influence on Hammett shows up in The Thin Man,
Hammett's influence shows up in just about every piece of work Lillian
did from this point on. As he was finishing his novel, Hammett gave
her William Roughead's book Bad Companions. He pointed out to her a
story about two headmistresses of a girls' school accused falsely by a
student of having a lesbian relationship, and told her he thought it
t
| would make a good play. He said he'd wanted to write it, but thought
j
ishe could make a better job of it. Lillian turned it into her first
successful play, The Children's Hour,
j Herman Shumlin produced and directed it, and it opened at Maxine
I
I
Elliott's Theatre on November 20, 1934. It was a smashing success, and
I
c/:
! ran for 691 performances. It was banned in Boston and Chicago, and
l
j performed only privately in London. The next year, it failed to win
jthe Pulitzer Prize (Zoe Akins's play, The Old Maid, won instead), thus
incensing the New York drama critics to the extent that they formed I
; their own prize-giving committee, The New York Drama Critics Circle, j
| i
i 1
[ |
147 ,
and gave it their own prize.Lillian was 29 years old.
Heilman acknowledged Hammett’s influence on her:
I His effect on me was enormous. I’ve long
i had a belief, which is very possibly not
! the truth, that, without Hammett, I wouldn’t
j have written. I've come to think, perhaps,
! that I would have written, but I would have had
j an infinitely greater struggle, and been less
i good, I think, without him. He taught me, in a
sense, to write. And beyond that which many
I people have done for many other people, he took
I chances that very few people will ever take,
; particularly with people they love. He told
the truth. When I did something he didn't like,
j he said it very bluntly and very sharply, and
he really didn’t give one damn if I liked it or
j didn't like it. And that, I think, is really the
j greatest gift anybody can give anybody."5
I
j In another interview, she again acknowledged her debt to him: ”1
I had stopped writing. I had decided I was not going to be any good and
j
j that I wasn’t going to be bad. It was he who teased me back into
1 CQ
writing, annoyed me back into writing, baited me back into writing."
Now that The Children's Hour was such a success, Lillian was
looking much more attractive to the studios than she had five years
before, as the unknown wife of a low-ranking screenwriter. When she
returned to Hollywood this time, it was to take a job not as a $50 a
week reader, but as a $2500 a week screenwriter, for Sam Goldwyn.
Sam Goldwyn, in 1935, was one of the most highly regarded
filmmakers in Hollywood. He made consistently high quality pictures,
i
1
and was one of the few studio heads to respect his writers. In fact,
I in 1935, the same year Goldwyn hired Heilman, he complained that
! 148
authors saw Hollywood as just a stopover between more important
projects, a place to make a few quick bucks. He argued that the movie
industry must "show writers that they can make as much out of a fine
picture as they would from a successful play."^® And he didn't mean
just money: he believed that the film industry could produce Art just
as well as Broadway, and was willing to pay top dollar for quality
; writers, directors, and cameramen. When he persuaded them to work for
i him, he was smart enough to let them do their work without a lot of
| meddling. Since interference and lack of respect were common
I
complaints at the other studios, writers who worked for Goldwyn were
considered luckier than most. Goldwyn's regard for his workers
extended even down to the commissary: he believed his employees
deserved the best, so he hired a top-level chef.^
Sam Goldwyn was not an angel, however, and not many people worked
for him long. He was demanding and had a fierce temper. And, like most
studio bosses, if Art conflicted with Business, he chose the
alternative that he thought would produce the greatest profits.
Heilman was one of the few writers to sustain more than a one-picture
relationship with Goldwyn. (Others were Frances Marion and Sidney
I
I Howard. ) Goldwyn usually didn't like to hire aggressive women (or
I
I
j aggressive men, for that matter), but he made an exception in
! Lillian's case, because she was such a good writer. But they
quarrelled constantly and loudly. She wasn't afraid to tell Goldwyn
1 that he didn't know what he was talking about, or even "to go fuck
himself." Both of them saw arguing as a sport, though, and they
149
developed a deep respect for each other. Before long, Lillian was
having lunch with Goldwyn frequently in his private dining room.
Lillian’s first assignment for Goldwyn was an adaption of Guy
Bolton’s drama, Dark Angel (it had previously been a silent film).
I
! Dark Angel was to star Fredric March and Merle Oberon, and would be
I
directed by Sidney Franklin. Goldwyn also assigned her a collaborator,
since she was inexperienced at screenwriting; Mordaunt Shairp was an
I
i
I English playwright. Working in collaboration was never Lillian s
strong point, and she, Shairp, and Franklin did not get along. Lillian
was irritated by story conferences which dragged on and produced
little, while Franklin complained that she would go to sleep while
they were trying to work. Finally, after repeated disputes, Goldwyn
pulled Shairp off the project. Lillian later claimed that ninety
per cent of the film was hers, with only a few suggestions from Shairp |
surviving into the final script.^
After Dark Angel was released, her contract had been renewed, and
Goldwyn had given her complete freedom to select whatever project she
wanted to work on. She chose her own play, The Children’s Hour. j
Goldwyn bought the rights to it for $50,000. Some of Goldwyn*s j
t
; colleagues warned him against buying the play. Merritt Hurlburd told j
! |
j him, ’ ’Forget it, Mr. Goldwyn. It's about lesbians.” Goldwyn replied,
j ’ ’ That's all right. We’ll make them Americans.Goldwyn got more
]
j trouble from the Hays Office, which warned him that, because of its
; 5
subject matter, they would refuse to approve it. Lillian suggested I
i
that she alter the story slightly, placing the emphasis on the i
I
150 ;
destructiveness of lies. It worked. The title was also changed.
Goldwyn wanted to call it Women Can Be Wrong, but Heilman held out
for, and got, These Three.
When These Three was released in February of 1936, starring
Miriam Hopkins, Merle Oberon, Joel McCrea, Bonita Granville, and
I
| Margaret Hamilton, it was an instant success. Audiences and critics
; loved it. This was the first of three films Lillian would make with
j director William Wyler and cameraman Gregg Toland. According to Axel
I Madsen, one of William Wyler's biographers, Heilman's influence on
Wyler "was in lifting his artistic sights and heightening his
awareness of himself as a creative person. Her integrity was an
example that was to give him the inner security to turn down second-
rate projects. Her complete devotion to her work made him demand more
1 of himself and his craft.
In an interview she gave in New York that year, she discussed
with Lucius Beebe her feelings about her work in Hollywood. As he
said, it gave her "the gripes." Lillian added,
Except the place isn't as bad if you're
working there. Of course, it's unbearable to
any civilized person as a mere visitor, but
with something to do it's no worse than being
in jail and working all day in the jute mill.
It keeps your mind off things. It still stands
as the most preposterous civilization of all
time, however, and in a way that's fascinating.
I mean, things like the elaborate and preten
tious dinner parties the film people give. You
find yourself twelve at a table with twelve
footmen and two major domos, and then food that
you'd throw right back at the counterman in a
dairy lunch is set before you with fancy gestures
151
and on gold plate. I've had tired old chicken
put in front of me by powdered flunkies out
there that they wouldn’t serve at a public
lunch for 5,000 people in New York.
She also spoke about writing for the screen:
i
t
i
I
You can say what you like in the theatre within
any reasonable bounds...and you can present an
idea for the consideration of intelligent aud
iences, which, of course, is completely outside j
! the gaudiest opium dreams of possibility in Holly- l
wood. They wouldn't know an idea if they saw it
on the Coast, and if by any chance they should
recognize it the film people would be frightened
right out of their suede shoes.
But no matter how gauche the company, how unpleasant the
ambience, how unappreciative of talent, the money was hard to turn
down, and Lillian kept coming back for more. Her third screenplay for
I
| Goldwyn was an adaptation of Sidney Kingsley's play, Dead End. Again,
I
J it was directed by William Wyler and shot by Greg Toland, and starred
Humphrey Bogart, Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea, Huntz Hall, and Leo
Gorcey. It was released on August 27, 1937, to very good reviews. The
movie got four Oscar nominations, for Best Picture, Best Supporting
Actress, Best Direction, and Best Art Direction, but won nothing.
Her next major film was another adaptation of her own play, The j
Little Foxes. Throughout the filming, Goldwyn referred to it as "The J
Three Little Foxes." William Wyler and Bette Davis, who was the [
i ;
i
i star, argued endlessly over how Regina should be played. Davis wanted J
! to play her as a straightforward villainess. Wyler wanted more '
I
152
subtlety: he wanted her to become a villainess gradually. They
compromised: Regina is not a villain at the start, but is quite
formidable. Bette Davis was always unhappy with this role, and said it
was her least favorite; but others have said it was one of her most
effective portrayals. Gregg Toland, the cameraman, used a technique he
had invented to make her performance even more striking: the deep-
focus technique permitted the camera to film one character close up,
sharply in focus, while showing another character reacting in the
background, out of focus (or vice versa). This was used very
effectively in the climactic scene: the camera remains on Regina,
sitting immobile, while in the background, Horace dies slowly because
she will not give him his medicine.
When The Little Foxes was released in August of 1941, the credits
listed ’ ’Additional Scenes and Dialogue by Arthur Kober, Dorothy
Parker, and Alan Campbell." The rumor was that they needed the money;
another rumor was that Alan Campbell’s career needed a boost. Both may
have been true, but Lillian did use their help. She had always had
trouble writing love scenes, and Goldwyn insisted that Regina's
daughter, Alexandra (played by Teresa Wright), be given one. The
finished film starred Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, Teresa Wright,
and Dan Duryea.
By 1942, the United States had entered World War II, and found
itself an ally of the Soviet Union. Since our government had only
recently (and grudgingly) resumed diplomatic relations with the USSR,
most people in the United States knew little about Russia, and didn't
153
much like what they knew. A series of public relations maneuvers
began. One of these was to approach Lillian Heilman, who had a well-
known affinity for the Russians, to ask her to write a film which the
i
I White House would then get one of the film studios to produce. The
' film was to be a feature film in the documentary style, and its
i
purpose was to make Americans like Russians better. The ironies of the
situation were not lost on Lillian, but she enthusiastically agreed,
and got William Wyler to agree to direct. The film, she told him,
I
j would dramatize Russian bravery in the face of the Nazis. Goldwyn
i
agreed to produce it, partly to indulge two of his best workers, and
partly to be patriotic— and if he could make a few bucks, what would
be the harm?
I
Lillian began working. She spent over six months doing research; |
f
her notebook, filled with 250 single-spaced typed pages, contained |
i
I
information on every aspect of Russian village and farm life. When she
began writing, everything was going smoothly. But then Wyler joined
the army. Lillian had heard of another director, Lewis Milestone, who
had been born in Russia and had directed All Quiet on the Western
Front; she requested that Goldwyn hire him to replace Wyler. Milestone
had reservations about working with both Goldwyn and Heilman, but took
j the job anyway.
j Their collaboration was a disaster. Heilman saw Milestone as an
1 egomaniac; he offended her by giving her pages of detailed notes
; j
! requesting script changes ("As it turned out," he said, "Lillian knew
nothing about Russia— especially the villages"^®), and Heilman I
; i
154 }
complained to Goldwyn about what she called his treachery; Goldwyn
raged at Milestone for upsetting Lillian. Lillian and Milestone
refused to see each other at all. Goldwyn, in an attempt to smooth
I
| things over and finish the project, had them over for dinner. The
j atmosphere was icily polite until Goldwyn sided with Milestone over
i
some script changes, and then Lillian exploded. She refused to do any
i
I
more work on the script, and refused also to work with Goldwyn again, j
(
I She ended up buying out her contract with him for $30,000. Although
I
I
changes were made later in the script, Lillian received sole
screenplay credit for the film, and she had her own version of the
script published.
The movie was released in October of 1943, and starred Anne
Baxter, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan, and Erich von
Stroheim. It was not favorably reviewed, and rightly so: in this case,
Lillian let her political convictions get in the way of art. The
dialogue is stiff and full of propaganda, and the characters are
sacrificed to the political message.
Ironically, this government-inspired picture was one of three
made in 1942 that was later accused by the government of fostering
j i
i communist propaganda. (The other two were Mission to Moscow and Sonfi |
I
| Russia) . I
j The last Hollywood project Heilman worked on was after the
| blacklist, in 1965. It was a film called The Chase, an adaptation of a
l
■ Horton Foote novel, which, despite a stellar cast (Marlon Brando,
I
' Robert Redford, Jane Fonda), did not turn out well. Heilman’s
l
155 !
experience working for the producer, Sam Spiegel, was so unhappy that
she vowed never to write for Hollywood again, and she didn’t. She told
an interviewer,
Decision by democratic majority of vote is a fine
form of government, but it’s a stinking way to
create. So two other writers were called in, and
that made four with Mr. Siegel and Mr, Penn, and
what was intended as a modest picture about some
aimless people on an aimless Saturday night got
hot and large, and all the younger ladies in it
had three breasts; and— . Well, it is far more
painful to have your work mauled about and slicked
up than to see it go in a wastebasket.
After this last foray into screenwriting, Lillian stayed home.
She spent her time seeing friends, cooking, teaching writing and
literature classes at Harvard and Yale, and writing her memoirs. An
jUnfinished Woman was published in 1969, Pentimento in 1973, and
I
Scoundrel Time in 1976. She also filed an inordinate number of
lawsuits about everything from showing her old movies on t.v. without
her permission to keeping biographies of Hammett, Dorothy Parker, and
herself from being written and published. She died on June 30, 1984.
I
* Right up to the end, she resisted the aging process and the death
that lay beyond it. She refused to get nostalgic about the old days;
she was more interested in the present and the future. Albert Hackett
said the thing she hated most about getting old was that she could no
longer see, and that this got in the way of reading, and more
importantly, writing. It was hard for her to change the habit of a
156
lifetime and dictate instead of using the typewriter— she would try it
* and get frustrated— but she worked as much as possible as long as she
I
i could. Writing was more important to her than anything. When she was
asked by an interviewer what she loved about writing, she said,
"Creating something, making something out of nothing, I suppose.
Worrying about it. Having something that is more to you than anything
else is to you. Living with it all the time. So many things, good and
bad."72
She still had guests frequently, up until the last couple of
years,and with them, she stuck to the old schedule she had perfected
years before at Hardscrabble Farm:
My friends come to stay and amuse themselves
any way they want to— most of them read. We meet
at meals. When I write I still leave myself plenty
of time around the meal hours; work three hours or
so in the morning, two or three hours in the
afternoon, and start again at ten and work until
one or two in the morning.
