Caspary, Vera

Overview

Vera Louise Caspary (November 13, 1899-June 13, 1987) was a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Her bestselling novel, Laura, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Her novels were known for their use of multiple perspectives and her trademark career girls, young women who refused male protection and paternalism in their struggles for independence and autonomy. 

Biography

Born in 1899, Caspary was the youngest of Paul and Julia Caspary’s four children. Her mother was in her mid-forties when she became pregnant with Caspary and concealed her “shameful secret” by wearing “tea gowns which concealed her scandalous condition.” Once her mother had recovered from “the horror of having a baby at her age,” the “rest of the family . . . loved, spoiled and bossed me outrageously.”1 However loving, Caspary’s family life--like the lives of many middle class Americans in the early part of the twentieth century--was ideologically and economically turbulent. Both her maternal and paternal grandparents had emigrated to the US in the middle of the nineteenth century and although the family was secular (her paternal grandfather was a self-described socialist and freethinker), they “were contemptuous of Jews who denied being Jewish or changed their names and contradicted ourselves with scorn for those whose names ended in –witz and –ski.”2    

Caspary remembered her older sister Irma as the arbiter of these and other class distinctions, a girl who would give “only second-best candy to little girls whose grandparent had Russian or Polish accents” and who preferred that Vera “play with children with the surnames of German-Jewish families who had been in Chicago for at least two generations.”  Caspary’s autobiographical novel, Thicker Than Water, a sprawling epic about three generations of the fictional Piera family in Chicago, explored the multifaceted conflicts between Portuguese Jews and the Eastern European Jews they eschewed as “kikes.” The novel was, as Caspary later put it, about “Jewish prejudice toward Jews, the Sephardi to the Ashkenazi, the German Jews to the Russians, Polish, Lithuanian, etc.”3

 
When her father’s first business venture, establishing a department store in Memphis, Tennessee, ended in bankruptcy, conflicts within the Caspary family intensified. Ashamed of their circumstances, her mother and Irma concealed the frugalities forced upon them by this and subsequent financial disasters, indulging in forms of “self-pity and subterfuge” of which both Vera and her father disapproved. Guilt-ridden, Paul Caspary did not challenge their “constant whine of poverty since he suffered the guilt of a man who believed himself a failure because he could not provide the luxuries to which his women were entitled.”4 Caught between her father’s guilt over his failure to provide and her mother and sister’s consumerist desires, these formative experiences engendered in Caspary a critical perspective on the gendered expectations of normative families. For the remainder of her life, Caspary would understand the spitefulness of class envy as a distinctly feminized practice and she remained acutely aware of the powerful role that women played in enforcing norms of gender, at the expense of both women and men.

The Casparys were progressives to their core. Paul Caspary had grown up in an abolitionist family in Milwaukee and Vera grew up on a street that was in the midst of integrating: Rhodes Avenue in Chicago, which later became the center of Chicago’s Black Belt. The first blacks to move into their neighborhood—in fact, into the second unit of their double house—were groundbreaking journalist were anti-lynching activist Ida Wells Barnett and her husband, Judge Ferdinand Barnett. According to Caspary, Paul was among a group of white residents who resisted the racist backlash directed at the Barnetts, although as she later observed, they seldom socialized with their black neighbors.5

 
Alienated from her mother and sister’s consumerism and economic disappointment, which encouraged her to view women who worked for a living with “pity and contempt,” Caspary understood financial independence to be the key to success and happiness. Years later, she told a reporter “When I was just a little girl, I knew that I wanted to be a writer, and I took the necessary steps, through study and through making myself financially independent, to make my dream come true.”6 After graduating from high school in 1917, Caspary enrolled in a six-month course at a business college. She completed the course in January 1918, “put on a new hat, buckled my galoshes, rode downtown on the El and became a liberated woman.”7  

Like other aspiring writers of her era, Caspary hoped “to find a job as a girl reporter.”8  Instead, she found a series of low-paying secretarial jobs, quitting before her boldness cost her the jobs. She landed a job with a wholesale grocer--“a Socialist who enjoyed exploiting capitalists”--handling his correspondence and managing his office while he travelled, eventually preparing all the promotional materials for the grocer’s “questionable merchandise.”9  In what was becoming a pattern, she moved up the ranks quickly, graduating from stenographer to writing marketing copy and promotional materials. Nevertheless, “an assiduous student of want-ads,” Caspary had set her goals higher than the secretarial pool. She continued to send out letters describing her work experience and skills and--cagily--signing the letters “V.L. Caspary.”10 She received many interviews this way, only to find that “’when a ninety-five pound, five-foot-one girl turned up, the advertisers were angry or amused. None gave me a job.”11

 
In 1920, Caspary was hired by a large Chicago advertising agency, where she eventually “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.)”12 Here, she wrote her first headline, “Rat Bites Sleeping Child!,” for an ad selling E.J. Reefer’s Rat Virus, a product endorsed by an organization Caspary had created for this purpose, called The Rodent Extermination League of America.  

