Back STreet

  Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic films that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered through the publication of the novels on which they were based.

  FIRST VINTAGE MOVIE CLASSICS EDITION, MARCH 2014

  Copyright © 1930, 1931 by Fannie Hurst, renewed 1958 by Fannie Hurst Foreword copyright © 2014 by Cari Beauchamp

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally serialized in Cosmopolitan, New York, from September 1930 to January 1931.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Movie Classics and colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  Vintage Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8041-7067-3

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-7068-0

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover photograph © ClassicStock / akg-images / Camerique

  v3.1

  FOREWORD

  By Cari Beauchamp

  The name Fannie Hurst might ring a distant bell today, but in her time she was as famous for being herself as she was for the popular fiction she turned out with inspiring regularity. More than two hundred stories about her appeared in The New York Times, and her 1962 obituary made the front page.

  Hurst lived a life that rivaled those she created on the page, and as she was inventing some of her most famous characters, she was reinventing herself. A Jewish fish out of water in her native St. Louis, she wrote her way to fame as a sophisticated New Yorker. She laughingly maintained she began collecting rejection slips at the age of fourteen and had amassed quite a pile before publishing her first national story in 1912, when she was twenty-one. By the time she was thirty-five, she was making more money than Somerset Maugham or Edna Ferber. Fannie’s work was often serialized in the leading national magazines of the day, such as Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post, and Collier’s, before they were published as novels or in a collection of short stories.

  She created female protagonists who faced dilemmas rarely spoken of in polite conversation: sexual harassment, spousal abuse, and the plight of mistresses. She wrote of overtly sexual women who thought about the pros and cons of associating with married men, and the double standard that existed between men and women laced almost all her work. She was never a great literary figure, but rather a great storyteller, and for decades she was dubbed the reigning “sob sister” of American fiction.

  Hurst was an active supporter of women’s suffrage, civil rights, and the Lucy Stone League, which promoted women keeping their own name after marriage. Fannie not only did that, but she kept her marriage to the pianist Jacques Danielson a secret. They lived in separate apartments, breakfasted together twice a week, and balanced a schedule that included occasional weekends away together and many nights out with friends on their own. When, after five years, the marriage became front-page news, Fannie and Jacques found themselves advocating their arrangement, saying that since both of them needed hours alone for their work, they found it both productive and satisfying.

  What stayed secret from her public, according to Hurst’s biographer Brooke Kroeger, was that during her marriage Fannie conducted a longtime affair with the anthropologist and Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. In her fiction, Fannie’s female characters often found themselves waiting for their phones to ring, but in her own life, it was usually the men who did the waiting.

  Fannie’s widely read stories were obvious fodder for the burgeoning film industry. Financial independence was important to her, and nothing was better than getting paid for work she had already done. She befriended the screenwriter Frances Marion when Marion adapted and directed a film based on Hurst’s “Just Around the Corner” in 1919, and Fannie was pleased when Frances was assigned to adapt her Jewish ghetto story of heart-tugging mother love, “Humoresque”. Frances agreed with Fannie’s suggestion of casting the Russian-born Vera Gordon as the mother in the film, and together the women laughed off the studio head Adolph Zukor when he chastised Frances: “If you and Fannie Hurst are so determined to make the Jews appear sympathetic, why don’t you choose a story about the Rothschilds or men as distinguished as they?” Yet Fannie was “indignant” when she saw the first rough cut of Humoresque with a happy ending added, and demanded her name be taken off the credits. Frances talked Fannie down, explaining that while readers could handle a tragic ending, movie audiences needed “optimism and hope.” To her credit, Hurst took to studying motion pictures, seeing as many as she could, and came to not only agree with Frances but to encourage her to adapt others of her works into films, using, according to Marion, “the skeleton of those stories in new garb especially designed for the screen.” It didn’t hurt that Humoresque, often billed as “Fannie Hurst’s Humoresque,” went on to win Photoplay’s first Medal of Honor, a precursor of the Academy Awards, as the best film of 1920.

  Hurst’s stories of women grappling with their lives, their desires, and their place in society continued to sell magazines, books, and movie tickets. Back Street would be made into a film three times (in 1932, 1941, and 1961). “Humoresque” was adapted twice, as was her most famous novel, Imitation of Life. By the time Back Street was going before the cameras the first time in 1932, more than ten years had passed since the first Humoresque, and a dozen more of Fannie’s works had been made into films. Her short story “Back Pay” featured a classic Hurst heroine whose devoted small-town suitor loves her in her “little gingham dress,” but she knows she has to leave for the big city because she has “a crepe de chine soul.” Think of the young, dissatisfied woman in the hinterlands watching Back Pay in her local theater connecting, perhaps for the first time in her life, to a kindred spirit. She had been wondering what was wrong with her and she suddenly finds she isn’t alone after all. This was the power of Fannie’s stories.