She was always looking for the ideal way to write— the secret
that would make it easy:
Once I decided that by working very slowly in
longhand I might be able to make each sentence
count and save in the rewriting time the time
that I'd spend brooding and choosing and selecting
the exact right word, the precise and revelatory
action. I fitted myself all out for this effort,
planning to write in bed as Proust did, and Mark
Twain, complete with drawing board and pencils and
fountain pens. I had to give it up. Writing in bed
was much too uncomfortable, and my hand went much
too slowly. I go wrong a lot on the typewriter,
157
but it is the best way for me..It is very difficult
to explain that one goes through a play with ela
tion, depression, hope. That is the exact order.
Hope sets in toward nightfall. That’s when you tell
yourself that you're going to be better the next
time, so help you God. I am not special in this:
I don’t believe there ever was a writer who was
satisfied with what he had done and who wasn’t
willing to kid himself he'd be a Dostoevsky the
very next time.
When she was asked in an interview in 1978 what she’d like for
the future, she said, "I suppose to live as long as possible, to live
as comfortably as possible, and with as much work as possible."^ When
she was asked how she'd like to be remembered, she said, without a
7 f\
moment’s hesitation, ”As a good writer.'
In an interview in 1951, Lillian Heilman said, "I don't think my
opinion matters much, but The Autumn Garden is, to me, my most
satisfying play— certainly it was in the writing.When it opened,
audiences and reviewers commented on the fact that it didn't seem like
"a Lillian Heilman play." And on a first reading, it does seem softer
in some ways, and it seems to have different thematic concerns and
subject matter than she has been concerned with in the past. In
response to questions about this, Heilman said,
I haven't been conscious of trying to do anything
different. You change and what you do changes with
it. I've always done what I was doing at the moment.
Perhaps, in the play, I've wanted to say that if
you've had something to stand on inwardly when you
reach the middle years you have a chance of being
all right; if you haven’t you live out your life.
158
As is usual when Heilman comments on her own work, this statement
i is frustratingly inarticulate. Luckily, her play has the clarity
lacking in her interviews.
The Autumn Garden is not actually that different from Heilman's
other plays. Most of the same thematic concerns appear, although some
are not as strongly emphasized, and her prose has the same tough,
spare quality. What gives the play its softer feel is the fact that
the characters are not in the middle of a major crisis. They are a
i
| group of people gathered at a boardinghouse in a small town outside
New Orleans for the summer. They have all known each other for some
time, and although they can be cruel to each other, they lack the
malignancy of, for example, Regina in The Little Foxes or Teck in
Watch on the Rhine.
The characters' motives are certainly not always selfless, but deceit
is not the central theme of the play. There is lying and trickery, but
much of it goes jon off-stage, as if to minimize its importance.
Frederick, for example, discovers that his "friend," Payson, was only
interested in his money. But the audience never actually sees Payson.
We are informed of the events through conversations between other
characters. The emphasis is not on how Payson deceived Frederick, but
rather on how Frederick allowed himself to be fooled. The theme of
self-deception is given more prominence in this play, and is
emphasized by what Mrs. Ellis tells Frederick after Payson's betrayal:
"Then understand that you've been the fool, not he the villain.
I The only character who constantly and deliberately deceives and
| 159
manipulates other people is Nick Denery. But even his motives are not
completely malicious. He does a lot of harm without intending to; most
of the time he has convinced himself that his motive is to help
others, or to set a situation right. He tells Constance that Crossman
is in love with her, and has been for years. Crossman told him, he
t says, that he has always regretted not proposing to Constance.
| Constance, who has always been a little in love with Crossraan, is
happily flustered. Later, Nick's wife challenges him. He admits that
Crossman never said any such thing, but says that he knows it's true.
"Look, it makes her happy— and if I can get a little sense into her
head it will make him happy. I don't have to have an affidavit to know
on
what's going on in the human heart."
Actually, what Nick enjoys is the power: he likes to get people
all stirred up and then leave while everything is in crisis; and this
gives him power over his wife, as well, who will feel obligated to
stay on and try to smooth everything over. His own motives, however,
are unclear to him, and he really doesn't see that his behavior runs
in patterns. When Nina complains of always having to pick up after
him, he says, "That's not true. You know this never happened before."
Nina replies,
Nicky, it always confuses you that the fifth time
something happens it varies slightly from the
second and fourth. No, it never happened in this
house before. Cora had a husband and Sylvia wanted
one. And this isn't a hotel in Antibes, and Sophie
is not a rich Egyptian. And this time you didn't
break your arm on a boat deck and it isn't 1928—
160
Other than Nick, those who lie mostly only try to fool
I
themselves. Rose Griggs doesn't want to admit that her husband wants a
divorce, so she tries to convince herself that he isn’t serious, as if
> by ignoring the situation, she can make it go away. She tries to
I
i ignore her illness in the same way.
Constance, too, fools herself. She has a vision of what the world
should be like, and doesn’t want to admit anything that would distort
that vision. She believes young people should fall in love and marry,
so when Sophie and Frederick announce their engagement, she assumes
they are in love. When she finds they are not, she is shocked. She
says to Sophie, ’ ’ When Carrie first talked to me about the marriage, I
asked you immediately and you told me you were in love— ...I don’t
£30
remember your exact words but of course I understood— She has
also fooled herself about Nick’s motives for years, because she does
not want to admit that he is less wonderful than she has always
thought he was:
CONSTANCE: It was twenty-three years ago, the
eighteenth of next month. I mean the night he
decided to go to Paris to study. Not so many young
men from New Orleans went to Paris in those days,
CROSSMAN: Just as many young men met rich young
ladies on boats.
CONSTANCE: (Sharply) He fell in love. People
can’t be blamed for changing their hearts— it just
| happens. They've had a fine marriage, and that’s
| given me happiness all these years.
! CROSSMAN: How do you know they've had a ’’fine”
marriage?
161
r
CONSTANCE: (Smiles) I know.
CROSSMAN: The rest of us don't know anything about
any marriage— but you know all about one you've
never seen. You're very wise, Constance. It must
come from not thinking.
Constance does think, but only allows thoughts which confirm her
vision. She is not a stupid or malicious woman, though, and when the
truth is made clear to her, she is able to admit she was wrong, and to
feel sorry for it. When Sophie finally makes her feelings clear,
Constance says, "I have been so wrong. And so careless in not seeing
it. She is also a compassionate woman, and when Crossman is
berating himself for not seeing the truth about his life, she soothes
him: "Never mind. Most of us lie to ourselves, darling. Most of us."®~*
Constance, however, does not clearly see the dangers of lying to
oneself the way Crossman does. He discovers that he has lied to
himself for years, and is overwhelmed by the waste he has consequently
made of his life:
And all these years I told myself that if you'd
loved me everything would have been different.
I'd have had a good life, been worth something
to myself. I wanted to tell myself that. I
wanted to believe it. Griggs was right. I not
only wasted myself, but I wanted it that way.
All my life, I guess, I wanted it that way...
I've kept myself busy looking into other people’s
hearts so I wouldn't have to look into my own...
And I've never liked liars— least of all those who
lie to themselves.
162
The implication is that, had he allowed himself to see the truth
years ago, he might not have wasted his life. And neither might
i
Constance: if she had let go of her romantic illusions about Nick, she
might have been able to fall in love with Crossman; now it is too late
for both of them.
The Autumn Garden was written in 1950, when Heilman was forty-
j five. Her life with Hammett was not going well, and her political and
I
financial troubles were looming on the horizon. She said of writing
the play, "You change and what you do changes with it. I've always
done what I was doing at the moment." There is a good chance that she
was taking a long, hard look at what she had done and been in her
life; the characters in this play are mostly middle-aged or older and
are going through the same process. The speech which Hammett wrote for
the last act of the play, and which is said by Griggs, sums it up:
So at any given moment you're only the sum of
your life up to then. There are no big moments
you can reach unless you’ve a pile of smaller
moments to stand on. That big hour of decision,
the turning point in your life, the someday you've
counted on when you’d suddenly wipe out your past
mistakes, do the work you'd never done, think the
way you'd never thought, have what you'd never had
— it just doesn't come suddenly. You've trained
yourself for it while you waited— or you've let
it all run past you and frittered yourself away.
Griggs and Crossman conclude that they have frittered themselves
away. Nearly everyone in the play has, because they've lied to
j themselves, they've let themselves be victimized: "Most people like us
I
! 163
haven't done anything to themselves; they've let it be done to them. I
had no right to let it be done to me, but I let it be done."®^
The only real exceptions are Mrs. Ellis and Sophie. Both are
j wise, Mrs. Ellis having acquired her wisdom through age, and Sophie,
1
I through experience. They don't lie to themselves, and the truth they
see is often unpleasant, and makes them ruthless; it also sets them
free— in conjunction with money.
Mrs. Ellis is old and wealthy. She holds the purse strings,
although she seldom exercises the power she has. But she sees through
Payson long before Frederick and Carrie do, and she threatens to
withhold their allowances in order to make them see the truth: "Yes,
old people are often harsh, Carrie, when they control the purse.
You'll see, when your day comes. And then, too, one comes to be bored
with those who fool themselves. I say to myself— one should have
power, or give it over. But if one keeps it, it might as well be used,
with as little mealymouthness as possible." She uses her money as a
weapon, to make Carrie and Frederick see the truth, and feels no guilt
about doing so: "There is no morality to money, Carrie, and very
immoral of you to think so."^
Sophie also sees things as they are. She does not fool herself
about anything. She intends to marry Frederick because that is the
only way she can acquire any financial stability. Frederick knows her
reasons and has his own. His homosexuality is hinted at throughout the
play; Sophie certainly knows of it. She is willing to give him a
I
| measure of respectability; in return, she expects only independence.
I
i 164
She regards marriage as a business transaction, and is slightly amused
when Constance is so shocked: "I think Aunt Constance is sad that we
do not speak of it in the romantic words of love."^®
When Sophie has her chance to get money in another way, she takes
I
! advantage of it. After Nick has spent the night in her room, she goes
; to his wife, Nina, and says that her injuries can be repaired by five
I
thousand dollars. Nina tries to be pleasant about it, and says she
will give Sophie the money because she wants to give it. Desperate as
Sophie is, she refuses to take it on those terms. She will not lie to
herself, and she will not let Nina lie to herself, either: "But I will
not accept it as largesse. We will call it a loan, come by through
blackmail." Nina objects to calling it blackmail:
NINA: (gets up) I would like to give you the
money. And I will give it to you for that reason
and no other.
SOPHIE: It does not matter to me what you would
like. You will give it to me for my reason— or I
will not take it.
(Angrily, NINA goes toward the door, goes into
the room, then turns and smiles at SOPHIE.)
NINA: You are serious? Just for a word, a way
of calling something, you would hurt my husband
and me?
SOPHIE: For me it is more than a way of calling
something.
I
NINA: You're a tough little girl.^
165
Sophie is a tough little girl. She has had to be. Sophie is a
type that Heilman clearly admires. She is not very likable, but she is
j a survivor: practical, clear-eyed, and not at all innocent. "I came
S from another world and in that world thirteen is not young. Like
I
| Mrs. Ellis, she realizes that softness and sentimentality are not
admirable traits and innocence is not a virtue. They are weaknesses to
be overcome before they damage you or someone else. Protecting people
from unpleasantness or unpleasant knowledge is not only foolish but
dangerous, because it allows them to make more and larger mistakes.
This is one of the themes Heilman writes into her screenplay
adaptation of Sidney Kingsley's play, Dead End. The play is set in New
York City during the Depression. A new luxury apartment building, the
East River Terrace, has been built in the middle of the slums, and the
tension between wealth and poverty provides the main theme of the
play. It is also the main theme of Heilman's screenplay, and she uses
it to branch out in other directions as well. Kay, in Kingsley's
j version, is a young woman who is being kept by a wealthy man who lives
in the East River Terrace. She meets a young man named Gimpty, an
unemployed architect, and they fall in love. But she cannot give up
the money so she breaks off the relationship. In the play, she is
horrified by the poverty in which Gimpty lives when she finally sees
his home; but we are told of her reaction through conversation between
Kay and Gimpty. The emphasis is not on Kay's reaction for its own
sake; rather, her reaction is used to emphasize the misery and
hopelessness of the poverty that exists.
166
In Heilman's version, Gimpty is named Dave Connell. Kay goes to
! his home one day looking for him, and the camera follows her and
I
J
j focuses grahically on the squalid details: the audience hears, as Kay
does, a nasty quarrel between a man and a woman over money, sees the
cockroaches scurrying about in the garbage-strewn halls, watches as
Kay inadvertently touches a wall and snatches her hand away from the
damp and mildew, and feels the same horror and distaste Kay's face
expresses. Dave sees her too, when he comes home unexpectedly, but
ashamed in the face of her obvious disgust, hides until she is gone.
Dave's reaction gives the audience a taste of the censure the poor
face every day.
This scene accomplishes two things: first, it exposes Kay's
t
innocence for the weakness it is. She has lived surrounded by this
kind of poverty all her life, but has never allowed herself to see it;
when it is forced on her, she flees. And second, it shows the kind of
I poverty about which Kingsley has written much more graphically than
his own play does.
Heilman is able to accomplish this partly because the medium of
film has some advantages over the stage: the camera can move around
i
more easily to different locations, and can focus on, and thus
emphasize, certain things and reactions. It can also take us to actual
places, while a play is limited to painted sets. But all of Heilman's
improvements cannot be attributed to the medium in which she was
working. She has given the story more focus and sharper edges, and the
characters more definition and stronger motivations. She has sifted
: 167
out all of the chaff; the points are made more clearly and the story
I moves faster in the screenplay.
Some of the changes she made were due to the constraints placed
upon her by Sam Goldwyn. For example, Goldwyn demanded a romance.
Heilman therefore emphasized the attraction between Dave and Drina
more than Kingsley had. She threw them together more, and she made
Drina's attraction to Dave more obvious. Goldwyn also demanded a happy
ending, so Heilman brought Drina and Dave together explicitly at the
end; in the play, a future for Drina and Gimpty is only hinted at.
j Some of the other changes Heilman made were due to the
I
constraints put upon her by the demands of a movie audience. Those who
go to see a movie want characters who are likable, to whom they can be
sympathetic. The audiences of the 1930s, especially, wanted a film to
have a hero. So Heilman made Gimpty into All-American Dave Connell,
who is not unemployed as the film opens, but is working in a menial
job rather than the career he's been trained for. He is much more
cheerful and optimistic than Gimpty, and his morals are not as
flexible. Drina is prettier than in the play, and she is introduced
earlier. In the play, the first time she appears she is breaking up a
fight, and acts and talks very tough. In the screenplay, we first see
her at home with Tommy, trying to talk him into avoiding bad
influences. She is obviously very worried about him, and is trying
desperately to figure out a way to get him into a better environment,
j Although both versions of this character are strong and independent
and determined to get the best for Tommy, the Drina of the screenplay
makes a better first impression and is more refined.
