51 Facts About Vera Caspary

Vera Louise Caspary was an American writer of novels, plays, screenplays, and short stories.

Vera Caspary joined the Communist Party under an alias, but not being totally committed and at odds with its code of secrecy, she claimed to have confined her activities to fund-raising and hosting meetings.

Vera Caspary visited Russia in an attempt to confirm her beliefs, but became disillusioned and wished to resign from the Party, although she continued to contribute money and support similar causes.

Vera Caspary eventually married her lover and writing collaborator of six years, Isidor "Igee" Goldsmith; but despite this being a successful partnership, her Communist connections later led to her being "graylisted", temporarily yet significantly affecting their offers of work and income.

The couple split their time between Hollywood and Europe until Igee's death in 1964, after which Vera Caspary remained in New York where she wrote a further eight books.

Vera Caspary's father Paul was a buyer for a department store.

Vera Caspary's parents were both second generation immigrants of German-Jewish and Russian-Jewish heritage.

Vera Caspary went through a string of menial office jobs, looking for one where she could write instead of taking dictation from people with bad grammar.

Vera Caspary wrote all the materials for this and other correspondence courses she had little knowledge of, including one that taught screenwriting.

Vera Caspary was producing articles for publications such as Finger Print Magazine, and the New York-based Dance Lovers Magazine.

Vera Caspary moved to Greenwich Village in New York as Dance Lovers Magazine's new editor, achieving a Bohemian lifestyle.

Once again leaving a job to write her own material, Vera Caspary wrote her first published novel Ladies and Gents which was not published for two years due to a publisher's delay.

When Vera Caspary returned, the true original copy could not be found and the play closed in two weeks.

Back in New York in 1932, Vera Caspary was supporting herself and her mother writing magazine articles, including interviews for Gotham Life.

Vera Caspary wrote Thicker than Water, a thinly veiled Roman a clef about her own family.

Vera Caspary was almost broke, but after bumping into a story editor from Paramount, she came up with Suburb, a forty-page original story written over a weekend for which Paramount paid her $2,000.

Vera Caspary admitted in her memoir that she rewrote and resold this exact plot exactly eight times in the coming years.

Thicker than Water received good reviews, but by then even her publisher Liveright was feeling the pangs of the Great Depression and Vera Caspary was again nearly broke.

Vera Caspary spent that summer in Hollywood, writing a treatment for Fox and working on a play with Samuel Ornitz.

Vera Caspary bought herself a completely new wardrobe and brought her mother from New York.

Vera Caspary helped raise funds for causes and sign petitions but never actually became a true believer.

Nonetheless, one of the last things her mother did before she died was to scold Vera Caspary for associating with "filthy reds".

Vera Caspary found the Party's code of secrecy to be contrary to her search for truth and questioning of values, which had led her to join in the first place.

Vera Caspary later learned that he made it to America on his own.

Vera Caspary traveled through Germany by train, being strip-searched at border crossings.

Vera Caspary visited Moscow and Leningrad, visiting factories, seeing the "worker's paradise", and finding time to attend the ballet, where a Russian Jewish gentleman proposed to her during the intermission.

Vera Caspary called their bluff and agreed to it; however they were reluctant to let her go quietly, and agreed to call it a "temporary leave of absence".

Vera Caspary continued to sign petitions, contributed money, wrote to congressmen and maintained her memberships in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the League of American Writers.

Vera Caspary taught classes in writing screenplays to raise funds to bring refugee writers to America.

Vera Caspary had just met her future husband, a recent European emigre Igee Goldsmith.

Producer Dorothy Olney had taken an option on Laura, and Vera Caspary traveled to New York to assist with preproduction on the play.

When Vera Caspary returned to Hollywood Igee was waiting for her with bouquets of red roses.

Vera Caspary moved into a Mexican farmhouse on Horn Avenue across from Humphrey Bogart and began work on Bedelia.

Late in 1944, tired of the long separation from her love, Vera Caspary devised a method to reunite with Igee.

However, Caspary cabled Igee that he could have the film rights to Bedelia for a British production, if she could be brought over to write the screenplay, thus putting into motion a plan involving two British ministries, J Arthur Rank, the State Department, Good Housekeeping, the Stork Club and the White House, which brought her to England.

Finally on January 12,1945, Vera Caspary disappeared from New York only to reappear on a dock in England, just in time to see the British stage production of Laura open at the Q Theatre in London on January 30, with Sonia Dresdel as Laura.

Vera Caspary returned to London and Igee, where they enjoyed the few months they had left, but when the war ended and the screenplay was finished, the Ministry of Information sent her packing back to Hollywood for another separation without a foreseeable end.

Vera Caspary's stories improved by Igee's contribution were selling at inflated prices, and her salary rose due to high demand for her work and her limited availability.

Vera Caspary made it a practice only to accept jobs of adaptation; she found it more creative and fun, as in the case of John Klempner's book Letter to Five Wives, filmed under the title A Letter to Three Wives.

In 1950, Vera Caspary was one of the women identified as communists in Red Channels.

The couple were preparing to leave for Europe, as Igee was negotiating a French remake of Three Husbands, when MGM abruptly and illegally questioned Vera Caspary regarding her Communist links.

Since Vera Caspary had left the Party before she came to Hollywood, she told the truth about which committees she attended and the initiatives she had worked on, but the one thing they never asked was if she had ever been a member.

Vera Caspary was concerned; if she was subpoenaed to appear she would not be able to leave the country unless she became a "friendly witness" and named names.

Vera Caspary described the former as hell, the latter merely purgatory.

Years later, Vera Caspary remembered George Cukor's Les Girls with Gene Kelly and Mitzi Gaynor as her most enjoyable studio experience.

The novel won faint reviews, but Vera Caspary considered it one of her best, and famed Chicago Tribune reviewer Fanny Butcher came out of retirement long enough to denounce it as obscene.

Vera Caspary even broke a twenty-year vow and took work from Columbia Pictures and the ever-irascible Harry Cohn.

Vera Caspary reworked an idea that she had begun in Austria and that had been rejected in London, altering it to fit American situations, and to her shock 20th Century Fox offered $150,000 for it.

Vera Caspary completed a first draft, but the film was never made.

Vera Caspary returned to New York after Igee's death, where she published eight more books, including The Rosecrest Cell, a study of a group of frustrated amateur Communists; and the memoir The Secrets of Grown-ups.

Vera Caspary died of a stroke at St Vincent's Hospital in New York City in 1987.