Pulp Fiction V: Show Me The Money!

Misled. No male characters actually appear in the story Night Club. And just what conclusions, exactly, are we expected to draw regarding the wad of bills being tucked down the front of the girl-in-pink's dress? (Do I even need to ask?) Readers will search in vain for anything even remotely akin to what the cover illustration suggests.

And while "Intimate Confessions" might be accurate, the alleged behind-the-scenes "goings-on" happen outside of the club: the story's impact lies in its sheer vagueness, the incompleteness of its narrative. 

Oddly enough, Night Club does actually contain one genuinely controversial  story: The Mother Has the Custody was rejected by numerous magazine publishers because it dealt with the subject of abortion, which of course was absolutely taboo in 1928. The story appeared in print for the first time anywhere when the hardcover edition of Night Club was published in 1929. 

The Little Sins cover is certainly the tackiest and tawdriest of all the pulp covers. Look closely: I am quite certain that the décolletage was drawn in. And that icky guy squishing his greasy face against the girl? 'Nuff said.

Pulp Fiction IV: Banned in Pittsfield

From the "That's Incredible" File:

The 1949 Avon reprint of You Go Your Way was actually banned in Pittsfield, Massachusetts for having an obscene cover! Not for the content of the book, mind you, it was banned for its cover! Booksellers and newsstands were ordered to remove the book, along with a handful of other titles deemed equally offensive.

Kay, of course, defended her work (and rightly so), saying "there's not a salacious word in it!" Kay publicly took full responsibility for the debacle, admitting that she should have been more vigilant and not allowed the book to be released in its immodest new attire in the first place. But in the same breath she went on to assert that the cover photograph certainly wasn't that different or any worse than much to be found in current advertising, giving a pretty clear indication of just what she thought of the Pittsfield officials' decision...  

Even by 1949 standards, Pittsfield must have been one hell of a straight-laced town!

Pulp Fiction III: The British Connection

Kay was forever suffering the indignity of having her name misspelt (and no, I haven't misspelt "misspelt"; look it up) a fact pointed out by one New York gossip columnist who mentioned that Katharine Cornell also spelled (or should I say "spelt"?) her given name with two a's. (As did Katharine Hepburn, of course.) It must have been particularly galling, though, in the case of Avon's tawdry looking pulp edition of Red-Headed Woman. (The editors and art directors also managed to lose the hyphen in the title.)






What's really funny to me, though, is on the back of the book: a picture of the Bard being used to tout "GOOD BOOKS" by "Great Authors". That may well be the case, but it's completely incongruous with what's on the front cover. (Oh, remind me to show you my copy of The African Queen sometime!)










ANYway. One of the books in my collection is this 1948 British edition of Woman (depicting an elfin, modestly attired Lil--LOVE the Cinnabon hairdo!), inscribed by Kay in 1949 to some friends, with thanks for a lovely weekend. 







Now, one of the really nifty things about collecting is that sometimes you find little  unexpected surprises. Inside this copy of the book was this hand-written note from Kay ("Bob" was Kay's companion):

Isn't that cool? The "nasty-looking paperbound reprint, of the railroad station type" is undoubtedly the Avon edition. It's no surprise that Kay found it distasteful. The note also contains a bit of poignancy: Kay never would get around to writing that new book. She would be dead just three years later.

Pulp Fiction II: Bad Girls Club

Apparently, sometimes the titles of the books themselves were deemed insufficiently titillating, and had to be changed:

But it's interesting, isn't it, that it's the female character that gets recast as the bad one. So what if that's thoroughly inaccurate and completely unfair? The point is to sell books, right?

Oh, well. At least they spelled Kay's name correctly...

Pulp Fiction; Or, You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover

Like the work of many a greater and lesser writer, Kay's novels were republished through the 1940s and 50s in cheap (in both commonly understood senses of the word) paperback editions, tarted up with racy new covers that gave a thoroughly inaccurate and misleading (and certainly intentional) impression of the work therein. 