The product didn’t sell very well because the virus didn’t work, but the agency took note of Caspary’s writing skills and gave her additional accounts. 

Over the course of these jobs, Caspary learned a great deal about how the industry understood and addressed female audiences. During her three years in advertising, this devotee of Anatole France, H.L. Mencken, and irony learned to write copy “so simple any semiliterate housewife would understand on sight that she would get her dollar back if Mrs. Reefer’s Washing Tablets did not get her wash whiter than any soap on the market.” 13 In order to succeed, she mastered a style of writing for a female audience considered frivolous and unintelligent, proving successful at creating mail order campaigns in the process.

• 1Vera Caspary, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979, 1-3.
• 2Ibid, 8.
• 3Ibid, 7.
• 4Ibid, 17.
• 5Ibid, 17.
• 6Carol Soucek, “Are Today’s Women Really Liberated?” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 7 April 1975, B-1.
• 7Vera Caspary, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, 37.
• 8Ibid, 44.
• 9Ibid, 48.
• 10Ibid, 41.
• 11Ibid, 44.
• 12Ann L. Warren, Word Play: The Lives and Work of Four Women Writers in Hollywood’s Golden Age, Unpublished dissertation, University of Southern California, May 1988, 41.
• 13 Caspary, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, 53.

In luxurious houses, around pools, in rumpus rooms and bars, people whose talk had once centered around the frustrations of the movie writer, now argued about Fascism, social security, FDR, and the tactics of labor leaders. The time was ripe for it with the rise of Hitler in Germany, the stories of concentration camps, persecution of Jews, the aggressions of Mussolini, starvation persisting in the United States, union organizers thrown into prison, radicals manhandled by sheriffs’ deputies, poor people and Negroes deprived of justice.1

With the benefit of hindsight, Caspary recalled her experiences with the CPUSA with cynicism and some bitterness, painting a picture of a generation of hypocrites who sought to assuage guilty consciences by playing at revolution. But when Caspary joined in the 1930s, she was younger, more idealistic, and confident that the CPUSA, unlike either the Democratic or Republican Parties, was committed to fighting against racial and economic injustice. Along with writers and intellectuals such as Adrian Scott and her good friend Sam Ornitz, Caspary began gravitating toward the Communist Party some time in the 1920s, finally joining some time during the Spanish Civil War.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Jewish-Americans like Caspary shared African Americans’ broadly anti-anti-communist sentiments. Having inherited her father’s anti-racist convictions and growing up within a largely progressive Jewish community in Chicago during the Depression, socialism seemed a perfectly reasonable alternative to the capitalist system that was failing so many people throughout the world. And the atmosphere in Hollywood in the 1930s was politically and intellectually heady. Hollywood “was aflame with argument. It was alive and at its best, particularly among picture people,” Caspary later remembered, “There were lectures, seminars, parties of all kinds, raising money for Britain, for Russia, for refugees, etc. There was dancing, there was mingling ($5000 a week people talked to $500 a week bums), the left wing solicited the right, social lines were forgotten, and we stayed up later than in peace time.”2

According to her own account, Caspary did not join the CPUSA until some time in the winter of 1937, but her sympathies were already clear in an article she wrote for the Chicago Defender in 1932 about the nine young men accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama. Urging solidarity between the NAACP and the CPUSA’s International Labor Defense in the case, Caspary supported the CPUSA’s position, writing that the imprisonment of the Scottsboro youths was “not only a crime against black people, but a crime against all those poor ignorant working people, the mill hands and the tenant farmers, the poor Colored and the poor white in the South.”3

