Pre-Code

I should start with an apology — two of them, actually. First, I apologize for not posting here for the last two months. I recently submitted the manuscript of my book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts, to the University of Nebraska Press, and that left me little time and energy for Neglected Books. And second, I’ll apology in advance for the fact that there will be a fair number of posts about books from the early 1930s that will probably, on average, deserve their neglect if not for their function as sources for movies from what’s known as the Pre-Code era, which has become something of a fascination for me.

I wrote about Louis Weitzenkorn’s play Five-Star Final back in September and have since accumulated several shelves full of novels and plays from this period. A fair number of source texts have become quite rare, so I’ve taken liberal advantage of Inter Library Loan to obtain others — including this monstrosity.

There may be no better evidence of the symbiotic relationship between Hollywood and the literary world of the early 1930s than The Woman Accused. The genesis of the project is lost in the files of Paramount Studios, but apparently Polan Banks, one of Paramount’s screenwriters with a few novels to his credit, concocted the idea of having a team of popular novelists of the time collaborating on a novel that would both be serialized in Liberty magazine and filmed by Paramount. Tag-team novel writing wasn’t new: no lesser worthies than Henry James and William Dean Howells had banded with ten scribes in 1907 to produce The Whole Family, whose excellence is demonstrated by the fact that this may be the first and only time you’ll ever hear about it.

The novelty of Banks’s proposal was not the collaboration of the authors but the collaboration of studio, magazine, and book publisher in the synergistic marketing of the story. Liberty would publish the individual chapters concurrent with the appearance of Paramount’s movie in cinemas around the country, and Ray Long & Richard R. Smith would collect the chapters in a book that would hit shops at the same time. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Consumer would have to make concerted efforts not to stumble into one or another of its packages.

As the most popular magazine of the time, it was easy for Liberty to round up nine willing writers (Polan Banks graciously offered his services). Most of them were regular contributors already, and the few who weren’t would be happy to join the Liberty team. At the time, a single feature story in Liberty could earn a writer more than the average American made in a year. By late 1932, the recruitment process was over and the writing well underway. The cast of contributors is testimony to the fickleness of literary success:

• Rupert Hughes. Hughes was a prolific novelist, playwright, and author of magazine fiction whose strongest tie to Hollywood was through his nephew, the millionaire and budding film producer Howard Hughes. Hughes was also then in the midst of writing a well-regarded multi-volume biography of George Washington.
• Vicki Baum. The Austrian-born Baum was riding a wave of success from her novel, Menschen im Hotel, which became a best-seller in the U.S. as Grand Hotel and, in turn, the 1932 movie of the same name that won the Oscar for best picture of the year.
• Zane Grey. Grey had, by this time, spent decades as America’s best-selling author of Westerns (and even today his novel Riders of the Purple Sage has never been out of print).
• Viña Delmar. Delmar was then at the height of her success, her hit novel Bad Girl having been both a popular success and the basis of a 1931 movie of the same name, which earned three Oscar nominations, including for best picture, and with several other films made from her magazine stories.
• Irvin S. Cobb. Unless you frequent musty old bookstores, you’ve probably never seen his name before, but Cobb was then producing humorous and folksy books with titles like Speaking of Operations and Old Judge Priest (which John Ford would film the following year with Will Rogers in the title role).
• Gertrude Atherton. California’s answer to Edith Wharton, Atherton was perhaps too prolific to help her critical reputation, but her social and historical novels had been steady sellers since the turn of the century.
• J. P. McEvoy. McEvoy was then best-known for his Dixie Dugan novels, lightly satirical looks at show business as seen by a chorus girl and would-be starlet (modeled on Louise Brooks). (Long out of print and exceptionally rare, the Dixie Dugan trilogy was reissued earlier this year by Tough Poets Press.)
• Ursula Parrott. Ursula Parrott already had two movie adaptations under her belt, with her 1929 best-seller, Ex-Wife, made into The Divorcee and Strangers May Kiss filmed under the same name in 1931, both starring Norma Shearer.
• Polan Banks. Banks’s first novel, Black Ivory, was a turgid potboiler set in 18th century Louisiana, but it sold well enough to earn an invitation to come to Hollywood, where his next book, Street of Women, became a starring vehicle for Kay Francis under the same name in 1932.
• Sophie Kerr. Although, as her Wikipedia page puts it, Kerr “is largely unknown to contemporary readers and her books are long out of print,” she had ten novels to her name by the time she was enlisted to work on this project and was a frequent contributor of magazine fiction.

In theory, The Woman Accused would have taken months to write, with each author receiving the previous chapters and adding their own, in a version of the game Consequences. In practice, it appears that Banks and Hughes came up with the outline of the story and the transition points for each chapter to ensure continuity, and all the writers churned out their chapters in a few weeks. The exercise was not much of a stretch from that of writing a typical magazine short story, which all of them were doing as many as a dozen times each year.