Heilman adds her own little touches to Drina to get the audience
in sympathy with her, too. As she is talking to Dave near the
I beginning of the film, for example, she kneels down, takes the old
!
j newspaper out of her shoe, and tears a new piece to fit. Nothing is
| really said about it, but her action lets the audience see how matter—
i
j of-fact and practical she is, and this adds to her appeal. Later, when
]
she lies to the cop, Mulligan, about knowing Tommy, she immediately
tells Dave she’s had a run-in with the police just that day on the
picket line, and shows him the wound on her head where one of them
clubbed her. The audience, instead of frowning on her for lying to the
police, sympathizes.
Although she made many of the changes because she had to, Heilman
was one of the few screenwriters in Hollywood to retain any
significant measure of control over her own work, so most of the
changes she made were of her own volition. She probably felt quite
comfortable working with Kingsley’s play, since his opinions about
poverty and its effects were similar to her own, and they shared
several thematic concerns. His subject matter was not pleasant, but
Lillian Heilman would have hated working on something like Camille; a
play with so much political and social content, in which the
J characters are hard and tough instead of sweet and sentimental, suited
! her much better.
As soon as she started her adaptation, she began inserting her
own characteristic details. Kingsley's opening description of the
setting is beautifully written but lengthy:
i
DEAD END of a New York street, ending in a wharf
over the East River. To the left is a high iron
gate leading to the back of the exclusive East
River Terrace Apartments. Hugging the terrace and
filling up the streets are a series of squalid
tenement houses. Beyond the wharf is the East
River, covered by swirling scum an inch thick.
A brown river, mucky with floating refuse and
offal. A hundred sewers vomit their guts into
it. Up-town of the wharf as we float down Hell
Gate, the River voices its defiant protest in
fierce whirlpools and stumbling rapids, groaning.
Kingsley's description, vivid and violent, goes on for over four
pages. Heilman's opening shots are of a fallen "Dead End" sign, a
skinny dog lapping from a stagnant pool, a policeman (Mulligan)
kicking a drunk sleeping in a doorway, and a well-dressed couple
passing through on their way to the apartment house. "As they enter
the service entrance, CAMERA TILTS UPWARD to show the apartment house
in its full splendor and we see the unashamed comparison between the
very rich and the very poor."^ To further heighten the contrast and
proximity of rich and poor, Heilman adds: "SHOT OF APARTMENT HOUSE
WINDOW. Clean expensive curtains outside the window of the apartment
house are being blown across until they almost touch (AS CAMERA PANS
OVER) the cheap, fancy, and incredibly dirty curtains in a tenement
window.Two or three shots later, "a servant is angrily tying back
i the clean curtains so that they cannot blow to touch (CAMERA PANS OVER
TO) the dirty ones."^ Despite the fact that plays and films are both
170
visual media, Heilman makes her point more visually, directly, and
quickly than Kingsley does. He relies heavily on a prose description
| to set the scene; Heilman, in just a few shots, accomplishes the same
thing.
Kingsley relies on the conflict between Philip Griswald and the
i
j poor kids to emphasize the contrast between rich and poor; Heilman
retains the conflict, and adds some shots which make the point even
more strongly: T.B. eating a roll while Dippy looks on hungrily; a
janitress stealing a biscuit from a child and greedily devouring it;
and Philip Griswald playing with his milk and finally pouring it out
over the plants.
Heilman also lays the groundwork for later events right from the
start; in Kingsley’s play, very often the reader is not prepared at
all. She also makes the motivations of the characters stronger and
clearer. For example, in the play, Spit turns Tommy in to the police
for the slimmest of reasons. In the screenplay, Heilman emphasizes
Spit's jealousy of Tommy from the start, and makes it much clearer
that Spit covets Tommy’s position as leader of the gang. In the play,
; Tommy catches him later on and plans to cut his face to mark him as a
squealer. No mention is made of this before it actually happens. In
the screenplay, however, the mark of the squealer is introduced very
near the beginning, in such a way that it is obviously significant.
There is a big scar on the face of one of the boys from the rival gang
who come to invite them to fight. After they leave, one of the boys
asks what it was:
171
T.B.
i It’s what you get when you squeals. So just keep
1 it in mind.
; TOMMY
(going back to the other poker game,
very importantly, very impressively)
Yeah. Just keep it in mind.
Because Gimpty is made into Dave, and because Heilman makes so
many changes in his character, his motivations are different than
J Gimpty's in the play. Dave is made a more attractive, better, stronger
♦
j person than Gimpty, and because he is the hero, he must never appear
weak or foolish to the audience. Therefore, his relationship with Kay
must be different as well. In the play, Gimpty is the one pursuing
Kay. He is hopelessly in love with her, and although he knows he
doesn’t have a chance, he keeps trying. In the end, she leaves him,
telling him it's for his own good as well as hers: "It’s not all
selfishness, Pete. I'm thinking of you too. I could do this. I could
go and live with you and be happy...and then when poverty comes...and
we begin to torture each other, what would happen? I’d leave you and
go back to Jack." Gimpty accepts what she says humbly: "It’s funny,
but you know, I honestly never expected anything. I didn’t. It was
really just a...whimsy I played on myself.
But the hero of a movie never gets dumped; he recognizes that the
girl is not right for him, and dumps her first— gently, of course. In
the screenplay, Kay loves Dave much more. But she is just as weak, and
when Dave sees her reaction to his poverty he knows this. After he
gets some money, she wants to go away with him; she says she will stay
172
with him for a year, until the money runs out. The audience has been
pulling for Drina all along. It is Drina, after all, who makes Dave
i
i
j see that he is being selfish, that he has become so obsessed with Kay
that he has lost sight of his ideals. He used to want to tear down the
slums because they were bad, she says. Now he wants to tear them down
because Kay doesn't like to look at unpleasant things. He is angry,
but eventually realizes she was right. The audience has known all
along that Drina is obviously a much better person. And sure enough,
Dave finally sees that too. He turns Kay down as kindly as possible.
In the play, Gimpty knew Martin years ago; they were in the same
gang. Gimpty grew up and went to college, but Martin went on to a life
of crime and is now wanted for the murder of eight people. When Gimpty
sees him on the street, he is friendly to him, and assures Martin that
he won't turn him in to the police. But in the end, desperate to get
money so Kay will go away with him, he turns Martin in for the reward.
He is ashamed, but tells himself it needed to be done anyway. Kingsley
puts much more emphasis on the power of money either to save or
corrupt. Gimpty and Spit both squeal on their friends for money;
Gimpty redeems himself by giving his money to help Tommy, but both
have betrayed for money those who trusted them.
In Heilman's screenplay, this theme must be sacrificed, because
Dave cannot be allowed to betray a trust. When he turns Martin in, it
is because he is trying to prevent a kidnapping; Dave only finds out
I
I about the reward after Martin is dead. Dave cannot be seen as weak, so
I
i
his motives must be purer.
173
In the play, Gimpty never openly confronted Martin. Dave, in the
screenplay, challenges him several times. The first is when he catches
;Martin teaching Tommy how to fight with a knife. He interrupts the
!
jlesson and warns Martin not to stay around too long. He makes his
I
dislike for Martin clear throughout the screenplay. Dave is the one
who eventually brings Martin down, as well. Gimpty, in the play,
informed the police where to find him, and then hid and watched while
they ambushed and killed him. In Heilman’s version, Dave overhears
Martin planning to kidnap Philip for ransom, and threatens to go to
the police. Martin knifes Dave in the back and throws him into the
river. Dave, although wounded, drags himself out of the river,
overpowers Hunk, Martin's bodyguard, and chases Martin into a
warehouse. They fight, and Martin escapes onto the roof. Dave follows
him and shoots him. Martin falls into the street, where, after he
tries to kill a policeman, he is shot to death by other police.
In the play, after Martin's death, Gimpty is relieved and guilty,
but also is anxious to collect his reward. In the film, Martin's
mother sees the body, and breaks down in tears. Dave, watching, feels
terrible about what has happened. He is bleeding and dazed, and it is
others who tell the police that he was responsible for catching
Martin. The police offer him the reward, of which he was unaware.
The screenplay version makes Dave into a hero. But Dave regrets
having caused Martin's death, not because Martin didn't deserve it,
but because he is thinking of what might have been. Both the play and
jthe screenplay make it clear that Martin's life need not have been
! 174
wasted, and that the real culprit is poverty.
In Kingsley’s play, Gimpty makes the point by analogy:
GIMPTY: Yeah, Drina, the place you live in is
awfully important. It can give you a chance to
grow, or it can twist you— (he twists an imaginary
object with grim venom)— like that. When I was in
school, they used to teach us that evolution made
men out of animals. They forgot to tell us it can
also make animals out of men... "Now men," says
Evolution, "now men"— (nods to DRINA, acknowledging
her contribution)— "and women...I made you walk
straight, I gave you feeling, I gave you reason,
I gave you dignity, I gave you a sense of beauty, I
planted a God in your heart. Now let's see what
you’re going to do with them. An’ if you can’t do
anything with them, I’ll take ’em all away. Yeah,
I'll take away your reason as sure as I took away
the head of the oyster, and your sense of beauty as
I took away the flight of the ostrich, and men will
crawl on their bellies on the ground like snakes...
or die off altogether like the dinosaur.
Heilman's screenplay makes the same point, but more directly, as
is her style. She prefers to address the issues head-on. When Drina
asks Dave where Tommy learned to use a knife, Dave responds bitterly:
DAVE
(look toward Pascagli’s)
He had an excellent teacher. Anyway, it’s not hard
to learn,— in a place like this...The famous Baby
Face Martin used to live on this block. He wasn't
a bad kid, either,— at first. He was smart and
brave and decent— at first...Oh, what chance have
they got against all this? They got to fight for a
place to play, fight for a little extra some
thing to eat, fight for everything. They get used
to fighting. Enemies of society, it says in the
papers. Why not? What have they got to be so
friendly about?
175
The timing of Dave’s speech— it is very late in the story, after
Tommy has cut a man with a knife and is being sought by the police—
emphasizes the damage that poverty can do to anyone much more strongly
than the play does. In the play, the Gimpty's speech occurs much
earlier, before any real trouble has happened, so the speech serves
more as foreshadowing; in the screenplay, it becomes commentary on
events that have already taken place.
Dave’s speech also helps to explain why Martin can't recapture
the good old days. Martin has come back to New York in spite of the
danger from the police because he wants to see his mother and his old
girlfriend. He is not happy with his life now, despite the fact that
he is rich, and he wants to recapture the past, which he remembers as
simpler, innocent, and happy. But his plan fails. His mother wants
nothing to do with him, and Francey, his old girlfriend, is no longer
sweet and innocent. She, too, has been corrupted by the poverty in
which she lives: she is a prostitute. In the play Martin is disgusted
when he discovers this:
MARTIN: Why dincha git a job?
FRANCEY: Dey don' grow on trees!
MARTIN: Why dincha starve foist?
FRANCEY: Why didnchou?100
He is even more disgusted when he discovers she has a venereal
disease.
176
j In the screenplay, the same events occur, but the situation must
I
be handled slightly differently. The censors would have balked at
passing a mention— even an implication— of v.d., so Heilman changes
Francey's disease to tuberculosis. Martin is just as repulsed by her,
although his reaction is fear more than disgust.
I
| Martin's meeting with Francey makes him finally realize that he
i can't go back. This is a theme Heilman is comfortable with, and she
gives Hunk a speech to emphasize it:
I told you we shouldn’t have come back. But you
wouldn't listen to me. You never listen to me.
(leans forward, shakes his finger with great
weight) Never come back. Always go forward...
I read that. You know where? When I was a kid.
My Ma bought it, a sign, I mean, in a store and
hung it up over my bed. (with satisfaction) I
always kept it in my mind.
It is too late for Martin. He can't get the past back and he
can't change what he is. But it is not too late for Tommy. The endings
of both the play and the screenplay hold out hope for his future.
Heilman's ending is more positive, because Dave and Drina declare
their love for each other, and Dave's ideals are all in the right
i place. They decide to go away after Tommy's legal troubles are
straightened out, "But only," Drina says, "if we don't forget all
this, and only if you'll come back some day and tear it down. The way
•j
you always wanted to." The fact that life has not really changed
for any of the other kids still condemned to live there is offset by
I Dave and Drina's happiness, and by Drina's hope for the future.
!
The ending of Kingsley's play is bleaker. After Gimpty, Tommy,
and Drina have left the scene, life goes on as before for the other
boys, as if nothing had happened. Gimpty and Drina go off to try to
help Tommy, but nothing is said explicitly about their future
relationship. They never plan to leave the neighborhood together, as
Dsave and Drina do; they know they will be there, trying to cope,
fighting constantly to protect Tommy. Gimpty has no high ideals and
ambitions left. While Heilman's screenplay leaves the audience with
hope, Kingsley's play leaves a feeling of exhaustion. Tommy might have
gotten out, but the other are still trapped. At the end of the play,
T.B., Milty, Angel, Dippy and the other boys are reminded by the smoke
rising from their fire of a song; the play closes as they sing it:
(ANGEL starts playing "If I had the wings of an
angel" on his kazoo.)
T.B.: Dat's right. Dat's it! (In a quavery voice he
accompanies ANGEL.) If I had de wings of a angel.
Ovuh dese prison walls I wud fly...(The others
join in, swelling the song.) Straight tuh dee
yahms a my muddah. Ta da da, da da...
The song makes inescapable their hopelessness. Heilman ends her
screenplay with the same song, and it is just as poignant. But because
of what has come before, the boys' song in her screenplay sounds
hopeful. This kind of ending gives Heilman's screenplay a softer edge
than most of her work has. Heilman surely didn't fool herself that
there was a bright future for these boys or the millions like them.
j But movie audiences, according to Sam Goldwyn, need a happy ending. So
j Heilman compromised: she gave Goldwyn his happy ending, but gave the
I slum boys the last word.
I
i
179
Heilman— Notes
■^Lillian Heilman, An Unfinished Woman (New York: Little, Brown
and Company, 1969) 30.
! Jackson Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Heilman (Jackson
! University Press of Mississippi, 1986) xv.
I
: ^William Wright, Lillian Heilman: The Image, The Woman (New York
■ Simon and Schuster, 1986) 14.
^Wright 15-16.
^Heilman, Unfinished Woman 47.
^Sheilah Graham, The Garden of Allah (New York: Crown Publishers
Inc., 1970) 61.
^Graham 48.
O
Bernard F. Dick, Heilman in Hollywood (East Brunswick, N.J.:
Associated University Presses, Inc., 1982) 18-19.
^Heilman, Unfinished Woman 52-53.
10Dick 20.
^ -^Heilman, Unfinished Woman 48-49.
12Dick 20.
1 O
Heilman, Unfinished Woman 49.
■^Heilman, Unfinished Woman 50.
■^Heilman, Unfinished Woman 50-51.
16Dick 21.