  In the book Back Street, Walter explains to Ray his ability to bifurcate his life: “My feeling for you and my feeling for my wife and children are things separate and apart.” A simple declarative sentence explains it all, allowing Hurst and the film to focus on the agony and ecstasy of the mistress, a three-dimensional character. Fannie threads the needle carefully to make a role condemned by society into a complex and sympathetic woman, almost monastic in her dedication to her man.

  In addition to selling her previously published work to Hollywood, Hurst began writing scenarios directly for the screen when RKO offered her $30,000 for what she knew was only a few weeks’ work. While Fannie was not directly involved with the filming of Back Street at Universal, she was pleased that the director, John Stahl, and the writer, Gladys Lehman, stayed true to her story, including the dramatic ending. Fannie “adored” Irene Dunne as Ray, and the critics agreed.

  If Fannie had made her peace, and her ever-increasing income, with the movies, a force much larger than the audience’s need for “hope and optimism” was about to impact filmmaking. The Hays Office, created by the studios in 1922, had imposed a set of standards, but in 1934 the Production Code made censorship official. After the Legion of Decency, along with other Catholic and women’s groups, loudly condemned “vile and unwholesome moving pictures” such as Public Enemy and “fallen woman” films such as Red Headed Woman and Blonde Venus, Will Hays’s list of “dos and don’ts” gave way to what he called “a police department,” and its new chief was the very Catholic Joseph Breen, a former public relations man who had transformed his p
ush for the code’s enforcement into a well-paying job.

  Before the Production Code, films about adultery often centered on the “other woman” and told the story from her perspective. After 1934, films were limited in a myriad of ways. The focus was now on the cheating husband and the moral dilemma he faced. Sin had to be punished.

  In the 1941 version of Back Street, Ray Schmidt becomes Ray Smith, and in the process sheds her Jewish background. However, Universal actively resisted some of Breen’s suggestions, including the idea that Walter’s death should be caused by his “disgrace” and then Ray should become a “cheap hag of a gambler.” Directed by Robert Stevenson, who would go on to direct Mary Poppins and half a dozen other Disney classics, 1941’s Back Street stars a strong but vulnerable Margaret Sullavan with a none too Midwestern Charles Boyer as her lover.

  The cultural changes over the next twenty years are reflected in the 1961 Back Street, the film version that goes farthest afield from the novel. Ray (still Smith) has become the sophisticated Rae, an internationally successful clothes designer, and Walter owns a string of exclusive department stores. Together they are no longer in the “back streets,” but in a comfortable country home and the best hotels in Rome and Paris. John Gavin and Susan Hayward make the most physically beautiful pairing yet, and their relationship is explained in part by the newly fleshed-out role of Walter’s drunken shrew of a wife, played by Vera Miles.

  Each film stands on its own, mirroring the time it was made. Now we can go back to the original novel, to pure Fannie Hurst, and discover anew that so much has changed and so little has changed since its original publication in 1932.

  Cari Beauchamp is the award-winning author of Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood, Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years, and four other books of film history. She writes for Vanity Fair and other magazines, is a two-time Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar, and serves as the Resident Scholar of the Mary Pickford Foundation.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Book One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Book Two Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Book Three

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Book Four Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Movie Adaptations of Fannie Hurst’s Back Street

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  BOOK ONE

  1

  One evening in one of those Over-the-Rhine cafés which were plentiful along Vine Street of the Cincinnati of the nineties, a traveling salesman leaned across his stein of Moerlein’s Extra Light and openly accused Ray Schmidt of being innocent.

  “I know! You’re one of those cheating girls who act fly but aren’t. You’ll lead a man on, but you won’t go all the way.”

  At the implication and all that went with it, Ray’s hand flew to her tippet, color ran beneath her tan pallor, and as usual when under stress, she rolled her eyes and became flippant.

  “Try me,” was what she said, with little sense of the outrageousness of such a remark.

  “That’s exactly what I have been trying to do all evening,” said the traveling salesman who, having exhibited what was for him an unprecedented astuteness in his summary of Ray Schmidt, now leaned to pinch her knee softly underneath the table.

  Ray was forever being pinched underneath tables. As far back as she could remember, as a child and then as a girl growing up on Baymiller Street, boys had been fond of pinching and pulling her toward them for kisses.

  “Spooning” was not unpleasant, particularly in the evening, when somehow the boys’ faces receded out of a pimply reality into the velvet tunnels of Cincinnati’s low kind of darkness. With the boys whose faces persisted in jutting lumpily, even out of cover of nighttime, Ray simply had not the heart to follow the slightly disgusted impulse to push them away.