While the clothes and hairstyles have been brought up-to-date for this 1949 reissue of Young Man, you'd never know that this is actually a Jazz Age story about newspaper reporters, Prohibition, and bootleg whisky!

KATHARINE LOUISE INGHAM BRUSH

August 15, 1900-June 10, 1952

Master of Ceremonies

Katharine Brush’s last published novel, The Boy From Maine, debuted in 1942. Phil Stong, writing in The Saturday Review, called the novel “a heroic effort to take the gay, brittle, and slightly desperate survivors of the last war [World War I] and bring them up to date.” Beatrice Sherman of The New York Times thought the book contained “quick and realistic sketches of the social upheavals of the last twenty-five years, all laid on by a competent brush” (Did you catch that last pun?)

I just re-read the book, and I think it’s Kay’s best. It has more of the depth that the critics found lacking in Don’t Ever Leave Me, a sentiment that Miss Sherman shared. It’s a pity that Kay didn’t live longer to write more.

Above: The first edition dust jacket in dire need of some good art direction. Disembodied heads; and no music note ever looked like that. The result of War-time economies?

The Boy is one Hobey Hadley, a bumpkin born Hobart Higgins, on an Island off the coast of Maine at the turn of the last century. After fleeing the poverty and utter bleakness of the island, and surviving a requisite patriotic stint in the US Navy (he lies about his age to get in), Hobey lands in New York, and decides to stay, at the urging of benefactress (“Fairy Godmother” is really more like it) Ruby, who runs a smart cabaret, and whom Hobey meets right off the boat, even before the salt spray on his uniform has had a chance to evaporate. Our Boy eventually works his way up the ladder of show business, first as MC and erstwhile crooner at Ruby’s, then as a radio announcer, and, finally, at the ripe old age of 40, Hobey leaves the spotlight and becomes a successful radio executive.

Broadway Gave The Boy From Maine Everything But the Girl He Loved

1945 reprint

And all the while he yearns for his childhood love, Rosalie, whose family used to summer on Hobey’s Island. While Rosalie is genuinely fond of Hobey, both know there can never be anything between them. Or, rather, Hobey knows it; it would never occur to Rosalie that such an idea could even exist. Rosalie is rich and glamorous (she’s a Katharine Brush heroine, afterall), and Hobey is a hick.  A lovable hick, but a hick nonetheless.

But Fate, if it won’t let them be together, will at least not allow them to be kept entirely apart. Rosalie and her second husband (was the fatal wound that killed Rosalie’s first really a gun-cleaning accident?), the faded (though still extravagantly handsome) football star Bailey Harker, move in and out of New York over the years, and neo-sophisticate extraordinaire Hobey, at the center of her circle of intimates, basks in the warm glow of his radiant Rosalie.

And They Lived Happily Ever After

Of course there’s never a doubt that Our Boy is going to get his girl. The only question is how long it will take, the only suspense what obstacle will need to be overcome next.

At Last: after 7+ years work, 
a rather bemused looking
Kay (from the jacket)

And that brings me to an observation about The Boy From Maine’s structure. Though Kay began the book around the time Don’t Ever Leave Me was finished (1935), work on the novel stopped sometime before 1940, when Kay suffered some serious writer’s block. Kay apparently became unstuck in 1941, when You Go Your Way was completed. Kay often said that Boy stalled at page 220, and, interestingly enough, a perceivable change in the tone and the pacing of the novel occurs right about that spot, when Hobey returns to the island to visit his estranged family. Once Hobey leaves the island for the second time and returns to New York, Kay wraps everything up with a swift neatness that is not in keeping with the first part of the novel, and which all seems just a little too convenient. Frank Stockton could have been writing about The Boy From Maine when he complained that the ending of Young Man of Manhattan “reminds one of the hasty cutting of knots with which some of Dickens's plots are brought to a close.”

I don’t know if I would have noticed this shift had I not known anything about the novel’s compositional history, but it’s unmistakably there.

