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!

A Man And A Woman

Kay's next—and most successful—
two novels began as magazine serials just like their two prede-
cessors. But their appearance in The Saturday Evening Post is surely evidence of Kay's increased literary stature.  

Young Man of Manhattan debuted in October 1929 (above left), and Red-Headed Woman in the summer of 1931 (above right). Publication in hard covers (below)  followed shortly thereafter.  

Above left: this later-printing jacket of Young Man of Manhattan boasts significantly higher sales (10 times higher!) than Kay's first novel, Glitter. Above right: the rare, first edition dust jacket of Red-Headed Woman depicts a pre-Harlow conception of Lil Andrews.

Left: Inscription inside one of my five copies of Young Man of Manhattan

"Swanie" is H. N. Swanson, Kay's long-time literary agent, whom she met during her days at College Humor. I have a number of Kay's books—all inscribed—that belonged to him.


Swanie was a pretty big deal. You can read what the Times said about him when he died in 1991.

The Little Opus

Though by 1927 Kay was already an established author with two novels under her belt, it was actually a short story that put her on the literary map. Night Club caused quite a sensation when it appeared in Harper's in September of that year. Yet there's actually such an absence of action in Night Club that Kay was later prompted to call it not even a story, merely a trick. 

Mrs. Brady is the ladies' lounge attendant at the Club Français, a tony New York night club. Throughout the course of the evening, young and not-so-young-anymore ladies wander in and out, lingering just long enough for the combing of hair, buffing of fingernails, powdering of noses. The reader, observing from the vantage point of the central character, is treated to snippets of the most intimate and revealing of conversations. At one a.m., when the club's dancing act go on, Mrs. Brady finally has some time to herself. She takes out the true stories-type magazine she purchased at the beginning of the story, and is immediately “absorbed, her eyes drinking up printed lines.” To Mrs. Brady the magazine stories are “live, vivid threads in the dull, drab pattern of her night.”  

Appearing 20 years after its
initial publication, this pulp
edition of Night Club hints at
titillations never delivered

The irony, of course, is that the "true" stories that Mrs. Brady finds so engrossing are actually playing out right under her nose, without her ever being aware of it. The story's ending is a literary punchline: that's Kay's "trick."

Night Club, which Kay later dubbed "The Little Opus," received an honorable mention from The O. Henry Awards, and was collected, along with 10 other of Kay's more successful stories up to that time, and published in a single volume in 1929. 


That same year, Kay's "Little Opus" was transferred to the big screen, albeit in a much altered (read "unrecognizable") form.


Incidentally, 1929 was also the year that one of Kay's stories actually won an 
O. Henry Award.