“Those who read my book, Ex-Mistress,” writes Dora Macy in the foreword to Night Nurse, “will remember that twice I was ill in a hospital — once when I had my baby, and once when I parted with my appendix. Upon this last occasion, I found a new and interesting friend in my night nurse (who has since attended me at home during my second accouchement!)”
Night Nurse (1930), the second novel that Grace Perkins penned as Dora Macy, is drawn from interviews with this and other private nurses. It takes their horror cases and whips them into a melodramatic frappé, but one that comes served in a superficially objective container. Nurse Lora Hart, the narrator, purports to reveal the dirty truth of life inside “the world of sickness” — a “foreign world” with “different customs, rules, conventions, habits — an entirely different outlook on life.”
For Lora, “the world is divided into three parts: the sick, the well, and those who take care of the sick.” It doesn’t take the reader long, though, to figure out that the three parts of Lora’s world are really the good, the bad, and the patsies. She, of course, is one of the good. When she is assigned by her service to take the night shift caring for two little girls, seven and eight, suffering from malnutrition, she quickly wins their trust.
The girls reveal that their malnutrition is being fostered by Nick (bad), the family chauffeur, on behalf of their uncle (bad), who wants to gain control of the fortune currently being squandered by their alcoholic mother (patsy). They are slowly starving to death under the “care” of Dr. Ranger, a drug-addicted pediatrician (bad) in the pay of the evil uncle. Pretty much every adult involved is painted in lurid dark colors so exaggerated that Mortie, Lora’s bootlegger boyfriend, comes off looking like a knight in shining armor in contrast.
Not even Mortie, however, can aspire to Lora’s level of righteousness. Though she speaks in a voice of a hard-boiled, world-wise veteran (and an orphan, to boot), it never takes more than a paragraph or two for her to make it clear if a new character is good, bad, or patsy, and only a very few earn her gold star. Dr. Watchell, the physician from Lora’s training hospital she eventually recruits to her cause, attains superhero status with Lora as he snatches the girls from the jaws of death with regime that sounds utterly ineffective today: milk baths and “nutritive enemas.” With Dr. Watchell’s help, Lora manages to alert the police to the nefarious doings of Nick, Dr. Ranger, and the uncle, all of whom are put on trial — and gets the mother into a rehab clinic.
Grace Perkins, the hand holding Dora Macy’s pen, was a writer who’d worked her way up from being a pool reporter on New York newspapers to become one of the prized contributors of the “true stories” printed in Bernarr Macfadden’s hugely successful True Story. She then began an affair with Macfadden’s editorial director, Fulton Oursler, and eventually forced Oursler to divorce his first wife and marry her. By 1930, Mr. and Mrs. Oursler were not only the guiding forces of True Story, Liberty, Photoplay, and their many shorter-lived offshoots such as Flying Stories, Radio Stories, and Thrills of the Jungle, but successful novelists in their own right. Both Perkins and Oursler were so prolific, in fact, that they managed to produce a book or two a year under pseudonyms (Dora Macy, Anthony Abbott) — all bestsellers. Night Nurse had five printings in just the first two months after its publication.
Barbara Stanwyck delivers her verdict on the errant mother (Charlotte Merriam) in Night Nurse (Video).
Warner Brothers grabbed the rights to Night Nurse as a vehicle for rising star Barbara Stanwyck, already a veteran of hard-boiled roles, and their most cynical director, William Wellman. Released a little more than a year after the novel’s publication, the film version of Night Nurse put the book in the shade. Stanwyck is every bit as self-righteous as Perkins’s Lora, but her intensity is convincing rather than off-putting. The film also benefits from the inspired casting of the young Clark Gable (still in his first year with Warner Brothers) as Nick, managing to make the character both menacing and charming rather than one-dimensional. And finally, screenwriters Oliver H. P. Garrett and Charles Kenyon jettisoned Perkins’ awkward structure (halfway into the story of the starving girls, we step into a 10o-plus page flashback that takes us through Lora’s nurses’ training), which allowed a bit of comedy and the inevitable Pre-Code scene with Stanwyck and Joan Blondell caught in their lingerie.
Night Nurse the film is justly considered a classic of the period before the enforcement of the Production Code. Night Nurse the novel, on the other hand, is more an artifact of the publishing business as it existed when the relationship between slick magazines like Liberty, book publishing, and the movies was so close as to as be incestuous. And few exemplified that incestuousness like Grace Perkins and Fulton Oursler, who moved from New York to Hollywood soon after the sale of the film rights to Night Nurse so they could better oversee their involvement with the studios. Most of what the pair produced in the next two years (e.g., Personal Maid and No More Orchids (Perkins); The Great Jasper (Oursler); The Murder of the Night Club Lady (Oursler as Anthony Abbott)) would end up on screen as well as in print (magazine and book). It is just examples such as Grace Perkins and Fulton Oursler that I want to explore in what I hope will be my next book.