  One “spooned” to be kind. It gave you the reputation of being “fly,” no doubt of that, particularly if, like Ray, you were endowed with that subtle womanish dimension known as “style.” Ray had that. When she even so much as walked past the Stag Hotel, skirts held up off the sidewalk with that ineffable turn of wrist which again denoted “style,” there was that in her demeanor which caused each male head and eye to turn.

  Sometimes they made kissing sounds with their lips, past which she sailed with her head high.

  But the fact was that more usually than not Ray had attired herself, at length and with great detail, for this rapid sail past the Stag Hotel. The turning of the heads set agog within her a sense of excitement. It made life seem to quicken, as she felt the eyes burn along her well-corseted back. It was as if she could feel, with the very taper of her torso into a waistline that two ordinary hands could come within an inch of spanning, the rhythm of being well-proportioned. Nor was she above straining her ears from beneath their pompadour for the bits of applause that were sometimes carried along to her.

  “Hot baby!”

  “You’d look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two!”

  “Sweet Marie, come to me!”

  “She’s a daisy!”

  Ray’s longish eyelids would properly drop like two slow fans, and she would remark, if her stepsister Freda happened to be along, “See anything green?” But deep within her would begin to run the stirring saps of her body. The contour of her breasts, flung high by corsets, felt beautiful, and so did the movement of her flaring hips and the strength in the calves of her legs as, beneath two petticoats and a Spanish-flounced skirt, they hurried her along in their strong black cotton stockings.

  Privately her own as were these sensations that lay warmly in her body, the bold fact was that the eyes of the men seemed to bring them pleasantly awake. It was a greater treat to the senses, even more thoroughly delighting, than to indulge in her favorite habit of lying back in a warm bath with a copy of The Wages of Sin, by Lucas Malet, held open to its place and tied with twine to the faucet to facilitate page turnings.

  These Narcissus-like delights of hers branded the daughter of old Adolph Schmidt, during the various stages of her girlhood, as boy-crazy, fly, swift, fresh, shady, gay, and even fast.

  Men laid hands too readily on Ray Schmidt. She was not past slapping them off her thighs or the slim ledge of her hip, but the smile belied the fake anger in her gray eyes.

  “Ray lets the boys get fresh with her,” was the sotto voce indictment of Baymiller Street, even back in the days before she had lengthened her skirts, put up her hair, and developed t
o its fullest sense that promise of “style” which had already characterized her as a child.

  It was well-known along Baymiller that Schmidt did not even try to keep (much less succeed in keeping) his daughter off the streets—that he let her run wild, as the saying went—that it was not unusual, indeed habitual, for her, at fifteen, to remain out on the stoop with two, three, and sometimes one of the boys; and more than one head in curlpapers, popping out of a window after ten, had beheld her kissing good nights, “spooning.”

  Boys carried home Ray’s schoolbooks for her, just the ordinary boys who ran shouting about the streets after school, and stood for as long as an hour at the iron front gate, jiggling about in the spotty conversation of adolescence and ending with last-tag bouts and much body-mauling of Ray.

  A fresh child.

  When she was only thirteen, Bertha Auth, a neighboring child of a prosperous local builder, had already been forbidden to play with her because Ray kissed boys.

  That hurt her, terribly. Bertha, forbidden, made Ray feel dirty and contaminating. You kissed boys, well, chiefly because you happened to be the sort of girl the boys wanted to kiss. True, the way it made you feel reminded you of the ice in the gutters when it began to thaw in spring and started to flow with that beautiful spiral glassy sound. The best part of it all though was the fact that the boys wanted to kiss you and got pleasure. They didn’t clamor for the osculatory favors of Bertha or, for that matter, Freda Tagenhorst, who was prettier than Ray, and who at fourteen was to become Freda Schmidt by virtue of her mother’s marriage to Ray’s father.

  This impulse to please was part of the very texture of Ray. It pleased the boys to kiss and fondle her. They breathed hard and were eager. Even when they had pimply faces, which offended her, and crusty hands from after-school chores and skating bare-handed on the canal, she bore with their embraces for the apparent ecstasy it was hers to bestow upon just an ordinary schoolboy of shuffling feet, unkempt hair, and ill-hung clothes.

  It was not nice, and she knew it; and she suffered when the sweet and acquiescing friendship of Bertha was withdrawn, or when her stepmother bawled reprimands. But just the same, at nineteen, it was as characteristic of her as it had been at fourteen, that a traveling salesman, in the very act of making so acute an observation as, “You’re one of those girls who act fly but aren’t,” should, unreprimanded, pinch her knee under the table.