1 7
Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life (New York: Random
House, 1983) 94-95.
•^Heilman, Unfinished Woman 226.
■^Heilman, quoted in Nora Ephron, "Lillian Heilman Walking,
Cooking, Writing, Talking," The New York Times Book Review, 23
September 1973: 2.
Johnson 95-96.
2^Johnson 98.
22Diane Johnson, "Obsessed,” Vanity Fair, May 1985: 118.
09
Harold Clurman, "Lillian Heilman, A Woman in Search of Truth,"
Los Angeles Times 6 July 1969.
i 24Clurman 6 July 1969.
| 25Wright 64.
| ^Personal interview with Albert Hackett, 28 March 1985.
27Wright 283-284.
28Ephron 2, 51.
2^Graham 184.
30Wright 118.
O j
J William Alexander, Films on the Left: American Documentary Film
from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) 150.
32Graham 176.
33Joyce Haber, "Lillian Heilman Takes A Look At Today's Theater,"
Los Angeles Times 2 November 1969.
I 34Personal interview with Albert Hackett, 28 March 1985.
I *
o r
Johnson, Hammett 148.
38Personal interview with Mrs. Dale Eunson, 11 June 1985.
37Wright 144.
90
Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood:
Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979) 113-114.
^Alexander 190-191.
4<3Lillian Heilman, quoted in John Phillips and Anne Hollander,
"The Art of Theatre I: Lillian Heilman— An Interview," Paris Review,
Winter-Spring 1965, reprinted in Bryer 61.
4bright 211.
42Hellman, quoted in Wright 212-214.
181
48Ceplair and Englund 377.
44Wright 246-247.
4^"Meeting-Goer," Time, 2 June 1952.
4^Hellman, quoted in Bill Moyers, "Lillian Heilman: The Great
Playwright Candidly Reflects on a Long, Rich Life," interview telecast
on National Educational Television, April 1974, reprinted in Bryer
153.
4^Heilman, quoted in Phillips and Hollander 134.
48Wright 132.
49Wright 134.
■^Heilman, Autumn Garden, collected in Six Plays By Lillian
Heilman (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) 490.
■^Heilman, quoted in Robert Murray and Gary Waldhorn, "A
Playwright Looks At the Theatre Today", Yale Reports, 5 June 1966,
reprinted in Bryer 83.
CO
Heilman, Unfinished Woman 236.
Heilman, quoted in Phillips and Hollander 120.
^4Johnson, Hammett 108.
Personal interview with Albert Hackett, 28 March 1985.
c/:
Notable Names in the American Theatre (Clifton, New Jersey:
James T. White and Company, 1976) 815, 12.
c 7
Johnson, Hammett 118.
"^Heilman, quoted in Peter Adam, "Unfinished Woman," interview
broadcast on BBC "Omnibus," 8 February 1979, reprinted in Bryer 225.
“^Heilman, quoted in Marilyn Berger, "Profile: Lillian Heilman,"
interview broadcast on KERA-TV, Dallas/Fort Worth, 10 April 1981,
reprinted in Bryer 240.
60Dick 24.
61Dick 21.
ftO
Arthur Marx, Goldwyn: A Biography of the Man Behind the Myth
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1976) 312.
182
63Marx 275-276.
64Wright 108-109.
| ^3Wright 109.
I fie.
\ Axel Madsen, William Wyler: The Authorized Biography (New York:
j Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1973) 130.
i / C y
, Heilman, quoted in Lucius Beebe, "An Adult's Hour is Miss
! Heilman's Next Effort," New York Herald Tribune, 13 December 1936,
reprinted in Bryer 5-6.
^^Hellman, quoted in Beebe 4.
i ^Marx 5.
70Wright 186.
7^Irving Drutman, "A Stranger in the Theatre?" New York Times, 27
February 1966.
"7 0
Heilman, quoted in Lewis Funke, "Interview with Lillian
Heilman," in Playwrights Talk About Writing; 12 Interviews With Lewis
Funke (Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Co., 1975), reprinted in Bryer
105.
7o
Heilman, quoted in Robert Van Gelder, "Of Lillian Heilman:
Being A Conversation with the Author of Watch on the Rhine," New York \
Times, 20 April 1941, reprinted in Bryer 13.
74Hellman, quoted in Van Gelder 13-14.
73Hellman, quoted in Adam 230.
~7 f\
Heilman, quoted in Berger 273.
i 77Hellman, quoted in Ward Morehouse, "Garden Pleases Miss
Heilman," New York World-Telegram and Sun, 3 March 1951, reprinted in
Bryer 22.
73Hellman, quoted in Morehouse 23.
7^Heilman, Autumn Garden 458.
Heliman, Autumn Garden 436.
3^Heilman, Autumn Garden 478-479.
33Hellman, Autumn Garden 456.
183
83Heliman, Autumn Garden 414-415.
84Hellman, Autumn Garden 456.
85Hellman, Autumn Garden 494.
86Hellman, Autumn Garden 493-494.
87Hellman, Autumn Garden 490.
88Hellman, Autumn Garden 490.
89Hellman, Autumn Garden 444.
"Heilman, Autumn Garden 456.
91Hellman, Autumn Garden 485-486.
92Hellman, Autumn Garden 456.
93Sidney Kingsley, Dead End (New York: Random House, 1936) 11.
9^Lillian Heilman, Dead End, screenplay for Samuel Goldwyn
Productions, 1937.
93Hellman, Dead End 3.
96Hellman, Dead End 4.
97Kingsley, Dead End 136.
98Kingsley, Dead End 50, 52.
"Heilman, Dead End 152.
^ "Kingsley, Dead End 106.
101Hellman, Dead End 95.
" 2Hellman, Dead End 162.
[ ^-"Kingsley, Dead End 154—155.
L
184
CHAPTER 4— DOROTHY PARKER
Dorothy Parker never wrote an autobiography. Near the end of her
life, she tried to begin one, but filled it with fictional episodes
that bore no resemblance to reality. Perhaps she didn't think her life
was worth writing about. She never liked herself much, and thought
that very little of the work she'd done was really worthwhile. Yet her
i stories are moving, funny, and in many cases tell profound human
truths. In stories like "Big Blonde," "Horsie," and "Clothe the
Naked," she reveals a great wisdom about human nature. But she seems
to have been unable to apply that wisdom to herself.
Nearly everyone who has written about her life has noticed the
glaring contradictions in her. Leslie Frewin, one of her biographers,
says of her: "She appeared to be a social diptych, two images
uncomfortably posed side-by-side, each contemplating the other in
i distaste."-^ Or, as John Keats points out in less abstract terms:
This infinite woman seemed always to represent
matched opposites. Shy and retiring, she dominated
every room she entered. She made a great deal
of money but her purse was always empty. At the
time of her greatest wealth, she believed herself
to be a Communist. She hugely enjoyed her fame
and was bitterly derisive of it; well aware of
her power, she felt herself to be utterly help
less and useless. She was unhappiest when most
deeply in love; and while seeming to personify
the carefree exuberance of the twenties, she tried
to kill herself on at least two occasions.
185
It is impossible to sum up her life in a short sentence, or to
draw any positive conclusions about her motivations, because her
personality was always such a jumble of contradictions. Even most of
those who knew her well often found her puzzling, and one never knew
what to expect when she was around. One moment she was sarcastic and
witty, the next moment politely charming, the next in tears, and the
next bubbly and laughing. She would utter the deadliest insults in a
whispery, little girl voice. She would listen to someone attentively,
making him feel that his every word was the most fascinating thing
she'd ever heard, and when he walked away, she'd turn and say, "Oh,
God, these people bore me." She could be incredibly cruel to people
she knew, yet she devoted hours of her time and thousands of her
dollars to humanitarian causes about which she cared deeply. She loved
dogs, but often didn't treat her own very well. Albert Hackett said he
was afraid of her: he would never speak when she was around, because
O
he was afraid she would make fun of him. But Jay Dratler, a young
writer, and his wife, were friends of Parker; Mrs. Dratler said she
was older than they, and like a mother in some ways, always kind and
sweet to them.^ Alexander Woollcott called her a combination of Little
Eva and Lady Macbeth”*
Although she was often able to have a good time, to laugh and
entertain herself and others, she was deeply unhappy. According to
Henry Ephron, Parker hated her life. She died, he said, of
i "discaring. Sheilah Graham wrote of her, "I realize that she was a
I
very unhappy woman. She inhabited a vale of tears, and the only way
she could live with herself was to murder everyone else with her
biting words.
Dorothy Parker wrote of Katherine Mansfield, a writer she greatly
; admired,
i
She was not of the little breed of the discon
tented. Writing was the precious thing in life to
her, but she was never truly pleased with any
thing she had written. With a sort of fierce
' ■ austerity, she strove for the crystal clearness,
the hard, bright purity from which, she considered,
streams perfect truth. She never felt that she
had attained them.
Parker might as well have been writing about herself.
She was fascinated by death. At one point, according to Lillian
Heilman, she "had an amazing interest in mortuary magazines...Dorothy
was a great authority on embalming fluids and how everybody looked."^
She tried to kill herself three times, once by cutting her wrists, and
twice by an overdose of barbiturates. After these attempts failed, she
resorted to a slower, less obvious method, and spent the next thirty-
odd years drinking herself to death.
There is nothing in her early life that adequately explains such
deep unhappiness and self-hatred.
She was born Dorothy Rothschild on August 22, 1893.^® She was the
youngest of four children, having two older brothers and a sister. Her
father, J. Henry Rothschild, owned a garment factory and had a
doctorate in Talmudic studies. The family lived in New York City,
where they were served by a staff of five servants, and spent the
187
summers in West End, New Jersey. Her mother, Eliza, died in 1899, when
Dorothy was six, and she became withdrawn and depressed. Her father
j remarried shortly, and Dorothy hated her new stepmother, who was a
fervent Catholic and sent Dorothy to school at the Blessed Sacrament
Convent. The nuns there saw her as bright and quick, but rebellious
I
) and irreverent. She was angry at her mother for dying and abandoning
»
her, she hated her stepmother, and she hated her father for
remarrying. She always thought of him as a bully and a hypocrite. She
was ashamed of the fact that she was Jewish, and also blamed her
father for that. Finally, when she was thirteen, she was sent away to
school and unlike many girls her age, she was not at all sorry to be
leaving home. She became a student at Miss Dana’s School for Young
Ladies in Morristown, N.J. She stayed until she was 17, studying
Latin, Greek, art history, geometry, algebra, French, logic, physics,
psychology, chemistry, and music. There were lively weekly discussions
of current events, as well. She did quite well at Miss Dana's, and
graduated in 1910.
She returned home to live for a while, but the tension was too
great. Growing up had not changed her feelings about her family, and
I
she left home to live in a boardinghouse at 103rd and Broadway. For
eight dollars a week, she got her own room, breakfast, and dinner, and
most importantly, her independence.
j She would accept no money from her family, and found jobs to
support herself. Despite the squalid surroundings and the worries
about money, Dorothy was ecstatically happy. She wanted to be a
188
writer, and she spent most of her time at the boardinghouse writing
stories and verse. Some of the others who lived there shared her
I
! aspirations, and they would pool their money to buy a good meal once
in a while, and talk late into the night of art, literature, and their
' own work and dreams. When she finally managed to get some of her
1 verses published in Franklin P. Adams' "Conning Tower" column in the
New York World, they helped her celebrate.
Her real life had begun. She thought of her childhood as
! something to forget. When her father died on December 28, 1913, she
never acknowledged any of the sympathy cards she received. She refused
to go to his funeral. It was as if he'd never existed. But in a way,
his death set her free: a week later, she went to Frank Crowninshield,
the editor at Vanity Fair, and asked for a job. She had met him once
before, when he had published one of her poems for $5.00. He had
nothing for her at Vanity Fair, but gave her a staff job at Vogue, for
$10 a week. Even though the pay (for both the poem and the job) was
tiny, Dorothy was elated. She was working for one of New York’s top
magazines as a writer. So what if she was only writing captions? It
was a writing job, wasn't it?
Frank Crowninshield kept an eye on her, sensing her talent, and
soon moved her up to a job at Vanity Fair and gave her more to do. She
wrote poetry and prose, as well as captions, and collaborated on a
book with Crowninshield and George S. Chappell called High Society.
She got free passes to first nights and openings. Her social calendar
\
I
was full. She was very busy and very happy.
189
One of her friends introduced her to a young Wall Street
investment broker from Hartford, Connecticut, Edwin Pond Parker II. He
was 6'2", lean, well-mannered, in his early twenties, and came from an
upper-crust Gentile family. Despite the fact that they seemed to have
; little in common, Dorothy fell in love with him— maybe because he
t
j represented the opposite of everything she’d hated about her father.
His only obvious flaw— the fact that he drank a bottle or more of
whisky every day— she ignored. She was too deliriously happy to be
bothered with such details. She spent as much time with him as she
could. They were married in June 1917.
World War I was underway in Europe, and U.S. involvement seemed
imminent. When Parker joined the Thirty-third Ambulance Company as a
driver (along with other volunteers such as Ernest Hemingway, e.e.
cummings, and John Dos Passos), Dorothy was furious and terrified. She
would be sweet one moment, a shrew the next: How could he leave her
when she loved him so much? Stay, and she’d make him so happy. If he
I
really loved her, he’d stay. Fine. If he didn’t love her, he could go.
’ ’ The Lovely Leave” is an accurate description of the mess they usually
made of what little time they did have together. When he was sent to
France in June 1918, Dorothy wrote him numerous letters— sometimes as
many as three a day— and tried to immerse herself in her work. When he
was finally sent home in 1919, he had a difficult time readjusting to
! civilian life. While she was glad to have him home, Dorothy could not
hide her resentment that he’d gone in the first place and that he
seemed so distant from her now. He resented the fact that she was so
190
successful and that her career took up so much of her time. He drank
too much, she nagged too much, and their marriage disintegrated.
1 As life at home became more and more unbearable, Dorothy spent
more time with her new friends at Vanity Fair. Robert Benchley had
j been hired as managing editor in June 1919, and Dorothy was strongly
attracted to him. He was a highly literate man, with a fondness for
understatement, a gift for satire, an irreverence of authority, and a
cynicism about life that she found fascinating. At about the same
time, Robert Sherwood became the new drama editor at Vanity Fair. He
had a quick, sharp wit, and the three of them became close friends.
They would have lunch together, usually at the Algonquin Hotel. They
always ordered the cheapest dishes on the menu, since the Algonquin
was not cheap— scrambled eggs, hors d'oeuvres, coffee. Members of the
editorial staff of H.L. Mencken's magazine, Smart Set, also lunched
there, along with members of the theatre crowd. Frank Case, the owner,
soon got into the habit of reserving the largest table for Benchley,
j Parker, and Sherwood, who were joined by others such as Franklin P.