Anyway, the book is pure soap opera, sentimental, sometimes silly, sometimes melodramatic; so I naturally ate it up.

Itchbay

“I haven't met Dorothy Parker, and I wouldn’t dare say a word if I had. I guess I know when to make wisecracks and when not to.” 

That’s what Kay said in 1940. I wonder if she changed her mind a year later, when Parker’s review of You Go Your Way appeared in the July 6, 1941 issue of PM...She must have had plenty to say. At least in private.

They Went That-a-Way!

You Go Your Way was Kay’s sixth novel to be published, but it was not  the one that had stalled at page 220, the one that led Kay to write This is on Me. (That novel would have to wait yet another year before finally finding its way into hard covers.) Kirkus Reviews called You Go Your Way “Airy amorantics by a crack hand,” and Beatrice Sherman, writing in The New York Times found the novel “light and amusing, short on ballast, but long on smartly frivolous conversation,” and “generously diverting.”

Young and vivacious (and stunningly beautiful—that goes without saying) Connie Crowell, though madly in love with husband Bill, decides (before their honeymoon is even over) that she married Bill too hastily. Connie’s unorthodox philosophy (“I wish bigamy wasn't illegal”) is that she should have been married once or twice before—unhappily—so that she and Bill would be assured of unending marital bliss. And so, what follows is a completely preposterous string of separations, rivalries, and courtships, through which Connie bounces merrily while Bill fumes and tries to keep up. You know exactly how it will all turn out in the end, but the ride is a lot of fun. I won’t give anything away, but you can probably figure out the ending from my simple synopsis without much effort.

“Then Bill fell in love with a purple china
dachshund with cacti planted in its open back.”
The rivals prepare to go wooing--simultaneously.

Though the plot is light as air, Connie’s “amorantics” and the book’s dialogue are genuinely funny. You Go Your Way is Kay’s only truly comedic novel, and the only one that actually makes me laugh out loud; it has all the elements of classic Hollywood screwball comedy. Doesn't that look like Cary Grant holding the red roses?   

In fact, The New York Times announced in late 1940 that Paramount had bought the screen rights to You Go Your Way as a probable vehicle for Claudette Colbert. That’s funny, because a few days ago The Palm Beach Story (which starred Claudette Colbert, of course) was on the television, and I was struck by how alike Preston Sturges’s picture and Kay’s novel are. Both date from the same time, and the main characters are young, glamorous New Yorkers. Both start off with the wife deciding the couple shouldn't be married any longer.

Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert in
Preston Sturges's The Palm Beach Story

Both marriages are “threatened” by the presence of romantic rivals on each side. And in each the wife goes—by train—to Palm Beach for a divorce (Florida divorces are quicker than Reno divorces, according to Connie Crowell.) The plot of The Palm Beach Story is, not surprisingly when one considers Sturges's oeuvre, even more ridiculous than Kay's story.

But I think Palm Beach gives a little hint of what the movie version of Your Way might have looked like. It’s a pity the picture didn’t get made, and we’ll most certainly never know why.

One odd coincidence: Connie and Bill (in You Go Your Way) don yachting caps and go “yachting” on a chartered tug called the Ella F. McGlew. In The Palm Beach Story Gerry Jeffers (Colbert) introduces husband Tom (Joel McCrea) as her brother, Captain McGlew! Mere coincidence? Or was Preston Sturges perhaps familiar with Kay’s book?

You Go Your Way was originally  serialized in The American, starting with the April, 1941 issue. Illustration by Alfred Parker

Should've Left Well Enough Alone

First appearing in Cosmopolitan magazine, Kay’s 1935 novel Don’t Ever Leave Me did not, despite mostly favorable reviews (The New York Times was quite generous in its praise), enjoy success similar to that of its predecessors. Kay would later lay the blame on her own constant tinkering, her incessant re-writing. In fact, she told The Times in 1942 that the novel wasn't written at all—it was “carved.” Kay was, however, she further explained, ultimately pleased with the result. Along with a few other writers, bless their hearts.