By the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Caspary actively participated in party work, “petitioning for blockades, for collective security, for aid to the victims of aggression. She attended meetings with cells in New York and Connecticut. “In Connecticut gardens and New York living rooms,” she recalled, “we gathered to pledge our faith in a way of life that would give men and women the strength, the dignity, the equality of opportunity that we believed was the human lot in the Soviet Union.” Working for the Republican cause in Spain, Caspary recalled, “we grew sturdy and proud of membership in the only movement in the world (we were told) that would abolish poverty and raise to prosperity and equality the wretched of the earth.”4 

In Norwalk, Connecticut, Caspary had been introduced to a group of factory girls by an undercover agent for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. There being “no other place in town where girls of Italian, Polish and Hungarian descent could engage in organized recreation,” Caspary began holding weekly meetings of a group that called itself the Confidences Club. Although the CPUSA considered these meetings to be party activities, Caspary said that the group’s purpose was education and socialization of a sort  that most working-class girls didn’t get to experience. But the group likely had been infiltrated and when Caspary told one of the girls who was seeking advice about birth control to visit the Birth Control Association in New York, the Confidences Club made the local headlines, with a story that said that its leader advocated free love and was bringing communism to Connecticut.5 Although Caspary wasn’t identified by name, that was the end of the Confidences Club.

From the beginning, Caspary loathed the secrecy that caused her to be instructed “to join the Party under an alias,” the logic being that her “name as a writer would be of greater value . . . if I were not known as a Communist.”6 She would “serve better in secrecy,” she was told, since an “uncommitted writer would have greater influence on the prejudiced bourgeois reader than an acknowledged Communist.”7 “The discipline of silence,” she recalled, made her question her reasons “for joining the Party,” namely the “search for honesty, the questioning of values,” and created in her eyes a culture in which “any questioning is called treason.”8 The discipline of silence made doubly suspicious the excuses CPUSA leaders offered about “the Soviet purges, the trials of old Bolsheviks, executions, labor camps in Siberia,” which they predictably enough attributed to the machinations of  “the lackey capitalist press and wicked Trotskyites.”9

As a feminist, Caspary was also dismayed by the Communist Party’s gender politics. In The Rosecrest Cell, a novel she later describe as “a confession disguised as a novel about my two and a half years in the Party,” one of the party faithful – who symbolizes all the contradictions and shortsightedness of the party itself — confides in his comrades, “I’ve always supported the woman question, but hell, boy, I was on the [Federal Theatre] Project. Writers. Try running an office with a bunch of females who are off half the time with cramps. I could provide a biologist with some very valuable statistics. Stenographers menstruate twice a month.”10 

These frustrations were amplified by Caspary’s growing resentment about the CPUSA’s attempts to dictate the content of her novels. She blamed her inability to complete a novel during the time she was a member on the party’s insistence that she write a proletarian novel. Although she claimed that she agreed with the mandate that she must use her writing “To improve the conditions of living for all men,” she fiercely disagreed with the Party’s prescriptions about what constituted a “solid piece of proletarian literature.”11 One example of this conflict was Caspary’s run-in with Frontier Films, a Popular Front film collective with ties to the CPUSA.12 Asked about her experience with Frontier Films in the 1970s, Caspary told scholar William Alexander that she and her collaborator George Sklar “had a terrific argument” over their screen play for Pay Day, a play about child labor. “We had submitted a screen play,” she wrote Alexander, “which they changed sadly; they called it a shooting script but it was like no shooting script I’ve ever seen in Hollywood. Completely amateurish. And, as I remember, lifeless. So we were very angry and quit.”13 “They treated us worse than a Hollywood producer would have,” Caspary added in a conversation with scholar Ann L. Warren, “A Hollywood producer would at least have employed a professional to do the rewrite.”14 Frontier Films had also, erroneously according to Caspary, used her name on their letterhead without her authorization, a use that would come back to haunt her when this erroneous formal association with Frontier Films would be cited by anti-communists.

Her work in advertising and film had given Caspary far too much experience in what it was like to produce writing within the unyielding constraints of an industrial system. Caspary, moreover, did not like to collaborate. She was, as one colleague put it, “well-known as a wit, a bright woman, a good popular writer,” but it was equally well-known that “She never cooperated with anyone on a screenplay.”15 For her to experience similar forms of control on the part of a political party she believed to be in the business of liberation was, to her thinking, the final straw.