Adams, Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross, George S. Kaufman, and Donald
Ogden Stewart. Murdock Pemberton, another member of their circle,
I
christened the group "The Round Table at the Algonquin," even though
at this point, the table was still long and rectangular. But Frank
Case knew a good public relations tag when he heard it, and he got
them a round table to help the legend along.
Dorothy Parker was one of the few women who was a permanent
member of the Round Table. Others dropped in occasionally, but they
191
couldn't keep up with the speed of the conversation. Dorothy hid her
sharp mind and tongue behind a demure facade, as Conde Nast recalls:
...her figure was slight, her eyes, with their
tranquil and intensely thoughtful expression, a
curious mixture of hazel and green. She wore her
brownish-auburn hair in a bang and with, very
often, a bun at the back. She was reticent, self-
effacing, and preternaturally shy...She wore
horn-rimmed glasses, which she removed quickly
if anyone spoke to her suddenly. She had, too—
perhaps as a result of nervousness— a habit of
blinking and fluttering her eyelids. She had a
fondness for the perfume Chypre, and for flat-
heeled shoes, sometimes for black patent-leather
pumps with black bows. She walked, whatever her
shoes might be, with short, quick steps. Her suits,
in the winter at any rate, were tailor-made. Her
hats were large and turned up at the brim. Green,
as a color, seemed to appeal to her greatly,
whether in a dress, hat or scarf.
Dorothy, Benchley, and Sherwood did not limit their socializing
and quick wits to the Algonquin, however, and their work habits became
erratic. Dorothy was fired from Vanity Fair on January 24, 1920;
Benchley and Sherwood resigned in protest, and left in March. Being
fired was quite a blow to Dorothy's ego, but she recovered when she
and Benchley opened an office and decided to write freelance. Dorothy
recalled, "He and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it
would have been adultery. We had Parkbench as a cable address, but no
1 9
one ever sent us one." They had to close the office before too long,
though, because they couldn't get much work. Eventually they both were
hired to write humorous theatre pices and reviews for Life.
She separated from Parker at about this time. Although their
192
divorce did not become final until 1928, she had almost nothing to do
j with him anymore, and she certainly didn’t curtail her social life.
j After all, it was the Roaring Twenties, and having fun was the most
important thing. ’’ Certainly, they embraced the Roaring Twenties for
the fun-loving hell of it, giving the parties, setting the pace,
telling and retelling the jokes, pulling the pranks, ignoring the
1 9
future. Worrying was no part of their lives.' Later, Dorothy Parker
said of this time,
Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she
said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got
around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee!
We're lost.' Perhaps it suddenly brought to us
the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. Silly
of me to blame it on dates, but so it happened to
be. Dammit, it was the twenties and we
had to be smarty. I wanted to be cute.
That's the terrible thing. I should have had more
sense.
Actually, in some ways, Dorothy was handling herself well. She
and Benchley went to speakeasies and drank, but they seldom got drunk-
-it was too hard to be witty after too many drinks. In other ways,
however, she was not being very smart. She met Charles MacArthur and
they began a short affair. But for Dorothy, the length of an affair
had nothing to do with its intensity; she always fell deeply in love.
This time, she was careless not only with her emotions: she got
pregnant. MacArthur refused to marry her, so she had an abortion.
MacArthur was not around much to help her through this, and between
her guilt and her broken heart, she was a wreck. She began drinking
heavily, and one night, in her hotel room, she cut her wrists with one
of Eddie Parker's old razor blades. A bellhop found her and she was
rushed to the hospital. By the next day, she was making jokes about it
to her visitors.
After her release, she kept busy: she wrote the lyrics for a
revue, Round the Town, which opened at the Century Roof Theatre on May
21, 1924. It ran for only 13 performances, though.^ She also
collaborated on a play with Elmer Rice called Close Harmony. It opened
at the Gaiety Theatre on December 1, 1924, but ran for only 24
performances,^ She worked with George Kaufman on a movie short which
they sold to Paramount, called Business is Business. The movie was
made, but like so many silent shorts made in the 20s, it has
disappeared. By the mid-1920s, aside from the plays, she had written
nearly 130 prose pieces and nearly 70 poems for Life. She also had a
monthly column, and contributed to the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies'
Home Journal, and Everybody’s.
But it wasn't enough. In 1925, she again tried to commit suicide,
this time by barbiturate overdose. Robert Benchley found her in time,
and she was brought back to life again. She was not happy about being
saved, but as usual, she covered up with jokes and witticisms.
Her friends all knew she needed help, but they didn't know how
to help her. A trip was the best they could do, so Dorothy sailed for
Europe with Benchley and Donald Ogden Stewrat, to be a guest of Gerald
and Sara Murphy at the Villa America at Cap d'Antibes. She was going
to work hard and write a lot, she vowed over and over. But the Murphys
194
gave excellent parties, and the temptation was just too much for
Dorothy to resist. She did very little work. Instead, she socialized
i and drank heavily. She met, among others, Hemingway, whom she
(
{ admired,and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she did not,
i
j Back in the U.S. the next year, Benchley decided to take a job in
Hollywood. Dorothy helped his other friends give him a farewell
! party. Although he didn't relish the thought of living in California,
he needed the money. He was right: he didn't like Los Angeles. A few
weeks later, he wrote to Dorothy, "Hollywood is seventy-two suburbs in
search of a city."^
Dorothy missed him, but he made trips back to New York
asfrequently as possible. Once, at a party which bored her, she went
to the guest room, got pen and paper and wrote a note to Benchley
across town in Manhattan: "Send cake. And for heaven's sake, enclose
file and saw."^®
In 1927, Dorothy became Constant Reader for the New Yorker. Every
week from October 1927 through May 1928, she wrote book reviews. Her
column, because of its wit, and occasionally its viciousness, became
! extremely popular, and extremely powerful. She wrote some of her most
famous lines for this column. "Theodore Dreiser/Should ought to write
nicer" she wrote of his novel Dawn.^ The Autobiography of Margot
Asquith, in four volumes, boxed, inspired: '"Daddy, what's an
optimist?' said Pat to Mike while they were walking down the street
together one day. 'One who thought that Margot Asquith wasn't going to
write any more,' replied the absent-minded professor, as he wound up
i
i 195
the cat and put the clock out.'
In 1929, she won the 0. Henry Memorial Prize for Best American
I
; Short Story for "Big Blonde," and she’d had two volumes of poetry
published in the last two years, Enough Rope and Sunset Gun. But her
drinking was beginning to affect her work: she missed deadlines,
failed to fulfill promises to editors, procrastinated. Her volume of
sketches and short stories, Lament for the Living, was published in I
1929, but her publisher, George Oppenheimer, had to lock her into a
room with a bottle of whisky to make her correct the proofs. She hated
herself and felt guilty about betraying her talent. Another romance
had just ended, and the combination of failures was too much for her.
She checked into the Lowell Hotel and took an overdose of Veronal
tablets.
Once again, she was found just in time. The next day, Benchley
visited her in the hospital and told her, "Oh, Dottie, if you keep on
91
committing suicide you're going to injure your health permanently!"
Dorothy joked about it, too. According to Lillian Heilman, she
apologized for missing a dinner date that night by explaining that
92
suicide was more fun than having dinner with that particular man.
This time, she spent nearly a year with the Murphys in Europe.
She rested, tried to work, and drank.
She returned to New York in 1931 and began making the rounds of
I j
j parties again. At one of them she met a young actor and began seeing
I
! him. His name was Alan Campbell. He had graduated from the Virginia
Military Academy, and was very handsome. He was younger than she, but
196
L _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 1
they had a lot in common and enjoyed one another's company. Campbell
was bright, witty, extroverted, and flamboyant. He had expensive
i
tastes and liked high living, good food, nice clothes, and parties.
| Dorothy thought he was "fun." He was also bisexual, but Dorothy
I
j refused to look at the problems that could cause in the future. She
thought he could cheer her up, and she threw herself into this affair
with her usual abandon. In a short time, Campbell had moved into her
apartment and become her "assistant." He cooked, did the laundry,
acted as her secretary, paid the bills, cleaned, walked the dogs
(Dorothy always had two or three, sometimes as many as six little
dogs, mostly poodles), and generally made himself indispensable.
According to Laura Kerr, Lillian Heilman hated Alan Campbell— she
on
thought he wasn't good enough for Dorothy. And it is true that he
used her, but he was also good for her. According to Donald Ogden
Stewart, "He took her and probably kept her living...Alan was an actor
and he may have been playing a part which, little by little, took
o /
over, but he wasn't a villain. He kept her living and working." She
still drank too much, but there were no more suicide attempts, and he
encouraged her to write.
I
j When she was offered a job writing in Hollywood, he also
encouraged her to accept it. She was not thrilled about the idea. She
had been to Hollywood before, for three months in 1929. She had needed
money and had decided to accept a contract from MGM. Other old friends
had already gone— Donald Ogden Stewart, George Kaufmann, Charles
MacArthur, and Benchley— so at least she would know people there. She
197
travelled four days and nights on the train to get there, and was
I
| given a cubicle in which she read scripts, did rewrites, and wrote
treatments from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. She hated it, but stuck it out for
the money. She couldn't wait to get back to New York.
But Alan said it would be different this time. They would be
together, and they could write together, too, and he could make it
easier for her. And they could certainly use the money. Finally he
| convinced her, and they worked out contract with Paramount to write,
I
J jointly, six pictures, for $5200 a week, each. Paramount would never
I
have paid that much for Campbell alone; but if they had to take him to
get Dorothy Parker, it was worth the money.
Alan Campbell had no grandiose literary illusions. He was not out
to write the Great American Screenplay. He just wanted to go to
Hollywood and get rich and famous. He loved the idea of being on the
inside of the movie industry, and had fantasies of belonging to the
world of movie stars.
When they got there and began working, though, it was not quite
all that he'd dreamed. The movie industry does not look nearly as
glamorous from the inside as it does from the outside, especially when
you are a well-paid but powerless writer with the reputation of a
gigolo. But it was still good enough: Alan adjusted his dreams a bit
and got on with the work— and badgered Dorothy until she did, too. He
turned out to have a talent for screenwriting, and they made a good
team.
When Dorothy and Alan came to Hollywood in 1933, the future
198
seemed so bright— and it was, for a time.
' They lived at the Garden of Allah. On weekends they played golf
| and went shopping (Dorothy spent most of her money on hats and
j incredibly expensive lingerie). In the evenings they went to parties
|
given by various friends. She spent a lot of her time with Lillian
Heilman. They had met in New York, and Hammett had taken an immediate
dislike to her; but she and Heilman became quite close. She was also a
frequent guest at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, until she wrote a verse
about William Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies:
Upon my honor,
I saw a Madonna,
Standing in a niche,
Above the door,
Of a prominent whore
Of a prominent son of a bitch.
Dorothy and Alan also spent time with Henry and Phoebe Ephron.
Nora Ephron, their daughter, recalls,
One night, it seems, Dorothy Parker was playing
anagrams at our home with a young writer named
Sam Lauren. Lauren had just made the word 'currie,'
and Dorothy Parker insisted there was no such
spelling. A great deal of scrapping ensued.
Finally, my mother said she had some curry in
the kitchen and went to get it. She returned
with a jar of Crosse and Blackwell currie and
showed it to Dorothy Parker. 'What do they know?'
said Parker. ’Look at the way they spell Crosse.
Years later, during the 1960s, Dorothy and Alan weren't so ;
I
entertaining. According to Henry Ephron, they would drop in about 9:30j
199 |
or 10:00 p.m., and drink. Both would get so drunk that they'd have to
be driven home— but not together. Phoebe would have to drive Alan and
27
j Henry would have to drive Dorothy.
!
| There was always a dark side to all their gaiety. Dorothy and
I
j Alan gave a party during the late 1930s; among the guests were Robert
Sherwood, who was by this time a leading playwright and had received 2
Pulitzer Prizes, and Robert Benchley. Benchley had too much to drink,
and pointing dramatically to Sherwood, staggering a little, he
declared, "Those eyes— I can't stand those eyes looking at me! He's
looking at me and thinking how he knew me when I was going to be a
n o
great writer...and he's thinking, now look what I am!
None of them were that proud of what they'd become:
One evening they were sitting around at the
Garden [of Allah]— Charlie [Butterworth], Benchley,
Dorothy, and Dusty [Negulesco], The two men and
Dorothy were lamenting their fate in Hollywood. Bob
was then appearing in County Fair. 'Here I
am,' he said, 'the man who was going to write the
life of Queen Anne, doing square dancing and
walking between sandwich boards.' Said Miss
Parker, 'Here I am, taking instruction in writing
from Gregory Ratoff.' Butterworth said soberly,
'And me, if I don't step over the white mark [to
keep the actor stationary for the camera], it's
a good performance.' y
Dorothy Parker always affected to hate everything about Los
Angeles. She liked the money, but
Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow,
melts in your hand, and there you are. I can't
talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when
200
I was there and it's a horror to look back on. I
can't imagine how I did it. When I got away from
it I couldn't even refer to the place by name.
'Out there,' I called it. You want to know what
'out there' means to me? Once I was coming down
a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac
about a block long, and out of the side window
was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at
the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove
wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a
bagel with a bite out of it.
But Dorothy didn't hate Los Angeles as much as she pretended.
Mrs. Jay Dratler (now Mrs. Dale Eunson) met her at Joan Crawford's
house. Dorothy would sit in a corner knitting, watching everything
that went on, "and she loved it. I think she loved Hollywood. She
i
loved all the falseness about it, it was fascinating, and it was good
0 * 1
copy." Sam Marx, who was story editor at MGM while Dorothy worked
there, said, "Most of the negativity Dottie expressed about Hollywood
had more to do with keeping her vitriolic image going for the public
O o
than anything else." According to Christopher Isherwood, "She
complained about Hollywood the way English people do about the
weather.
I Working at the studios was not all bad; she and Alan managed to
I
have some fun there. She had lunch every day at the crowded writers'
table at MGM, when she worked there during the late thirties, along
with Sid Perelman, Herman Mankiewicz, Benchley, Butterworth,
Hammerstein, Donald Ogden Stewart, Eddie Chodorov, and Scott |
!