Sidney Cunningham dances with Don Lamont at the Labor Day dance.
Was the one wandering white strand inlaid in her otherwise black hair
grown or manufactured?  And what was the story of the little black cat
tattooed on her back? Magazine illustration by McClelland Barclay.

Reading the reviews today, I am reminded of that assessment by the Times in 1944: “the interesting thing about Katharine Brush's work has always been not so much what she says as how she says it.”

Regarding the how of Leave Me, one finds little in a negative vein:

“The large audiences that were captured by Young Man of Manhattan and Red-Headed Woman will not be disappointed…” (Leane Zugsmith, NYT)

“[Brush is] very readable for the moment…devilishly adept…” (John Chamberlain, NYT; “Books of the Times”)

“[Brush] has achieved a slick-as-cream smoothness which lesser popular writers must envy desperately…On certain contemporary matters her work is definitive.” (Edith H. Walton, The Youngstown Daily Vindicator)

The what, on the other hand, left the same critics unsatisfied.

Here’s Chamberlain:

Superficially, Miss Brush is a novelist of Scott Fitzgerald’s order. But only superficially. Both of them have very retentive memories for the ephemeral that gives each year its special tone. But…Fitzgerald is interested in character, in people making moral decisions. Miss Brush tries to be. But the typical and the topical are always diverting her…[T]he world of character, of moral decision, is neglected…

And although Walton thought the novel warmer than Red-Headed Woman, and found in it “faint, undeveloped traces of social consciousness,” she predicted that the book would be “unbearably nostalgic” ten years into the future. She twists the knife a bit by concluding that Don’t Ever Leave Me “will disappoint only those naïve optimists who once supposed, on the basis of her short stories, that Katharine Brush might develop into a writer of consequence.”

Ouch.

Left: the rather drab dust jacket of the first edition; Kay's name is now larger than the title. Right: Inscription inside Swanie's copy of Leave Me

All the Pretty Red-Heads

Putting us on:
Dressler, circa 1931

As with the casting of Scarlett O’Hara years later, 
it would seem that virtually every female star in Hollywood was “considered” for the part of Lillian Andrews in MGM’s screen adaptation of Red-Headed Woman. Many of the names can certainly be dismissed as just so much hype (Garbo? Give me a break!); but so tireless and extensive were the efforts of MGM's publicity machine that no less than sexagenarian 
(with perhaps an emphasis on the "sex") comedienne extraordinaire Marie Dressler was prompted to throw her own hat in the ring!

What Bow's Lil Andrews
might have looked like

"It Girl" Clara Bow was reported by Time magazine as a natural, if not necessarily first choice. But this seems to be just another rumor, originating with Louella Parsons. Parsons claimed that MGM's Irving Thalberg sought her opinion regarding who should get the part. To that end, Parsons conducted a “poll” in her column, asking her readers who they wanted to see in the part; Bow, apparently, was America's overwhelming choice. But I can find no independent evidence (other than the Time piece) that Bow was ever seriously considered for, much less offered the rôle.

The only name that appears to have been seriously in the running is Joan Crawford, whose assumption of the rôle seems to have come close to becoming reality: The New York Times went so far as to announce Crawford as MGM's likely choice in October of 1931. But  according to at least one source I have seen, Crawford was given the thumbs down by Kay herself, though Kay makes no mention of any participation on her part in the casting of the picture in This Is On Me. (Interestingly enough, Crawford would play another Brush heroine five years later in Mannequin, but more on that in a future post...)

Joan Crawford almost looks as though she's posing as the artist's rendering of Lillian Andrews!

Carole Lombard, circa 1931

Other suggestions that at least look plausible on paper are Carole Lombard and Barbara Stanwyck.  

But by early May of 1932 the Times announced 
the final cast, shortly after declaring that

Miss Harlow has specialized on the screen in distasteful women and the fear of the average star 
that she will suffer from an unsympathetic part is 
just so much cream in Miss Harlow’s coffee.