In April 1939, Caspary decided she would visit “Russia to see how people lived in a world that to the Daily Worker was a paradise, to the Daily News hell.”16 Although Caspary spoke glowingly of her visit in public, she found Moscow to be strewn with images of Stalin and tense “from the sense of constant surveillance.”17 When Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939, Caspary notified the CPUSA secretary of Connecticut that she was quitting. She also gave her “word that I would never betray the Party or reveal its secrets, although what there was to conceal I could not imagine since everything we had ever discussed was shouted at public meetings and openly declared” in party publications. The only real secrets she knew “were the names of members who could become victims of professional Red-baiters.”18 

On the eve of the United States’ entry into World War II, Caspary fell in love with British film producer Isadore “Igee” Goldsmith. Separated for much of the war, the couple began living together in 1945. In 1950, finally married to Goldsmith, Caspary was at the top of her game. Her stories were selling well in Hollywood and, accepting work only on adaptations rather than original stories, Caspary contracted for five-week stints, which left her plenty of time to work on the novels that were “the purpose of all my screen jobs.” In the lulls between her lucrative contract gigs, Caspary “wrote as I liked, telling stories for the story’s sake, pleasing myself in the creation of incident, the development of character, the weaving of a theme.”19 

Fresh from working on the film Three Husbands, a comedy starring Eve Arden and Ruth Warrick, Caspary had just sold a treatment to MGM for $50,000 –- over $400,000 in today’s dollars. In 1951, Caspary would earn $55,000 from MGM alone. But then the sky came crashing down. Listed in Red Channels in 1950, Caspary’s career in the film industry began to take a slow nosedive, cushioned somewhat by screenwriting projects that were already under contract. By 1960, Caspary was earning a meager $2,500 a year.“20 She enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle that supported frequent travel to Europe, she had houses in Hollywood and Connecticut, and she and Goldsmith had no expenses associated with children or elderly parents. Moreover, aside from the script for Pay Day that was never made, Caspary’s commercial work had never been reflective of her political views and she understood her screen jobs as little more than a means to the end of her fiction writing.

But anti-communists made no distinction between past and present political sympathies. For them, once infected with the communist bug, the only cure was public renunciation. As Caspary put it, “The skeleton in my closet carries a hammer and a sickle” and that closet contained examples of what anti-communists considered subversive activities.22 Her support for numerous anti-Fascist events in the 1930s provided anti-communists with a trail of public documents to follow. In 1943, Caspary had been described as a fellow traveller in an FBI Special Agent’s report on communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. The report noted that she taught screen writing for the Hollywood School for Writers, an organization founded by the communist-sponsored League of American Writers (both groups ceased to function in January 1943, which demonstrates the unreliability of much of the information in the report, which assumed that these organizations were still functioning in 1950).23 Despite the largely apolitical content of her commercial work, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were suspicious of film noir and jealous of its successes, believing noir’s renderings of crime, criminals, and detectives to be too ambivalent (particularly when it came to masculinity) and not hard enough on crime and criminals. The trip to Russia in 1939 seemed the icing on the anti-communist cake.

Still, it’s likely that Caspary’s history would not have come back to haunt her if it hadn’t been for a request she made in 1944: to visit childcare centers at the Richmond Shipyards in San Francisco. The purpose of her visit to the childcare centers was to produce an Office of War Information (OWI) film “dealing with state child care centers, to be shown in neutral countries after the war as an example of democracy at work.”24 For an FBI already concerned Hollywood pictures “will have an effect on some classes of the American people, which will not be in the interest of the American form of Democracy,” Caspary’s request raised flashing red flags.25

In the first place, as the FBI put it in their October 1943 report on Hollywood--one of two major reports conducted in that year--Hollywood’s un-Americanism was being promoted not just by communists, but by immigrants and the children of immigrants who “harbored ‘ideas and culture’ alien to ‘the ideals and traditions of America’ . . . . and [who] naturally carried with them an ‘instinctive racial affinity inherited from European social life’ which, revolutionary or not, was deemed un-American.”26 A Jew, a Communist, and the daughter of immigrants, Caspary’s motives were inherently suspect. Hoover had additionally conceived an antipathy toward the Office of War Information that made him distrustful of all their requests. Perhaps most importantly, Caspary’s interest in childcare and the link she made between childcare and democracy was fully subversive in the context of an emerging Cold War culture that understood women’s work in the waged economy and childcare as communist conspiracies to undermine family values and patriarchal control.