Fitgerald. They played a dice game to see who would pick up the check. I
i
; Manckiewicz, hoping to make a little money on the side, offered to
insure anyone for five dollars against being stuck with the bill. "One
week, a 'client' lost consistently, and it cost Mankiewicz two hundred
A /
dollars.' Kyle Crichton reported seeing Dorothy in a car parked in
I
I front of a supermarket in Hollywood. He leaned in the window and
j asked, "How do you like it out here?" Dorothy answered, "Oh, it's all
right. You make a little money and get caught up on your debts. We're
q c
up to 1912 now..."J She would stand by her window in the Thalberg
building and look out at the cemetery next door, and ask passing
strangers, "What's it like over there?"^
But no amount of joking could erase the fact that, while she
didn't hate Hollywood as much as she said she did, she truly hated
screenwriting. Of course, Dorothy hated any kind of writing, but
writing for the studios had extra negatives attached. When an
interviewer asked her what the evil was in Hollywood, she said,
It's the people. Like the director who put his
finger in Scott Fitzgerald's face and complained,
'Pay you. Why, you ought to pay us.’ It
was terrible about Scott; if you'd seen him you'd
have been sick. When he died no one went to the
funeral, not a single soul came, or even sent a
flower. I said, 'Poor son of a bitch,' a quote
right out of The Great Gatsby, and
everyone thought it was another wisecrack. But it
was said in dead seriousness. Sickening about
Scott. And it wasn't only the people, but the
indignity to which your ability was put. There was
a picture in which Mr. Benchley had a part. In it
Monty Woolley had a scene in which he had to enter
a room through a door on which was balanced a
bucket of water. He came into the room covered
with water and muttered to Mr. Benchley, who had
a part in the scene, 'Benchley? Benchley of
Harvard?* 'Yes,' mumbled Mr. Benchley
and asked, 'Woolley? Woolley of Yale? *
202
Even your own work is not really your own: "I tell you, nobody
can do anything alone. You are given a script that eight people have
written from a novel four people have written. You, then, they say,
write dialogue. What a curious word! Well, you know, you can’t write
dialogue without changing scenes. While you are doing it, eight people
! back of you are writing beyond you. Nobody is allowed to do anything
alone.”38
Perhaps the greatest sin, in Dorothy’s eyes, was that Hollywood
people had no sense of humor. Once she was working on a Cecil B.
DeMille picture called Dynamite. ’’ Dottie told us she wanted to call it
Dynamite, _ILove You. But C.B* had absolutely no sense of humor. He
said, 'This is a very serious picture.'”3^
Dorothy was unable to take anything about Hollywood completely
seriously. She even poked fun at her own profession: "We are not
authors, we're just workers. Of course our craft is a respectable one,
just as the carpenter’s craft, for instance, is respectable. You see,
writing for films is just like doing crossword puzzles— except that to
I
do crossword puzzles you have to have a certain knowledge of words.
But in the early days they were still optimistic. In 1933, when
they first came to Hollywood and stayed at the Garden of Allah, they
found quite a few of their friends there: John McClain, Eddie Mayer,
John O’Hara, the Hacketts, Charlie Butterworth, Alex Woollcott, Orson
Welles, Marc Connelly, and of course Robert Benchley. Mike Romanoff ;
j
spent a lot of time at the Garden of Allah visiting his friends, and j
I when he decided to open a restaurant, Dorothy, Benchley, Jock Whitney i
and John O'Hara all chipped in money to back him. Romanoff's was on
North Rodeo Drive, north of Wilshire Boulevard, and became one of the j
! most exclusive restaurants in Los Angeles.^ There were always parties
at the Garden of Allah. They began early in the afternoon and
j continued on through the night, nearly every day. People visited back
J and forth continually. Dorothy and Alan would have guests over in the
evenings sometimes. Dorothy and Marc Connelly loved charades. One
night, Sheila Graham acted out Picasso's Blue Period, and Dorothy
/ A
guessed it. Or sometimes they would visit George Oppenheimer for
breakfast on the weekends. One Sunday morning, on the front page of
the paper, there was a picture advertising the circus, of three
elephants standing on hind legs, one dressed as a bride, one as a
groom, and one as a priest. Dorothy took one look, tossed the paper
| / Q
aside, and said, "I give it six months.'
Oppenheimer was one of their closest friends, and he knew how
unpredictable Dorothy could be. "Being friends with Dottie," he said,
"was like living on a volcano.He knew firsthand that Dorothy was
not one to spare even her friends her wit. Her apartment was right
below Oppenheimer's, and one evening she was having some people in for
drinks when there was a loud crash from above. "Pay no attention," she
told her guests. "It's only George Oppenheimer dropping a name."^“* j
Living at the Garden was one joke after another. Dorothy even had rugsj
made for either side of her bed with raised chenille letters that '
li f i i ‘
spelled "WELCOME." Even the employees were interesting. Ben the
I
j I
! Bellboy knew where everything was. Once Dorothy asked him to go to j
Schwab’s and pick up some Scotch for her. He said, ’’ But you have some.
There's Scotch in your underwear drawer.” She checked, and he was
right.47
The Garden of Allah became famous. The stories were often better
than the reality, hoewever. Alan Campbell told Charles Champlin, a
columnist for the Los Angeles Times,
Despite the legend, the Garden was a pretty
uncomfortable place. The rooms were dark, the
tapestries were dingy, the furniture ugly and
the beds were hard. But there were in those days
only two places for transients to stay, the
1 Garden and the Beverly Hills Hotel. And Dottie
always called the Beverly Hills the place the
elephants go to die. So we stayed at the Garden
until we bought a house.
Alan’s snobbery is showing here. There were many more than two
places for transients to stay, of course; but the Beverly Hills Hotel
and the Garden of Allah were two of the most stylish— and the most
expensive. Something had to support that life style; someone had to
work occasionally. And although one would never know it by reading the
stories written by all of the Garden's residents later on, they all
worked hard— especially Dorothy and Alan. During the time they spent
in Hollywood, they worked on dozens of scripts. Dorothy may have had a
drinking problem, but it could not have affected her work much during
the 1930s, because she was still able to command salaries in the
$5000-$10,000 range during those years. Studios didn't pay that kind j
of money for long to someone who couldn't produce, no matter what her
205
name was.
She and Alan made a good writing team. They bickered constantly. |
i
I Albert Hackett recalls that during the late 30s he and his wife,
!Frances Goodrich, were working at MGM, and their office was next door
jto Dorothy and Alan's. Dorothy would sit near the door and wait for
I someone to come up the stairs and then try to engage him in
converstaion, so that she wouldn't have to work.^ Alan would try to
make his wife pay attention to what they were supposed to be doing,
and she would insult him. But they always quarrelled, even when they
were most deeply in love, and it didn't seem to get in the way of
their work. In fact, Alan nagged and cajoled and insulted Dorothy into
a discipline she would not have had otherwise. She certainly produced
more work when he was with her than when he was not.
But work never agreed with Dorothy, and the more they worked, the
more they quarrelled, and the more they drank. They needed a vacation.
They took a long break and travelled throughout the Southwest, and
while they were in New Mexico, they got married. The honeymoon lasted j
!
[for quite a while after they returned to Hollywood and began working j
|again,but after a few months things began to get rocky. More and more,
Dorothy, who had never in her life lived in the country, spoke
yearningly of having a farm, of having "roots." They began asking
around, and eventually went to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to look at
real estate. Several of their friends had bought land there already—
Sid and Laura Perelman, George Kaufman, Moss Hart, and several other
playwrights— and Dorothy and Alan followed suit. They spent thousands
206
of dollars on renovations, so that their charming, rustic farmhouse
would be charming, rustic, and comfortable, and then moved in. They
arranged with the studios that they would work at their farm, and only
! go to Los Angeles for story conferences or other business. In the
^ study, they had facing desks and typewriters. They would work during
I
! the day, and in the evenings they would see friends, talk, and drink.
Dorothy knitted, too— baby clothes. She was pregnant, and
ecstatic about it. They made joyful plans, bought toys, and built a
nursery. But forty—three was a dangerous age to have a baby, and
Dorothy miscarried. She was crushed. She had been counting on the baby
to give her direction, a new start, meaning.
Alan quietly ordered the nursery dismantled and gave the toys
away; he also suggested that they go back to Hollywood, and for once
Dorothy needed no encouragement. When they got back, they rented a
white Colonial house at 520 N. Canon Drive, in Beverly Hills. The
!
house came with four servants to help with giving the parties, the
dinners, and later Dorothy's political meetings.
During the 1930s, Dorothy became very active in both national and
Hollywood politics. She had begun to involve herself in politics as
early as 1927, when she, along with Benchley, Dos Passos, and Edna St.
Vincent Millay attended a rally in Boston for Sacco and Vanzetti,
Thirty-nine protestors were arrested, including Dorothy, Benchley, and
Dos Passos. They were fined $5 each and allowed to go. During the
early 30s, Dorothy herself felt little impact from the Depression, but
she was sorry for those who had, and donated generous sums of money to
207
various charities and soup kitchens.
By 1934, Dorothy and Alan were in Hollywood, working for
j Paramount. Upton Sinclair was running as the Democratic candidate for
| governor on the EPIC ("End Poverty in California") platform. He was
i
j widely thought of as a dangerous socialist and the campaign was a
J bitter one. The studio heads, especially, saw him as a threat to their
way of life, and deliberately manipulated newsreel footage to make it
look as if all of Sinclair’s supporters were tramps and hoboes. This
outraged many of the writers and actors, but their support was not
really mobilized until the producers began taking mandatory
’’contributions" from studio workers' salaries to support Sinclair’s
opponent. Then, Dorothy, Gene Fowler, and others formed the California
Authors' League for Sinclair. Despite their support, and the support
of similar groups, Sinclair lost the election.
As the Depression worsened, and as international events seemed
more ominous, Dorothy moved further to the left and became more vocal
and more involved in politics. This made Alan nervous; he wanted her
to tone it down. He was afraid that the studios would retaliate by
giving them no work. Dorothy was defiant: she had a right to her
political opinions, and no one would stop her from expressing and
acting upon them. Since Alan had so little sympathy for her
I
activities, she began spending more and more time with Donald Ogden
Stewart; this only increased the distance between Dorothy and Alan.
As her political committments increased, she and Alan began to
grow apart. He could not understand her concern, and she could not
208
understand his lack of it. She threw herself into politics with the
i
same abandon and wholeheartedness she given to her romances before she
was married, and since Alan could not share in such large part of her
life,she saw him less. He worried more about the repercussions her
involvements might have on their jobs; she scoffed at such concern,
and defiantly invited more and more politically dangerous people to
their homes in Beverly Hills and Bucks County. In retaliation, he
invited his gay friends, and Dorothy insulted them and him. He
shrugged it off, and simply spent more time with them and less with
her. They still worked together, but barely spoke otherwise.
But she didn’t have time to worry about that* The more political
causes she assisted, the more her help was sought. She helped arrange
a $100-a-plate dinner at the Victor Hugo Restaurant in April of 1936
to benefit victims of Nazism; this idea was well-received by almost
everyone, for a change, and she even got support from the studio
bosses. Thalberg, Selznick, Wanger, and Goldwyn all contributed. She
also gave a buffet to aid the Scottsboro Boys, and raised several
thousand dollars. In the spring of 1936, she and Stewart helped found
the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which had members among both liberals
and coservatives. Its membership included Carl Laemmle, Jack Warner,
and Dore Schary (who later resigned, offended by the left-wing bias of
the group), along with liberals and socialists like Eddie Cantor, Marc
Connelly, Herbert Biberman, Marian Spitzer, John Howard Lawson and Sam j
Ornitz. [
Her interests were numerous: anti-fascism, unemployment, the
209
rights of screenwriters, segregation and bad treatment of blacks, the
Spanish Civil War. She wrote for The New Masses, organized the western
| branch of the League of American Writers, was acting chairman for the
j Spanish Refugee Appeal, was national chairman for the Joint Anti-
i Fascist Refugee Committee, served on the editorial board of the anti-
J racist magazine, Equality, helped form Contempoorary Historians, Inc.,
j to finance Joris Ivens' film, The Spanish Earth, about the Spanish
I Civil War— the list is very long.~^ The House Unamerican Activities
I
Committee later listed her as one of twenty-seven people who had
belonged to thirty-one to forty communist-front organizations,
CTO
according to the Attorney General. Dorothy had a different view of
her activities: "Oh, the years I have wasted, being a party girl and
smart arse, when I could have been helping all the unfortunate people
in the world.
I
One of the things that brought home to her the importance of all
this was her trip to Spain in 1937. She went first to Paris with Alan,
Lillian Heilman and Dashiell Hammett and visited the Murphys, and then
on to Spain to write a report for The New Masses. When she came back,
sobered by what she had seen, she wrote two pieces: a documentary
article for The New Masses called "The Siege of Madrid," and a story
for the New Yorker, "Soldiers of the Republic." In the former, she
says, "Well, now I know. I know that there are things that never have
been funny, and never will be." She writes of hearing guns in the
distance. "And you know that gunners no longer need to shoot just for
practice. Where there is firing, that means there is blood and
210
blindness and death." Yet, "the people go about their daily living. It
isn’t tense and it isn't hysterical. What they have is not morale,
I which is something created and bolstered and directed. It is the sure,
I
i steady spirit of those who know what the fight is about and know that
they must win," Their strength amazed her:
Yesterday I saw a woman who lives in the poorest
quarter of Madrid. It has been bombed twice by the
fascists; her house is one of the few left standing.
She has seven children. It has often been suggested
to her that she and the children leave Madrid for a
safer place. She dismisses such ideas easily and
firmly. Every six weeks, she says, her husband has
forty-eight hours* leave from the front. Naturally,
he wants to come home to see her and the children.
She, and each one of the seven, are calm and strong
and smiling. It is a typical Madrid family.
What amazed her more, and shocked and horrified her, was the
random destruction, for no good reason:
In Valencia, last Sunday morning, a pretty, bright
Sunday morning, five German planes came over and
bombed the quarter down by the port. It is a poor
quarter, the place where the men who work on the
docks live, and it is, like all poor quarters,
congested. After the planes had dropped their bombs,
there wasn’t much left of the places where so many
families had been living. There was an old, old man
who went up to everyone he saw and asked, please,
had they seen his wife, please, would they tell him
where his wife was. There were two little girls who
saw their father killed in front of them, and were
trying to get past the guards, back to the still
crumbling, crashing houses to find their mother.
There was a great pile of rubble, and on the top of
it a broken doll and a dead kitten...because two
men— two men— want more power.
211
What she had seen in Spain made Dorothy even more determined to
step up her political activities. But it cost hers neither she nor
Alan were offered a single screenwriting assignment in 1939; in 1940,
they had to sell the lease on their N. Canon home to Laurence Olivier
j
jand Janet Leigh. Alan was sure Dorothy was being watched by the FBI,
and he was afraid. Things started to pick up again in 1941, though; by
that time, the word had gotten around that Dorothy had dropped a lot
of her political affiliations because of the Soviet non-aggression
pact with the Nazis in 1939 and her resulting disillusionment with the
communists. In 1942, Dorothy tried to join the Women’s Army Corps, but
was turned down on the basis of her age— she was forty-nine. When that
plan failed, she tried to get accreditation as an overseas war
correspondent, but was turned down by the government because of her
political activities. She was a "premature anti-Fascist" and a
"possible subversive."'*'*
In 1942, after the United States entered World War II, Alan
wanted to enlist. Dorothy encouraged him to go ahead, and he entered
the army as a private. He left in August of 1942,
Her attitude to his enlistment was the opposite of that she’d had
years earlier, with Eddie Parker. This time, she was glad to get Alan
out of her hair— they needed some time apart. But with her usual
perverseness, when he was no longer there, she missed him desperately.