What strikes me as funny is the fuss that was made at the time over Harlow’s 
hair-color—platinum blonde—which was hardly natural to begin with. One writer 
expressed dismay that the character would have to be turned into a blonde, and Parsons argued that the part should at least be given to a real red-head, conveniently ignoring the fact that Bow’s own red tresses came from a block of henna! And it’s odd that in the finished, black-and-white picture, Harlow’s hair (a wig, according to the Times) doesn’t even register as all that vivid. It makes me think of how Bette Davis’s “red” dress in Jezebel was actually not red at all…

I vant to be a red-head:
Garbo would eventually get her chance
to go "red," for 1939's Ninotchka

“So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?”

The opening line of MGM’s topnotch treatment of Red-Headed Woman is an inside joke: 
the line, of course, is a reference to Anita Loos’ book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, published in 1925. 
The joke is that Jean Harlow's blonde hair was already the star's trademark, and that the screenplay of Woman was written by none other than Loos herself—apparently after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s effort fizzled.


The accepted story, repeated by numerous Fitzgerald biographers, has it that the Fitzgerald script (produced with collaborator Marcel de Sano) was deemed too somber, and was tossed aside. In all fairness to Mr. Fitzgerald, it should be pointed out that Kay's original novel does not contain much—if any—of the humor to be found in MGM's realized adaptation. (By his own account, the experience left Fitzgerald more than a little disillusioned with Hollywood.) According to This is on Me, Loos was with the project from the beginning, and Fitzgerald a seemingly minor player. I'm not quite sure who to believe, but it would seem that Kay’s recollection in this instance is faulty. In any event, it’s Loos’ name in the opening credits, not Fitzgerald’s.

The picture premiered on June 25, 1932, and was an instant hit.

My favorite line in the movie? Lillian Andrews, trying on a dress in a shop (and standing in front of a sunny window), demurely asks the (off-camera) shopgirl 

“can you see through this?”  “I’m afraid you can, miss,” answers the shopgirl. 

“I’ll wear it,” comes Lil’s unexpected reply. It occurs within the first 2 minutes 

of the movie, and it lets us know right from the outset just what sort of picture 
this is going to be: 
    
“a quick, caustic biography of an alert, successful strumpet,” according to Time.

Jean Harlow (seated) and Anita Loos cutting up for MGM's publicity department

Young Woman with a Pulitzer

Here’s a suggestion for Christmas gift-giving from The Palm Beach Post’s “Book Nook”, December 20, 1931:

Probably too light in vein for a Pulitzer. Probably. Even that’s quite a compliment. As greatly as I admire Kay’s writing, as much as I enjoyed Red-Headed Woman, even I have to say that even “probably” was probably a bit optimistic.

The Outsider

I just finished reading Red-Headed Woman. I had left it for later, as I mentioned previously, because I felt I already knew the story well enough from the movie. 

In fact last night, with 20 or 30 pages left, I put the movie on, so that I could do a sort of side-by-side comparison. My initial assessment—that I knew it, the story—was only partially correct. The picture’s a good one, a lot of fun, but the book is, not surprisingly, much better, much fuller.

The jacket of the 
movie tie-in edition

The essentials are the same. Red-headed Lillian ("Lil") Andrews is from the "wrong side of the tracks." Lil works as a stenographer for the Legendres, who own a number of coal mines in Renwood, Ohio. Lil aspires to a more affluent, comfortable (well, pampered, really) life, and sets her sights on William ("Bill") Legendre, Jr. She uses her considerable feminine charms to seduce Bill away from his wife Irene. But even Renwood affluence isn’t enough for Lil, and, what’s worse, the social gates she thought would be flung wide to welcome her remain frustratingly, maddeningly barred. She decides it’s time to trade up, which she does by charming one C. G. Gaerste (rhymes with "thirsty"), whose wealth dwarfs that of the Legendres. ("You wouldn't call it money.")

