Vera Louise Caspary (November 13, 1899 – June 13, 1987) was an American writer of novels, plays, screenplays, and short stories.
Her best-known novel, Laura, was made into a successful movie of the same title. Though generally classified as a mystery novelist, Caspary felt uncomfortable with classifying herself in the genre. Yet her novels effectively merged women's quest for identity and love with murder plots. Independence is the key to her protagonists, with her novels revolving around women who are menaced, but who turn out to be neither victimized nor rescued damsels.Emery. 2005.
Following her father's death in 1924, the income from Caspary's writing was at times barely sufficient to support herself and her mother, and during the Great Depression she became interested in socialist causes. Caspary joined the Communist Party under an alias, but not being totally committed and at odds with its code of secrecy, she claimed to have confined her activities to fund-raising and hosting meetings.Caspary. 1979
Caspary visited Russia in an attempt to confirm her beliefs, but became disillusioned and wished to resign from the Party, though she continued to contribute money and support similar causes. She eventually married Isidor "Igee" Goldsmith, her lover and writing collaborator of six years. However, despite their successful partnership, her Communist connections led to her being "graylisted", temporarily yet significantly affecting their offers of work and income. The couple split their time between Hollywood and Europe until Igee's 1964 death, after which Caspary remained in New York where she wrote eight more books.NYT Obit, 1987
Biography Caspary was born prematurely in Chicago – her mother, Julia (née Cohen), over 40 with three nearly-grown children, had hidden the pregnancy. Her father Paul was a buyer for a department store. Caspary's parents were second-generation immigrants of German-Jewish and Russian-Jewish heritage.Current Biography. 1947. Being so much younger than her siblings, Caspary was reportedly spoiled as a child.
After Caspary graduated high school in 1917, her father enrolled her in a six-month course in a business college. By January 1918, Caspary found herself working as a stenographer. She went through a string of menial office jobs, looking for one where she could write instead of taking dictation from people with bad grammar.
While working at an ad agency composing copy, she invented the fictitious "Sergei Marinoff School of Classic Dancing", a mail-order dance course. Caspary wrote all the materials for this and other correspondence courses she had little knowledge of, including one that taught screenwriting.Contemporary Authors. 2003. She was also producing articles for publications such as Finger Print Magazine, and the New York-based Dance Lovers Magazine. By 1922, she had turned down a raise from $50 to $75 to write from home and work on her first novel.
New York By the time her father died in 1924, Caspary was fully supporting her mother, who was impressed that her daughter could "pound money out of a typewriter". Caspary moved to Greenwich Village in New York as Dance Lovers Magazine'''s new editor, living a Bohemian lifestyle. Here she met lifelong friend and collaborator Samuel Ornitz, then editor of Radio Lovers Magazine. Again leaving a job to write her own material, Caspary wrote her first novel, Ladies and Gents, which did not come out for two years due to a publisher's delay. When her mother fell ill, Caspary took another job writing a Charm and Beauty correspondence course.
While living in Greenwich Village, she was inspired to write The White Girl (January 1929) about a Southern black woman who moves North and passes as white. The reviews were better than Caspary had hoped; some speculated that it was written by a black woman who was passing.
By 1928, Caspary was writing for Gotham Life: the Metropolitan Guide, a free entertainment guide distributed through hotels. This job provided free tickets to theater shows, concerts, and nightclubs and introduced her to a wide circle of press agents and celebrities. While at Gotham Life, she lived under an assumed name in a "working girl's home". In March 1929, she again quit her job to write full-time, and her 1930 novel Music in the Street was set in a working girl's home.
Caspary moved back to Chicago and co-wrote the play version of Blind Mice with Winifred Lenihan, which featured an all-female cast and formed the basis for the 1931 film Working Girls. She and her mother moved to Connecticut to do rewrites on the play. However, it was disastrous – Caspary's inexperience with the process caused her to take everyone's advice, altering the text constantly. When she and Lenihan weren't present, the producers rewrote the play themselves. When Caspary returned, the original copy could not be found and the play closed in two weeks.
Back in New York in 1932, Caspary was supporting herself and her mother writing magazine articles, including interviews for Gotham Life. She also wrote Thicker than Water, a thinly veiled roman à clef about her own family. Caspary was nearly broke, but after bumping into a story editor from Paramount, she came up with Suburb, a 40-page story written over a weekend for which Paramount paid her $2,000. In her memoir, Caspary admitted that she rewrote and resold this exact plot eight times in the coming years. The week after she sold it to Paramount the first time, Liveright publishers gave her a $1,000 advance on Thicker Than Water.