• 1Vera Caspary, The Rosecrest Cell, New York: W.H. Allen, 1968, 39-40.
• 2“Letter to Faith Logotleth,” Vera Caspary Papers (Box 28, Folder 5, “Correspondence from Readers,” n.d. probably 1981).
• 3“Vera Caspary, “What Price Martyrdom?” Chicago Defender (9 January 1932), 14.
• 4Vera Caspary, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, 177.
• 5Ibid, 177.
• 6Caspary, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, 178.
• 7Caspary, The Rosecrest Cell, 54.
• 8Ibid, 363.
• 9Caspary, Thicker Than Water, 178.
• 10 Ibid, 179.
• 11Caspary, The Rosecrest Cell, 58.
• 12See William Alexander, “Frontier Films, 1936-1941: The Aesthetics of Impact,” Cinema Journal (Volume 15, Number 1, 1 October 1974), 16-28, for more on Frontier Films and the popular front.
• 13“Letter to William Alexander,” Vera Caspary Papers, Box 28, Folder 1, General Correspondence, 22 June 1975.
• 14Ann L. Warren, Word Play: The Lives and Work of Four Women Writers in Hollywood’s Golden Age, Unpublished dissertation, University of Southern California, May 1988, 75-6.
• 15Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999, 244.
• 16Caspary, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, 182.
• 17Ibid, 187.
• 18Ibid, 119.
• 19Ibid, 230-231.
• 20Memo from Bernard Skadron, Public Accountant,” Vera Caspary Papers (Box 28, Folder 1, General Correspondence).[/fn]

  Like many of those listed in the pages of Red Channels, by 1950, Caspary’s political perspectives had drifted from the radical left more toward the center. According to Norma Barzman, Caspary and Goldsmith continued to travel in leftwing circles – it would have been impossible to avoid those in the Hollywood of the early 1940s, but whatever communist sympathies she might have harbored were safely in the past.McGilligan and Buhle, 3.

• 22Caspary, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, 169.
• 23“Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry,” Special Agent Report, Los Angeles, FBI (18 February 1943 (Leab 1991), Reel 1, 162-3.
• 24FBI Memorandum, 21 March 1945.
• 25Quoted in John Sbardellati, “Brassbound G-Men and Celluloid Reds: The FBI’s Search for Communist Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood,” Film History (20, 2008), 419.
• 26Ibid, 415.

Bibliography

A Manual of Classic Dancing. (as Sergei Marinoff) Chicago: Sergei Marinoff School, 1922 (Non-fiction)

Ladies and Gents. NY: The Century Company, 1929

The White Girl. NY: J.H. Sears & Company, 1929

Music in the street. NY: Sears Publishing Co., 1930

Thicker than Water. NY: Liveright, 1932

Laura. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943

Bedelia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945

Stranger Than Truth. NY: Random House, 1946

The Murder in the Stork Club. NY: AC. Black, 1946

The Weeping And The Laughter. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1950

Thelma. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1952

False Face. London: W.H Allen, 1954

The Husband. NY: Harpers, 1957; London: W.H. Allen, 1957 (with dust-wrapper by George Adamson)

Evvie. NY: Harper, 1960

Bachelor in Paradise. NY: Dell, 1961

A Chosen Sparrow. NY: Putnam, 1964

The Man Who Loved His Wife. NY: Putnam, 1966

The Rosecrest Cell. NY: Putnam, 1967

Final Portrait. London: W.H. Allen, 1971

Ruth. NY: Pocket, 1972

Dreamers. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1975

Elizabeth X. London: W.H. Allen, 1978

The Secrets of Grown-Ups. NY: McGraw Hill, 1979

The Murder in the Stork Club and Other Mysteries. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru, 2009. Collection of novelettes.

Short Stories

"In Conference"

"Marriage '48", Colliers, Sept–Oct 1948

"Odd Thursday"

"Out of the Blue", Today's Woman, Sept 1947

"Stranger in The House", 1943

"Stranger Than Truth", Colliers, Sept–Oct 1946

"Suburbs"

Plays

Blind Mice w/ Winifred Lenihan (1930)

Geraniums in My Window; a Comedy in Three Acts, w/ Samuel Ornitz (1934)

June 13; a Mystery-Drama in Three Acts, w/ Frank Vreeland (1940)

Wedding in Paris, w/ Sonny Miller (1956)

Laura, w/ George Sklar (1947)