First Love's Lasting Spell

LAURA

By Vera Caspary

Feminist Press. 219 pp. Paperback, $13.95

The first time I fell in love I was 12 years old, and the object of my affliction was the dazzling young Gene Tierney, starring in Otto Preminger's 1944 film noir classic "Laura." Tierney's beauty and her dreamlike aura as Laura Hunt put me in a daze that lasted for weeks. Still, I must say, looking back after many years, that my youthful longing may have been less for the actress than for a suddenly glimpsed world of beauty, wit and sophistication that seemed extremely unlikely ever to open its doors to the scruffy likes of me.

Those memories made me welcome Feminist Press's reissue, as part of its Femmes Fatales series, of the 1942 Vera Caspary novel on which the movie was based. Although I've seen "Laura" many times, I'd never read the book. I found it sometimes brilliant, sometimes a mess and mostly of interest as the first draft of Preminger's Oscar-nominated movie.

The novel has three great strengths. The first is Waldo Lydecker, Laura Hunt's mentor, the vain, deliciously nasty newspaper columnist who narrates the first and strongest section of the book. Lydecker, so archly portrayed by Clifton Webb in the movie, is one of those fancy-pants intellectuals we love to hate. He's an inspired creation; without him, the novel could only have been routine.

Its second strength is an ingenious plot twist that I won't spoil, although movie buffs have known it for decades, and it is revealed a third of the way into the novel. Let's just say we're astonished when someone returns unexpectedly. The novel's third strength is Caspary's having set a noirish crime story in the Manhattan haute monde of ad agencies, fancy restaurants and society folk as odious as they are self-satisfied. Caspary (1899-1987), who worked in advertising as a young woman before becoming a prolific author of novels and screenplays, knew that world well and delighted in satirizing it.

Her Laura, nearing 30, is a successful advertising copywriter, a woman who prizes her independence (and, it is hinted, sleeps where she pleases) but whose personal life is a calamity. As the novel opens, she has two men more or less in love with her: the older Lydecker, her frequent escort, who is possessive ("Under my tutelage she developed from a gauche child to a gracious New Yorker") and probably gay; and her fiancee, the handsome, Kentucky-born charmer Shelby Carpenter (nicely embodied by Vincent Price in the movie), who is at best a spoiled child and at worst a crook. Soon enough, the irresistible Laura is also loved by Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews in the film), the detective who is investigating the murder at the heart of the story. Caspary has fun pitting the no-nonsense detective against the effete columnist:

"Tell me, what kind of dame was she anyway?"

"She was not the sort of woman you call a dame."

Caspary also gives McPherson a memorable line when Lydecker asks if the detective has ever been in love: "A doll in Washington Heights got a fox fur out of me."

The first third of the novel, with Lydecker narrating, is hypnotic, but problems arise when Laura's voice takes over. A central contradiction in the story is how so smart a woman could get herself embroiled with creeps like Lydecker and Carpenter, both of whom the reader suspects of murder and both of whom are quite willing to suggest that she is the killer. Caspary ties Laura in knots trying to explain this contradiction. She tells us, "The idea that I am an intelligent woman is pure myth," and that she was only "pretending to love" the man she planned to marry and that, speaking of Lydecker's history of driving away her boyfriends, "I had been too blind and obstinate to see how his sharp little knife-thrusts had hurt my friends and destroyed love for me." It doesn't add up, except in plot terms: The two men must be creeps to contrast them with the detective, for whom she quickly falls -- a real man, at last -- even though he, too, suspects her.

It's easy to see how Preminger was attracted to the novel's strengths, confident that he could fix its weaknesses. Many of the best-known noir novels have become better movies: John Huston greatly improved Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon," and Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler worked wonders on James M. Cain's "Double Indemnity." Preminger began by cutting a great deal of weak and irrelevant material, and proceeded to make the most of Lydecker -- starting with his casting of Webb, over the objections of studio mogul Darryl Zanuck. He added new material, including McPherson's grilling of Laura at the station house, a different murder weapon and a vastly more dramatic ending. Finally, Preminger finessed the contradictions in Laura's character by distracting us with Tierney's beauty, as well as with stunning photography and a haunting score. The movie has flaws, but it's still magical -- though never as magical as it was light-years ago, for a lad in the hinterland, dreaming in the darkness of a future when all the girls would be like Gene Tierney.