Here’s where the stories diverge. In Kay’s original, Gaerste is, like Lil, an outsider of humble origins. Through hard work and sheer good luck he amassed his millions, which he now relishes in flaunting before all the world. Free of any “old money” snobbishness (to say nothing of restraint), he and Lil are simpatico. Gaerste sees Lil as simply another gorgeous, expensive ornament for him to dangle before envious, admiring eyes. Whether or not there’s any real affection between the two is completely beside the point.  

In the movie, Gaerste is a bit of an old coot, a wealthy friend and business associate of the Legendres. At first resistant to Lil’s wiles, Gaerste must be won over with sex.  And old coot or no, Gaerste is rich enough for Lillian to accept his proposal of marriage.

But then there’s a chauffeur (in the guise of Charles Boyer), a private investigator, a shooting, and an escape to Paris, none of which originated at the point of Kay’s pen. Oh well, both versions of the story end with Lil pretty much getting exactly what she wanted from the start.

Obviously, motion picture adaptations of literary works have to be condensed, streamlined. Characters get combined or added or eliminated altogether; events are truncated, shifted. At least this was the understood, the expected and accepted practice in 1932. Unfortunately, the central—it literally happens in the middle of the book—event in Kay’s original, the party scene, is shifted and condensed in such a manner and to such a degree that it loses most, if not all, of its impact.

The scene shows Kay at her best, I think, and can stand almost on its own as a story. It’s worth reading in its entirety, and if you’d like to do so, you can find it here. 

Here’s the emotional climax:

                She knew, she understood, then and thereafter. Her mind made swift and shattering translations. She could not delude herself, she could no longer, with the thin veil of Louise's subtlety, hide from herself Louise's meanings. Now she knew what all this was—deep in her mind she must have known it from the start, to know it so well now, to see it with such clarity. They were kidding her, these girls. Of course. Of course. They were giving her a ride. They were making fun of her, making a perfect fool of her—laughing at her behind the bright polite glaze of their eyes. They were collecting ludicrous quotations and descriptions, to take away with them; enough to last them for a long time. They were Irene's great friends, and this was sport and this was vengeance. So they had come. Now she knew well why they had come.

                This was what happened, then. This was what you got. You were the red-headed Andrews girl from Renwood Falls, from the railroad crossing, and you stole a rich husband and bought a big house, and a Chinese Buddha, and a naked dress, and you tried to crash Society—and this was what you got. Never mind what you expected, hoped for. This was what you got. This was what Society did to you, to make you understand. You couldn't crash it in a million years.

The scene as Kay’s written it also highlights one of the less tangible differences between novel and movie. Watching Harlow give life to Lil Andrews, we are alternately amused and scandalized (assuming we’re an audience of 1932, anyway) by her wanton brazenness. But we never feel sorry for her. Not once. And while we might cringe at the behavior, the taste and the choices of Kay’s “heroine,” she’s not one-sided; something akin to pity is often aroused in the reader. 

Pity for the outsider who so desperately wants to belong.

photo of Kay from the first edition dust jacket

Young Man of the Movies

It was inevitable that a novel as successful as Young Man of Manhattan would find its way to the silver screen: it arrived in theaters the same year the book was published. In fact, the film rights had been sold even before the Saturday Evening Post serial had concluded! It seems quite astonishing today, the rapidity with which the studios managed to turn bestsellers into movies...such was the demand for talking pictures.

It was the era of raccoon eyes--I mean COATS!

Paramount's Young Man Norman Foster starred opposite his then real-life wife Claudette Colbert in a faithful and straightforward (albeit somewhat condensed) realization of Kay's original. And although it was quite universally lauded by the critics, one reviewer said he wished Miss Colbert had worn rather less eye makeup! 


The picture also starred Charles ("Charlie") Ruggles, best remembered today as the burbling grandfather in Disney's The Parent Trap (1961), and a young Ginger Rogers in her first feature-length motion picture. 

Charlie Ruggles must have been more popular
than Claudette Colbert in Brooklyn back in 1930!