Churned is the operative word here. As the New York Times’s reviewer put it when the book version came out, “If a machine existed for the production of novels without the hindrance of an artist’s imagination, its work would resemble this collaboration of ten successful writers …” It’s a bit like a gourmet meal run through a blender for consumption through a straw.

Much magazine fiction of the time relied on a formula perfected decades before by the likes of O. Henry: characters recognizably based on stereotypes, a dramatic quandary, and a twist. And The Woman Accused is simply a concatenation of ten different versions of this stereotype hung upon a skeletal plot. Glenda Cromwell is a bright, beautiful, popular young woman who’s madly in love with bright, handsome, successful lawyer Jeffrey Baxter. Happiness awaits them. Unfortunately, there’s an obstacle: Glenda is a kept woman, the mistress of a powerful tycoon named Leo Young.

She decides to take the course of radical honesty and tells Jeffrey all, expecting his rejection. But Jeffrey demonstrates exception tolerance — or a uniformly low opinion of women:

She told him everything, put the worst interpretation on all her misdeeds, made crimes of her mistakes, tried to make him loathe her old self, as she herself did. This proved to him only that she was honest. He believed all women capable of sin, and most of them eager to yield to temptation.

And so, he proposes and she accepts and this book could easily have been ended by page 9. But Rupert Hughes, author of the first chapter, injects a couple of doses of plot complications and twists to keep his fiction machine cranking. They should go on a “six-day cruise to nowhere,” during which the captain — an old client — will marry them in secret (Because? O, reader, toss away your crutches of plausibility and walk!).

But then, the night before departure, Leo Young returns. He refuses to let Glenda go. Threatens to spread horrible rumors. She was once arrested (For? This is left to our imagination, or rather, to Chapter 10) and he can arrange for her records, including fingerprints, to be destroyed. He twirls the end of his moustache around his finger in malevolent glee. (Sorry, that’s Simon Legree. Hard to keep these stereotype bad guys straight.) There’s an argument, a struggle, and a shot.

Somehow, Glenda and Jeffrey make their way to the ship before the police discover the body. But wait! There’s a radiogram: Glenda is wanted for murder. Those fingerprints match the ones on the gun! The captain is told to hold Glenda until the return to port. But then someone comes up with the idea of holding a mock trial, with Glenda as defendant and Jeffery as her attorney. Several more plot twists follow, each accompanied by much creaking of machinery. Finally, a completely implausible explanation for Leo’s death is produced and Glenda and Jeffrey live happily ever after.

The ten authors should be credited with managing to achieve a consistent level of mediocrity across all ten chapters. These were writers known for their ability to produce fast-moving plots, not finely-honed prose styles or memorable characters. Viña Delmar shows slightly more flair for dialogue, Zane Grey slightly less clunkiness in his narrative. Sophie Kerr has the misfortune to be left with the chore of explaining those fingerprints, which she does in ten pages of near shaggy-dog tale telling by Glenda that serve more to achieve her word count goal than to facilitate a neat happy ending to the book.

In sum, The Woman Accused is neither a good novel or a good novelty. Nor was it entirely satisfactory as film material. Paramount gave the stories to playwright Bayard Veiller, then on contract, and he cut out a few twists and introduced some of his own. Now, the mock trial is instigated by a crony of the late Leo Young who commandeers a police boat that races out to intercept the cruise ship at sea. Which was, of course, just another day’s work for the men of the New York City Police Department Navy. Veiller tacks on a talky examination in a judge’s office on land — with Baxter once again as defense attorney — and invents a fairly shocking scene in which Baxter, played by Cary Grant, horsewhips a low-life crook, played by Jack LaRue, into confessing…well, something useful to exonerate Glenda.

The book’s primary interest is as an artifact of the intimate links between Hollywood and the literary world of its time. Liberty proclaimed that 5,000,000 of its readers would want to see Paramount’s movie version. Paramount opened its movie not with cast or production credit but with portraits of the “Ten of the World’s Greatest Authors.” Ads for the Long & Smith book touted both film and magazine serial.

Opening credits of the Paramount film, The Woman Accused (1933).

For the authors involved, The Woman Accused, once the royalty checks were deposited, the book was probably forgotten. All continued to write. Atherton, the oldest, published eleven books before her death in 1948. Grey, the first to die, in 1939, managed to publish sixteen more as well as an equal number posthumously. Viña Delmar had the the longest career, publishing her 16th novel, McKeever, in 1976 and passing at the age of 86 in 1990. Of the several hundred books (and even more magazine stories) produced by this tentet, Zane Grey’s books have survived the best, although Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife has had a recent revival thanks to reissues from Faber (UK) and McNally Editions (US) and a 2023 biography by Marsha Gordon.

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The Woman Accused, by Rupert Hughes, Vicki Baum, Zane Grey, Viña Delmar, Irvin S. Cobb, Gertrude Atherton, J. P. McEvoy, Ursula Parrott, Polan Banks, and Sophie Kerr
New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1933.