He didn’t seem to miss her, though, and no matter how much war work
and fundraising she did, she couldn’t distract herself from the fact
that his letters were getting progressively fewer and farther between.
212
She wanted only him, and wanted his letters to show that he was pining
for her as well; instead, they told of a social whirl in London,
i parties, trips to the country, new friends, and implied romantic
attachments.
She developed a bitter hatred for him, and when he decided to
! stay on in Europe after the war for a while, she announced to him and
to her friends that she was through with him. After complicated legal
negotiations over the division of their property, their divorce became
final on May 21, 1947. Dorothy sold the farm for $40,000, at an
$80,000 loss.
It quickly became clear to her friends that, while they had
fought constantly, Alan had exercised a considerable stabilizing
influence on Dorothy's life. Now that that no longer existed, she
seemed to drift. She drank more and sank herself into a series of
unhappy and expensive affairs with younger men. Her work suffered, and
she found it harder even to get screen work, partly because she had
done a poor job so often, but mostly because of her political
affiliations.
This was just a taste of what was to come. After the war was
over, the Red Scare and the conservative backlash began, and her
friends began toppling right and left. Some went to jail, some left
the country, and some spent weeks hiding inside their houses to avoid
subpoenas. In 1949, Dorothy was listed by Jack Tenney, along with
1 Charlie Chaplin, Pearl Buck, Katherine Hepburn, Lillian Heilman,
I
] Dashiell Hammett, Danny Kaye, Alan Campbell, V.J. Jerome, and Donald
213
Ogden Stewart, as "having followed or appeased some of the Communist
party-line programs.' In 1951, Martin Berkeley claimed that she and
I Alan, along with Heilman, Hammett, and several others, had met at his
■ home in June of 1937 to found the Hollywood section of the Communist
I Party.57
It was only a matter of time before she was called to testify.
The bright pink subpoena arrived late in 1952, and commanded her to
appear before the HUAC in Washington, D.C. She remained calm. She
never apologized for any of her past affiliations, and had nothing but
scorn for the Committee. "With the integrity displayed by many of the
1
subpoened she told reporters that she would invoke the Fifth
Amendment...She was not prepared to insult her own intelligence by
even acknowledging HUAC's stautory right of inquiry. As far as she was
concerned, the committee did not exist; and if it did exist, it was a
disgrace to the precepts of freedom and democracy on which the
| CO
American Constitution was based."
Lillian Heilman later said, "I don't think it occurred to her...
that the ruling classes were anything but people with more money than
you had. She acted before the committee as she acted so often with
their more literate, upper-class cousins at dinner: as if to say,
'Yes, dear, it's true that I'm here to observe you, but I do not like
you and will, of course, say and write exactly that.'"5^
When she was called before the Committee, she was asked, "Are you
■ now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" Her reply
was, "I was and am many things, to myself and my friends. But I am not
214
a traitor and I will not be involved in this obscene inquisition."
Despite her defiance, the Committee backed off of further prosecution,
as it had with Lillian Heilman. They could send men to jail, but
rightly guessed that the public would not stand for the imprisonment
of women, especially ones so well-known as Heilman and Parker.^®
The damage had been done in Hollywood, however. For several
| years, she received almost no writing assignments, and money was very
I tight. One night during this time, Dorothy was in a bar. A man
t
| approached her and began nagging her. She was in no mood to be polite;
she walked away after saying, "With the crown of thorns I wear, why
should I be bothered with a prick like you?"^
Five years later, an interviewer asked her how she felt about the
time of the blacklisting. She answered, "It’s not the tragedies that
f\0
kill us, it's the messes. I can't stand mess."
She went back to New York, and Alan called her there in 1956 to
ask for a reconciliation. He was lonely and he missed her. Did she
miss him? he asked. She did, and she lost no time in getting out to
Hollywood to be with him. They decided to remarry, and moved into his
leased house at 8983 Norma Place in West Hollywood. At the wedding
reception, Dorothy looked around the room and said, "People who
haven't talked to each other in years are on speaking terms again
/ r q
today, including the bride and groom."
They quickly settled into an unsettled marriage. They couldn't
live without each other, it appeared, yet they seemed determined to
make sure they were not too happy. If there was no trouble, one of
215
them— most likely Dorothy— would be sure to start some. Wyatt Cooper
recalls,
Alan was constantly starting home improvement
projects, adding a bathroom or making the garage
into a guest cottage to be rented out, and they
were rarely completed. Dottie would announce with
the air of a true martyr, 'I don’t know where
Alan is; he just pulled two boards up out of the
floor and went off to the post office!’ Or if he
took a chair to be covered in a pretty fabric—
he had a strong nest-building instinct— Dottie
would share his enthusiasm for the result, taking
loving pride in his taste but, shortly afterward,
when the dogs had done their inevitable destruc
tion to it, she was almost gleeful in pointing
out the damage...At the same time, Alan and Dottie
could be fiercely protective of each other. When
she suffered through quite a bit of repair work
on her teeth, Alan was visibly distressed by her
pain. Once, when we were driving along in my car
and Alan was describing some untalented screen
writer, saying, 'He would write a line like:
You’re mashing hell out of my finger,' Dottie
was busily reacting, saying, 'Imagine writing a
line like that!' and I, ever eager to learn, was
trying to figure out what was wrong if the
character’s fingers were actually being mashed,
not connecting it with the fact that I was also,
at that moment, pressing a button, the function of
which was to raise the window on Alan's side of
the car. I had no way of knowing that he'd stuck
his fingers down into the space where the window
was rising, and it took some time and quite a lot
of yelling on Alan's part to make the connection
clear for me. Dottie laughed heartily at his pre
dicament, reversing her former position by saying,
'It seemed like a perfectly good line to me,'
until she saw that there was actually blood on
his fingernail and then she.was all concern for
him and mad at my idiocy.'
After a time, however, their drinking and the fact that they were
getting no screenwriting assignments created new tensions, exacerbated
216
by the fact that Dottie had begun accusing Alan of having homosexual
affairs. He denied it, but she refused to believe him. After a time,
when she said she wanted to go back to New York by herself for a
while, he wearily agreed. She collaborated on a play while she was
| there with Arnaud d’Usseau, called Ladies of the Corridor. It was not
a success, and that was disappointing. Before long, Dorothy was back
in Los Angeles with Alan. They were not happy together, but they
couldn't stay apart. The drinking was even heavier, and there was no
screen work. They were living on old royalty checks and money which
Dorothy made from selling pieces to magazines. They added Veronal to
their regimen of alcohol and few meals, so that they could sleep at
night.
On the night of June 14, 1963, Alan took several sleeping tablets
on top of several drinks and went to bed. When Dorothy joined him
later he was already asleep. She couldn’t wake him the next morning;
he had died in the night. He was fifty-eight years old.
Dorothy called several friends, and some of the neighbors came
over as well. One of them, a nosy woman who nevertheless meant well,
said to her, "Dottie, tell me, dear. What can I do to help you?"
Dorothy turned to her and said, "Get me a new husband." The neighbor,
shocked, said, "Dottie, I think that is the most callous and
disgusting remark I ever heard in my life.” Dorothy replied softly,
"So sorry. Then run down to the corner and get me a ham and cheese on
C. C
rye and tell them to hold the mayo."
Dorothy was not being entirely facetious when she told the woman
217
she needed a new husband. She and Alan had hated each other and loved
each other. He had kept her from destroying herself, and he had kept
away the awful loneliness. Loving him, and hating him and fighting
with him, had given her life a center, and now he was gone. She was
old, and now she was alone— again. It was her greatest fear,
j Shortly after Alan’s death, she moved back to New York
| permanently, took a room at the Volney Hotel,and became one of the
Ladies of the Corridor— the one who hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign on
the door and never left her room again. She was seventy now, and it
was unlikely that any man would ever love her again. She did some
work, but mostly, especially in the last year of her life, she sat in
her room and smoked and drank. She died in her room on June 7, 1967,
alone except for her poodle, C'est Tout.
In an interview late in her life, Dorothy Parker was asked a
f i f t
number of questions about her writing -, and her answers illuminated
not only her methods, but her feelings about her own worth as a
writer. She had a low opinion of her poetry: "My verses. I cannot say
poems. Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite
footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My
verses are no damn good. Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly
dated— as anything once fashionable is dreadful now." She also didn’t
think much of her humorous writings: "I don’t want to be classed as a
humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I've never read a good tough
quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn’t do
218
it. A 'smartcracker * they called me, and that makes me sick and
unhappy. There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit.
Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
It was getting harder and harder for her to write short stories,
she said; "It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and
then write it sentence by sentence— no first draft. I can't write five
words but that I change seven... I wrote in longhand at first, but
I’ve lost it. I use two fingers at the typewriter...1 know so little
about the typewriter that once I bought a new one because I couldn’t
change the ribbon on the one I had." Several years later, she told
another interviewer she was going to give up writing short stories:
"Not too long ago I tried to write a short story. I got my name and
address on the sheet; a title which stank; and the first sentence;
'The stranger appeared in the doorway.' Then I had to lie down with a
wet cloth on my face.”^
Ladies of the Corridor was, apparently, the only thing she had
written that she liked: "Unhappily, our first play...was not a
success, but writing that play was the best time I ever had, both for
the privilege and the stimulation of working with Hr. d’Usseau and
because that play was the only thing I have ever done in which I had
great pride."
All of her screenwriting work she dismissed: "If you're going to
write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can
do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you. I
want so much to write well, though I know I don't, and that I didn't
219
make it."
Dorothy Parker's stories are very much like she was: cynical but
| romantic, a bit cruel, and fond of understatement. Her story, "Here We
| Are," contains all of these elements. The story is about a young
I
newlywed couple. They board the train after the wedding to begin their
honeymoon. They are both a bit nervous, and get into a quarrel.
The young woman in the story is the typical Dorothy Parker
"heroine," just as the young man is the typical Parker "hero." She is
middle class, and this shows in her dress: "Her hat, her fur, her
frock, her gloves were glossy and stiff with novelty. On the arc of
the thin, slippery sole of one beige shoe was gummed a tiny oblong of
white paper, printed with the price set and paid for that slipper and
its fellow, and the name of the shop that had dispensed them." The
stiffness of her dress emphasizes the awkwardness and newness of the
situation, and the price tag overlooked on her shoe makes the reader
feel slightly embarrassed for her.
A Dorothy Parker heroine also tends to look at the negative side
of any situation, at all the possibilities for failure. She is jealous
j and oversensitive, with a tendency to deliberately take offense where
none was intended. When the young man arouses her ire— usually with
some innocent statement— she draws him in deeper and deeper, and then
reveals how hurt she is that he would say such things. She makes him
feel guilty, as if it is all his fault, and then she magnanimously
apologizes, thus appropriating all of the power. Parker's heroines are
insecure, and try to manipulate a situation until they have control.
220
Sometimes this is successful, sometimes not. Always, though, their
nastiness covers up unhappiness and insecurity,
i The young man in the story is typical of young men in Parker
i
i
! stories. He has good intentions, and is simple, uncomplicated, and
[ knows nothing about the way women in general, and in particular, his
woman, think. He says what comes into his mind with no thought for its
implications or effects, and almost always succeeds in making her
angry. When this happens, he is surprised, bewildered, and
conciliatory. He doesn’t know where he went wrong, but he wants only
to fix it. He is not aware that he has lost his power, because to him,
it was never a power struggle in the first place.
Parker’s gift for understatement is evident in the first two
paragraphs of the story:
The young man in the new blue suit finished
arranging the glistening luggage in tight corners
of the Pullman compartment. The train had leaped
at curves and bounced along straightaways, rendering
balance a praiseworthy achievement and a sporadic
one; and the young man had pushed and hoisted and
tucked and shifted the bags with concentrated care.
Nevertheless, eight minutes for the settling of
two suitcases and a hat-box is a long time.
With a single sentence and a few details, she lets the reader
know this is an awkward situation. The girl in the compartment feels
just as nervous as the young man: she has been
staring raptly out of the window, drinking in
the big weathered signboards that extolled the
phenomena of codfish without bones and screens no
221
rust could corrupt. As the young man sat down, she
turned politely from the pane, met his eyes,
started a smile and got it about half done, and
rested her gaze just above his shoulder.
Their conversation is stilted; neither one knows what to say, so
the girl sets the conversational ball rolling, and from ordinary
j thoughts, falls slowly into the pessimism so common to Parker girls.
i
| It amazes her, she says, to think of all the people all over the
Jworld, getting married all the time. !,And it's— well, it's sort of
i
such a big thing to do, it makes you feel queer. You think of them,
all of them, all doing it just like it wasn't anything. And how does
anybody know what’s going to happen next?"
Her husband ineptly tries to distract her. He wants to think
about nice things, and he can't see any reason for her to be thinking
such gloomy thoughts: "Well, let's not worry about people all over the
world...Let's don’t think about a lot of Chinese. We've got something
better to think about. I mean. I mean— well, what do we care about
them?" But she keeps on: "Of course. Only you think of all the people,
and you have to sort of keep thinking. It makes you feel funny. An
awful lot of people that get married, it doesn't turn out so well. And
I guess they all must have thought it was going to be great."
He tries changing the subject— he brings up the wedding. He tells
her how "great" she looked. She asks him if he thought her bridesmaids
looked all right, and he, relieved to have got the conversation going,
and desperate to keep it going, overenthusiastically says that one of
the bridesmaids, Louise, looked great.
222
This makes her jealous, and she gets upset. She is quite catty
about it, another common trait of Parker girls:
Oh, really?...Funny. Of course, everybody thought
her dress and hat were lovely, but a lot of
people seemed to think she looked sort of tired.
People have been saying that a lot, lately. I tell
them I think it’s awfully mean of them to go
around saying that about her. I tell them they've
got to remember that Louise isn’t so terribly
young any more, and they’ve got to expect her to
look like that. Louise can say she's twenty-three
all she wants to, but she's a good deal nearer
to twenty-seven.
The young man doesn’t yet realize that he’s in trouble. Trying to
find something to say, he innocently repeats that Louise looked great.
"I'm terribly glad you thought so," she says. "I'm glad someone did.
How did you think Ellie looked?"
The young man is beginning to see that something is wrong, but he
doesn't know what. To play it safe, he says he didn't notice Ellie.
