“So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?” Jean Harlow’s opening line in Red-Headed Woman (1932) was a double self-jest: a retort to the title of screenwriter Anita Loos’s best-seller, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and a jab at the platinum blonde hair that had already become Harlow’s trademark. But it was also a signal that this film was going to take its story in a different direction than the Katharine Brush novel that inspired it.
Red-Headed Woman has become one of the signature films of the Pre-Code era, less for anything particularly titillating than for the brazenness with which Harlow’s character, Lillian Andrews, works her way up the social ladder by luring men into extramarital sex. Although a keen eye can spot a flash of Harlow’s breast when she dons a nightgown she reclaims from roommate Una Merkel, the Studio Relations Committee (SRC), the censorship arm of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), better known as the Hays Office, did a vigorous job of scrubbing Loos’s script. The SRC felt that audiences would see Lillian more as an object of ridicule than a sex symbol. And Harlow does throw herself into the pursuit of her victims — first Chester Morris, then coal magnate Henry Stephenson — with a scary level of intensity. Both actors do marvelous jobs of flipping back and forth between fear and lust in split seconds in their scenes with Harlow.
But this piece is about Red-Headed Woman the book, not the movie, and I’m not sure there is much to be gained by comparing the two or itemizing what is and isn’t included from the one in the other. Despite the fact that the subject of adaptation of fiction into film continues to eat up acres of forest each year, I have to side with George Bluestone, who observes in Novels into Film (1957) that “It is insufficiently recognized that the end products of novel and film represent different aesthetic genera, as different from each other as ballet is from architecture.”
At the time that Katharine Brush began work on Red-Headed Woman, she was beginning to enjoy the financial rewards not just of a steady stream of magazine story sales but the popularity of Young Man of Manhattan (1930), her third novel, which was not only a best-seller but brought in a substantial fee through the sale of its film rights to Paramount. But the roots of The Fair-Haired Girl (Brush’s original title for Red-Headed Woman) reach back to 1923, when she and her first husband, Thomas “Stew” Brush, moved to East Liverpool, Ohio.
Stew Brush had been sent to East Liverpool by his father, Louis H. Brush, co-owner of the Brush-Moore chain of newspapers (and later radio stations), to manage the Review-Tribune and other papers in nearby towns. Though their son, Thomas, was born soon after, Katharine, who’d already had some experience as a reporter, soon felt the need to get back to writing. In addition to writing an uncredited advice column, she began submitting stories and humorous pieces for magazines such as College Humor. As she details in This is on Me (1940), her total income from writing that year was $84.75.
Though she occasionally wrote about the doings of East Liverpool’s high society in the Review-Tribune, the Brushes were not quite in the same class as the coal mine and steel mill owners with grand houses and country club memberships. They had a small unit in the Montgomery Apartments, a place not that different from the apartment where Lillian Andrews shares a room with her friend Sally. Brush describes Renwood — the fictional counterpart of East Liverpool — in Red-Headed Woman:
This was a country of mills and mines, of potteries and brickyards, of oil derricks strayed over from the neighboring Pennsylvania hills, black skeletons, lost and occasional here…. Here were thin thickets, fallow fields, a miner’s settlement, a beacon for the air mail built upon a hill, a march of powerlines northward through a gash across the land.
Or, as she puts it more succinctly in This is on Me, “It wasn’t very pretty.”
East Liverpool (Renwood) was just big enough for people to erect and maintain strong economic and social barriers between the working poor, the uneasy middle class, and the class of capitalists, their Junior League wives, and the children they could afford to send to boarding schools. Lillian Andrews, daughter of a railroad crossing attendant, is at the bottom of Renwood’s pecking order, but she begins early on to start her climb. She enrolls in the business school above Schrifftgisser’s hardware store, though she attends only enough to earn her stenographer’s diploma. After several short engagements with businesses that grew reluctant to keep her once they learned about Lillian’s “er — well –” reputation around town, she ends up at the Legendre Coal Company, where she immediately lays siege to Bill Legendre, Junior, the boss’s younger son, an antsy ex-jock unable to adjust to the sedate pace of the family business.
“Indeed, it was almost impossible for him to dictate,” Brush writes. “Stalk the floor as he would, head lowered, thumbs tucked into his belt, to the door and turn, to the window and turn, to the water-cooler and drink, his letters were not masterpieces.” Temperamentally unable to settle down, Bill has not only strapped himself to his father’s company and close supervision but to Irene, his childhood sweetheart and his family-approved mate. Wound as tight as he is, he’s easy prey for Lillian.
But as Brush makes clear, Lillian’s ultimate target is not Bill Legendre but the status of being one of Renwood’s best people. Maneuvering Bill into a position that gives Irene no choice but divorce is only the means to becoming lady of one of Renwood’s finest mansions, which she proceeds to redecorate furiously in what she believes is high style: “Brocaded satin chairs. Brocaded satin divans. Wrought-iron Spanish benches with red cushions and gold fringe…. Standing lamps with rosy-fringed silk shades.”
All of these material goods, as well as closets full of expensive clothes, might have been enough to earn Lillian Legendre some level of acceptance in a big city like New York where even the rich are sufficiently numerous to sustain mere acquaintances. Brush’s descriptions of Lillian’s love of things remind me of that scene in The Great Gatsby where Gatsby keeps throwing handfuls of shirts onto the floor, as if to tell Daisy, “See: I’m so rich I no longer know how many clothes I have!”
But in a small city like Renwood, memories are obstacles. The country club set, the bridge-playing set, the dinner-hosting and -attending set, are the same people Bill and Irene grew up with and the same people who turned their noses up at Lillian, the daughter of ol’ Tim the crossing attendant. They cannot and will not forget any of that to welcome this garish gate-crasher. And what Brush documents so meticulously — details that the film cannot afford to dwell upon — are the many ways in which Renwood’s best people are able to isolate and ostracize Lillian. She does, eventually, have to escape to New York, though with somewhat less deliberation than Jean Harlow’s Lillian. And having rejected Lillian like an antibody, Renwood reforms its ranks and brings Bill and Irene — reunited — back into their circle of the accepted.
Red-Headed Woman was actually Brush’s fifth fiction set in Renwood/East Liverpool. Prior to its appearance, she wrote four short stories that were sketches of some of the women she’d observed — one of them being Bill’s now ex-wife, Irene. These would later be included in Brush’s 1933 collection, Other Women.
At the risk of overstating its merits, Red-Headed Woman often seemed to me more like an updated tale out of Balzac than some throwaway bit of popular fiction. Katharine Brush spent just long enough in East Liverpool to make a precise accounting of its manners, mores, and cultural artifacts. In his review for Saturday Review, Jonathan Daniels called it “more than a story to be read…a social picture to be seen, a picture of a very vivid if not very intelligent segment of the American scene.” He praised Brush as an expert “collector of trivial details,” and summed up the novel as “a brittle, hard book about a brittle, hard world.”
Had she been around seventy years later, Katharine Brush might well have found herself writing for Desperate Housewives or producing a reality television series. Instead, she wrote for the most successful outlets of her time: magazines like Saturday Evening Post, in which Red-Headed Woman was serialized prior to publication in book form and its appearance on screen. And she managed to write stories that not only appealed to a broad audience but that recorded with the objectivity of an anthropologist the behaviors of a cross-section of American society.