Hollywood Thicker than Water received good reviews, but by then her publisher Liveright was feeling the pangs of the Great Depression and Caspary was again nearly broke. In March 1933, a Fox story editor called and asked for another original like Suburb, which had been filmed as The Night of June 13. She spent that summer in Hollywood, writing a treatment for Fox and working on a play with Samuel Ornitz. Caspary could not sell that play and by winter she was broke again, but Ornitz insisted they write another and brought her back to Hollywood where her luck was always better.
Within a week she had sold three stories to studios and gotten a $500-a-week contract. She purchased a completely new wardrobe and brought her mother from New York. Like most people, Caspary did not get along with Harry Cohn, and after one spat, she no longer received writing assignments. Since her contract had five more months, she merely stopped going to the studio and spent her days at the beach while her agent picked up her paycheck. Again wanting to write her own material, she got her contract canceled and set sail for New York.
Communism By this point in the Depression, many intellectuals were flirting with Socialist causes, and Ornitz tried to interest Caspary by giving her The Communist Manifesto, the Daily Worker and other materials. Though not truly committed, she allowed her work to be affected by changing attitudes, but found that having never been a proletarian, she could not write the great proletarian novel. She helped raise funds for causes and sign petitions but never became a true believer. Nonetheless, one of the last things her mother did before she died was to scold Caspary for associating with "filthy Reds".
Upon returning to Greenwich Village, Caspary was invited to join the Communist Party by a prominent playwright, and did so though under the alias of "Lucy Sheridan". Caspary found the Party's code of secrecy to be contrary to her search for truth and questioning of values, which had led her to join in the first place. Though she claimed to have never actively recruited anyone, she admitted performing Party chores such as fund-raising and hosting the fortnightly Confidences Club meetings at her home, which were mostly for socializing.
In April 1939, Caspary used the profits of a Hollywood story sale to travel to Russia to "see how people lived" in what the Daily Worker had described as a paradise. During her trip across Europe, she was nearly persuaded out of guilt to marry an Austrian Jew to get him to the United States, but due to slow paperwork she was saved that fate. She later learned that he made it to America on his own.
She traveled through Germany by train, being strip-searched at border crossings. She visited Moscow and Leningrad, visiting factories, seeing the "worker's paradise", and finding time to attend the ballet, where a Russian Jewish gentleman proposed to her during intermission. On her return trip through the Finnish border, the first-class car was empty, save for Caspary and Ivan Maisky, the Russian ambassador to Britain, who would have been carrying the ill-fated Russian offer for "collective security" to the Court of St James's.
Stalin's pact with Hitler disillusioned many Party members including Caspary. In her words, "Loss of faith is a slow process, and painful. A last desperate effort to cling to belief attacks the nerves. I became irritable, disliked my friends, slept badly, lost tolerance. Haunted by ghosts of deeds and statements. I felt filthy." By December 1939, she was actively trying to resign from the Communist Party; she was informed that she couldn't just exit, but could be asked to leave if she was brought up on charges. She called their bluff and agreed to it; however they were reluctant to let her go quietly, and agreed to call it a "temporary leave of absence". In January she closed up her house and moved back to Hollywood.
Laura However, Caspary's conscience would not let her simply abandon causes. She continued to sign petitions, contributed money, wrote to congressmen and maintained her memberships in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the League of American Writers. She also taught classes in writing screenplays to raise funds to bring refugee writers to America.
In June 1941, Germany attacked Russia, and Hollywood benefits for Russian war relief drew huge crowds. During this time, Caspary started tinkering with a murder mystery, but instead of producing an original screenplay she was encouraged to turn it into a novel. It was finished by October, and to get some perspective she went to work on a story about a night plane to Chungking for Paramount Studios. When the United States declared war on Germany and Japan in early December, that story was canceled, and Caspary asked to be laid off and returned happily to her murder mystery. During Christmas 1941, she typed "The End" on the last page of Laura.
1942 found Caspary working on a dramatization of Laura with George Sklar. While waiting for some meaningful war-related work to come from the Office of War information, she tried to enlist in the Army but was turned down. She had just met her future husband, a recent European émigré Igee Goldsmith.
Producer Dorothy Olney had taken an option on Laura, and Caspary traveled to New York to assist with preproduction on the play. Despite their efforts, Olney could not secure backing and gave up the option on the play. When Caspary returned to Hollywood, Igee was waiting for her with bouquets of red roses.
Caspary moved into a Mexican farmhouse on Horn Avenue across from Humphrey Bogart and began work on Bedelia. Igee, who had grown annoyed at the Hollywood habit of keeping producers on the payroll and not giving them anything to produce, was overjoyed at her request for assistance in working on Bedelia's rough patches. At Christmas 1942, their love affair was interrupted as every able-bodied British citizen was recalled to help with the defense of Great Britain. Igee, born in Austria, had emigrated to England in 1932 and would have to return there. She did not see him again for 13 months.