What he doesn't realize is that she's won, either way. If he says
Ellie looked great, she'll be jealous. If he says he didn't notice
her, she'll be angry about that, too: "Oh, really," she says. "Well, I
certainly think that's too bad. I don't suppose I ought to say it
about my own sister, but I never saw anybody look as beautiful as
Ellie looked today. And always so sweet and unselfish, too. And you
didn't even notice her. But you never pay attention to Ellie, anyway.
I
Don't think I haven't noticed it. It makes me feel just terrible. It |
1 |
! makes me feel just awful that you don't like my own sister." She
L
223
builds up his innocent remark until she has him, in the future,
locking the door against her family, refusing to let them into their
home.
Finally, he cajoles her into a better mood. She relaxes,
| apologizes, and takes her hat off and gives it to him to put up on the
rack. While he is doing that, she says, "Yes, don't let's ever, ever
fight. We won't be like a whole lot of them. We won't fight or be
nasty or anything. Will we?" Then, fishing for a compliment, she asks
him what he thinks of her hat.
Like a fool, he tells the truth. "Well, I'll tell you. I know
this is the new style and everything like that, and it's probably
great. I don't know anything about things like that. Only I like the
kind of a hat like that blue hat you had. Gee, I liked that hat."
And she's off again, blowing his remark all out of proportion.
All of Dorothy Parker's girls talk the same way, with too many
adjectives, gushingly, repeating themselves and beating around the
bush endlessly. When he compliments her, for example, the girl in this
story says, "Oh, I'm terribly glad. Ellie and Louise looked lovely,
didn't they? I'm terribly glad they did finally decide on pink. They
looked perfectly lovely."
Her characters often speak with unconscious irony, as they do
here. During this short train ride, she has picked three fights with
him; yet they promise each other over and over that they will not j
i
fight like other married people. Their marriage will be perfect. And j
224
they apparently believe what they are saying. The ending of the story
lets the reader see what they can't. The young man says:
"We're not going to have any bad starts. Look
at us— we're on our honeymoon* Pretty soon we'll
be regular old married people. I mean. I mean, in
a few minutes we'll be getting in to New York, and
j then we'll be going to the hotel, and then everything
I will be all right. I mean— look at us! Here we are
i married! Here we are!"
"Yes, here we are," she said. "Aren't we?"
Dorothy Parker's cynicism about marriage and love is evident in
most of her stories, and is especially clear in this one. There is no
hope for these two. They don't know it, but we do. And unconsciously
the girl has put her finger on the point, which the reader can't help
but remember, since it is repeated three times: that people are always
j getting married, and they all think it's going to be perfect. It
seldom is.
Only in the movies does every marriage have a happy ending.
Charles Brackett said that Dorothy Parker often got equal credit
p
on screenwriting work done almost entirely by Alan Campbell. This is
almost certainly not true. Parker worked hard in Hollywood, even
though she didn't enjoy it. !
There are numerous differences, of course, between the short
stories she wrote and the screenplays. The differences go beyond the
obvious ones of genre. Parker never wrote a screenplay singlehandedly.
I
She always had one or more collaborators. Her style, therefore, is
tempered by theirs. And she didn't have the kind of power Lillian
225
Heilman did over what she wrote, so she seldom chose her own subject
i matter, and had to make the changes the various producers and
| directors called for. Nevertheless, the presence of her imagination is
{ evident.
I
In 1938, , at MGM, Albert Hackett and his wife, Frances Goodrich,
shared an office next door to Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell’s.
Dorothy frequently left her office door open, so Hackett could hear
what went on most of the time. Dorothy and Alan were working on
Sweethearts, a project for Nelson Eddy and Jeannette MacDonald, and
Dorothy wasn't too happy about either it or Alan at the time. Alan
would type something on his typewriter, and then say to Dorothy,
"Well, what does she say?" Dorothy would reply, "Shit." Alan would
say, "Don't use that word. What does she say?" Dorothy would say,
"Shit," and Alan would say, "DON'T USE THAT WORD!" Depending on how
upset she wanted to make Alan, Dorothy could go on with this for
f\Q
hours. But when she shut the door and they went to work, they got a
lot accomplished very quickly.
Sweethearts is about Gwen Merrill and Ernest Lane. They are
actors, and have been starring in a hit Broadway musical called
Sweethearts for the last six years. They are happily married to each
other. They are beginning to tire of doing the same show, saying the
same lines, and singing the same songs over and over again, though,
and are feeling a bit restless. Norman Trumpett, as representative of
| Sam Silver Film Studios, is trying to get them to sign a movie
contract, and this makes the people whose income is dependent on the
226
play— Felix Lehman, the producer, Dink Rogers, the press agent, Leo
Kronk, the author, Oscar Engel, the conductor, and Appleby, the
auditor— very nervous. They try their best to keep Trumpett away from
I Gwen and Norman, but he slips through their net and tells the couple
I
j how wonderful Hollywood is, and how much easier life is there. They
l
I are hesitant at first, but after one too many frustrations, they
I
decide to accept his offer. To save themselves, their "friends," Leo,
!
| Felix, Dink, and Appleby, come up with a plan to break them up,
i
j figuring that if they aren't a couple, Hollywood won't want them. Leo
steals some of the notes Ernest has written to Gwen and puts them in a
play he is writing. He tells her he got them from a woman he knows who
is having an affair with a married man. Gwen thinks Ernest is having
an affair with Kay, their secretary. She confronts them and they deny
it, because it is not true; but she doesn't believe them. They both
decide not to go to Hollywood; instead, they split up and go on tour
in separate companies of Sweethearts. Both are miserable, because they
still love each other. One day, Gwen reads a review of Leo's new play,
and when she hears the plot (which is based on the trick he and the
others have played on Gwen and Ernest), she realizes they've been had.
Ernest realizes it at the same time, and they finally get back
together. Back in New York, they confront Felix and Leo and threaten
to go to Hollywood just to pay them back for what they have done to
them. Felix makes them feel guilty and they decide to stay in New i
York, which is what they really want to do anyway. They revive
Sweethearts, and life goes back to normal— or at least, back to the j
227
way it was as the movie began.
The screenplay is not as shallow as a plot summary makes it
sound. It is full of soap opera cliches and stock situations; but
Dorothy Parker touches can be seen throughout the script, and there is
a certain cynicism about love and marriage that survives the syrupy
plot.
j Dink's treatment of Trumpett, the studio representative, has just
i
I
| the sort of false niceness that so many of Parker's characters
I
! display. Trumpett has come to see the play and to try to speak with
Gwen and Ernest. Dink doesn't want him in the place, but discovers
that Trumpett has had the audacity to appropriate Felix Lehman's
luxurious private box. Dink hates Trumpett, and the audience can tell
because of the nasty-polite dialogue between them, In response to a
patronizing compliment from Trumpett, Dink says;
DINK
(with mock delight)
Oh, goody!
(with feigned solicitude)
Sure your seat's all right?
TRUMPETT
Oh, not half bad. After all, one can't expect
too much, planing in from the Coast at the last
moment, can one?
DINK
It's awfully nice of one to take pot luck with us...^
Trumpett has the kind of manipulative cruelty so many Parker
j
characters have. He makes sure Felix sees him write a note and give it
228
to the usher with instructions to deliver it backstage. He knows this
will drive Felix crazy. When Felix finally manages to intercept the
note, it says:
Dear Felix:
It’s not cricket to open
other people's messages!
N.T.
P.S.— When I want to talk to
them— I will.
The descriptions of the characters are typical of her type of
understatement: she gives details that expose the character's deepest
flaws, so that even though nothing explicit is said, the point is made
perfectly clear. Her description of Norman Trumpett, for example, is
classic Dorothy Parker:
He is perhaps forty, glistening with gentility. He
is the personal representative of Sam Silver Studios.
He never forgets that he had two years of French at
the Erasmus Public High School in New York, and is
therefore well up on the front ranks of Hollywood
culture. He is careful always to be good-natured
toward his intellectual inferiors, among whom he
includes practically everybody he meets. He shows this
benignity by laughing heartily, and with an interesting
display of teeth, at everything that is said to him,
and there is always about him the suggestion of the
phony.
In Sweethearts, there are numerous uncomplimentary references to
film studios; Parker gets to make some jabs at the studio executives
she hates. The irony, that they are paying her huge sums of money to
j write insulting things about them, cannot have escaped her. And the
I
229
picture she draws of a studio head, and of what life is really like in
Hollywood behind the glamorous facade, is vicious. When Norman
Trumpett calls his boss, Sam Silver, to report on his progress in
signing Gwen Merrill and Ernest Lane, he is treated to a recital of
Silver's woes: Joan Darrow fell off a throne on the set and broke her
arm, Neil Craig got bit by a rattlesnake on location, Sally Hayes is
in the hospital for overwork, Bob Brandon has makeup poisoning, he has
had to suspend Gabrielle Gabriand because she got angry at having to
J do two pictures at once, Barbara North and Ronald Smith have made
eleven pictures in eight months; she is down to 92 pounds, and he
can't remember his lines anymore. All his actors and actresses are out
to get him, he says. He commands Trumpett to promise Gwen and Ernest
anything, as long as he gets them to sign a seven-year contract.
Trumpett immediately goes to Gwen and Ernest and draws a picture
for them of Paradise, where they will work only when they feel like
it, and then rest and see friends and play golf until they are in the
mood to do another picture. They will be rich beyond their wildest
dreams and live in a mansion with servants and a swimming pool, and
grow their own orange trees.
The theme of falseness and hypocrisy runs throughout the
screenplay: Gwen and Ernest are tricked by just about everyone they
trust. In a Parker short story, the result would be unhappiness with
no solution for any of the characters. But this is the movies:
everything gets untangled so that there can be a happy ending.
Dorothy Parker was never proud of any of the writing she did for
230
the studios. But then, she wasn't proud of most of the writing she'd
done. She hated writing. "Everything that isn't writing is fun," she
said.^ But from her complaints, screenwriting seemed to be even less
enjoyable. So, given all her choices, why did she keep going back? She
gave only one answer: "Need of money, dear."^
231
Notes— Parker
■^Leslie Frewin, The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company, 1986) 154.
0
John Keats, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of
Dorothy Parker (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970) 11-12.
^Personal interview with Albert Hackett, 28 March 1985.
^Personal interview with Mr. and Mrs. Dale Eunson, 11 June 1985.
^Morton Cooper, "Parker's Pen is Ever Sharp," Coronet, May 1965
100.
Telephone interview with Henry Ephron, 19 June 1985
^Sheilah Graham, The Garden of Allah (New York: Crown Publishers,
Inc., 1970) 141.
^Dorothy Parker, "The Private Papers of the Dead," in The
Portable Dorothy Parker, 2nd ed. (New York: The Viking Press, 1973)
451.
^Judith Martin and Aaron Latham, "Lillian Heilman: Guardian of
Memories," International Herald Tribune, 20 May 1970.
1Q
For general biographical information, I am indebted to Leslie
Frewin, The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker, and John Keats, You Might As
Well Live.
■^Conde Nast, quoted in Frewin 28-29.
7 2
Dorothy Parker, quoted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review
Interviews, ed. Malcom Cowley (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), p.
74.
13Frewin 45.
^^Parker, Paris Review Interviews 75.
^Notable Names in the American Theatre, (Clifton, New Jersey:
James T. White and Co., 1976) 42, 730.
1 fs
Edwin Bronner, The Encyclopedia of the American Theatre 1900-
1975 (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, Inc., 1980) 96-97.
1 7
Robert Benchley, quoted in Frewin 114.
■^Cooper 100.
232
•^Dorothy Parker, "Words, Words, Words," in The Portable Dorothy
Parker 544.
9 0
Dorothy Parker, "Re-enter Margot Asquith— A Masterpiece From
the French," in The Portable Dorothy Parker 455-456.
"^Graham 142.
22Martin and Latham, IHT.
OO
Personal interview with Laura Kerr, 9 April 1986
24Frewin 177.
23Norman Zierold, The Moguls (New York: Avon Books, 1969) 281.
Nora Ephron, Wallflower at the Orgy (New York: The Viking
Press, 1970) 159-162.
97
Telephone interview with Henry Ephron, 19 June 1985.
28Graham 108
^Graham 135.
30
Parker, quoted in Paris Review Interviews 81.
J Personal interview with Mr. and Mrs. Dale Eunson, 11 June 1985.
09
Sam Marx, quoted in Lisa Mitchell, "Dorothy Parker as the Lady
of Wit in a Life of Sorrow," Los Angeles Times Book Review, 19
December 1976: 3.
33Mitchell 3.
34Graham 170.
33Max Wilk, The Wit and Wisdom of Hollywood (New York: Warner
Books, Warner Paperback Library, 1971) 162.
36Graham 209.
07
Parker, quoted in Paris Reviev Interviews 81-82.
38Frewin 198.
3^Graham 145.
4^"Are Film Writers Workers?" Pacific Weekly, 4, No. 26 (29 June
1936): 371.
233
^Graham 76.
^Graham 102.
i ^George Oppenheimer, The View From the Sixties: Memories of a
Spent Life (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1966) 157.
^Graham 143.
^Oppenheimer 3.
^Graham 143,
^Graham 76.
1
! ^Charles Champlin, "We Lift Our Glasses to 'Mrs. Parker,"1 Los
Angeles Times, 18 June 1967, Calendar sec.: 6.
^Personal interview with Albert Hackett, 28 March 1985.
■^Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood:
Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979) 89-92.
~^I am indebted for this information to Ceplair and Englund, The
Inquisition in Hollywood 170-171, Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A
Life New York: Random House, 1983) 156, and William Alexander, Film on
the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981) 150-53. j
I
"^Frewin 262.
~*%rewin 221.
-^Dorothy Parker, "The Siege of Madrid," The Portable Dorothy
Parker 589-94.
“^Frewin 244.
■^Richard Moody, Lillian Heilman, Playwright (New York: Bobbs-
Merrill Company, Inc., 1972) 233-34.
■^Johnson 138-39.
58Frewin 260.
i ^Lillian Heilman, An Unfinished Woman (New York: Little, Brown
1 and Company, 1969) 190-191.
88Frewin 261-63.
234
61Wilk 292.
f\* )
Parker, quoted in Paris Review Interviews 82.
63Frewin 271.
64Frewin 271.
65Frewin 289.
All following quotes are from Parker, in Paris Review
Interviews 75-82, unless otherwise specified.
^Cooper 99.
68Frewin 199.
Personal interview with Albert Hackett, 28 March 1985.
■^Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, Sweethearts, screenplay
written for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1938, 10.
^ Sweethearts 16.
10
Sweethearts 7.
7 ^
Parker, quoted in Dorothy Townsend, "Dorothy Parker Sets Up
L.A. Shop," Los Angeles Times, 18 June 1962, Sec. 4: 1.
^4Parker, quoted in Paris Review Interviews 76.
235
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