The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words
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It’s a disgraceful thing that no reputable writer can work for Hollywood without its ending in cynicism and disgust.
I shall probably do others [screenplays], and if so I shall do them as well as I know how, but I shall keep my heart to myself.
—Letter to Hamish Hamilton—November 10, 1950
He did not.
I think today there are much better film writers than I could ever be, because I never quite saw things in the terms of the camera, but always as dramatic scenes between people.
—Letter to Helga Greene—April 30, 1957
And finally, “A Qualified Farewell” (early 1950s) …
I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and the balanced mind. I am a writer and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn’t have to be great writing, it doesn’t even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.
His considered verdict in Hollywood—“I personally had a lot of fun there.”
2014 and something that would have raised a wry Chandler smile. He is given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Seven
Dames … the Little Sisters
Trouble dwelt in her eyes.
—“No Crime in the Mountains”
At the bottom of his heart every decent man feels that his approach to the woman he loves is an approach to a shrine.
—Raymond Chandler
She sighed. “All men are the same.”
“So are all women—after the first nine.”
—Mrs. Grayle and Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely
“Dames lie about anything—just for practice,” Nulty said grimly.
—Farewell, My Lovely
In his private life—apart from a few desperate and irrelevant forays—he appears to have loved only one woman, Cissy, and he was happily married to her for over thirty years. By the time he watched her die he was a hopeless alcoholic and a self-doomed man himself. The last few years were a sad personal coda, as he persuaded himself he had fallen in love with and was about to marry a whole string of women—several of whom, like Natasha Spender, were in no position to marry him, since they were married already.
As John Houseman acutely observed—since, as an ex–English public schoolboy himself, he understood Chandler’s conditioning and the value system he took to the grave—“In life he was too inhibited to be gay; too emotional to be witty … the system had left a sexually devastating mark on him.”
Houseman’s assessment would seem to explain the offhand way Chandler so often treats women in his fiction. They fascinate and frighten him at the same time. There is little love, and even that is dispassionately handled … a certain amount of wariness toward dominating women …
One of the women had enough ice on her to cool the Mojave Desert and enough make‑up to paint a steam yacht … The men with them looked gray and tired, probably from signing checks.
—Playback
… and a strong element of male chauvinism that treats women as sex objects, which, to be fair, was by no means unusual for the period …
Veronica Lake. Chandler was less than impressed with the performance of “Miss Moronica Lake.” “The only times she’s good,” he said, “is when she keeps her mouth shut and looks mysterious.” Photofest (illustrations credit 7.1)
Lauren Bacall as Vivian Regan in The Big Sleep (1946). Chandler wrote of the character: “Her eyes were pools of darkness, much emptier than darkness.” Photofest (illustrations credit 7.2)
[The cigarette girl] wore an egret-plume in her hair, enough clothes to hide behind a tooth pick, one of her long beautiful naked legs was silver and one was gold. She had the utterly disdainful expression of a dame who makes her dates by long distance.
Women per se are not to be trusted. In four of the seven novels the murderer is a woman. In all but one of them she is beautiful …
In “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” Rhonda Farr has “the sort of skin an old rake dreams of.”
In “Try the Girl” Beulah has “hair like a brush fire at night”—which makes her a twin sister to Dolores Chiozza in “The King in Yellow,” whose hair was “the color of a brush fire seen through a cloud of dust.”
Belle Marr in “Spanish Blood” goes one better. Her hair “seemed to gather all the light there was and make a soft halo around her coldly beautiful face.”
Under the skin, though, they were all sisters to Harriet Huntress in “Trouble Is My Business”—
She didn’t look hard, but she looked as if she had heard all the answers and remembered the ones she thought she might be able to use sometime.
—or the girl in the cigarette kiosk in Playback:
I wouldn’t say she looked exactly wistful, but neither did she look as hard to get as a controlling interest in General Motors.
Chandler—or Chandler through Marlowe—invariably notices the lady’s eyes. Usually he sees danger in them: “Her eyes held a warm bitterness like poisoned honey” (of Mrs. Prendergast in “Mandarin’s Jade”) … “The woman’s seaweed-colored eyes” (of Mrs. Shamey in “Try the Girl”) … The hatcheck girl at the Idle Valley Club “had eyes like strange sins” (The High Window) … “Her eyes were pools of darkness, much emptier than darkness” (of Vivian Regan in The Big Sleep).
Sometimes the eyes have a second line of defense—
The mascara was so thick on her eyelashes that they looked like miniature iron railings.
—Of Mrs. Morny in The High Window
—although in this case it was Marlowe who needed the protection!
Much less threatening was Carol Pride in “Mandarin’s Jade,” whose “eyes could be very blue if they tried.”
Then there was the way the lady smiled …
Mrs. Pendergast gives John Dalmas “a smile I could feel in my hip pocket” … and later, … “She returned my smile with an angel on its back” (“Mandarin’s Jade”).
She smiled at me and her teeth were as thin and sharp as a pauper’s Christmas.
—Of Helen Matson in “Bay City Blues”
A silvery ripple of laughter that held the unspoiled naturalness of a bubble dance.
— Of Mrs. Morny in The High Window
Marlowe has been looking appreciatively at an attractive woman at poolside in The Long Goodbye. But then:
She opened a mouth like a fire-bucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn’t hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.
Her mouth looked like the prelude to a scream.
—Of Vivian Regan in The Big Sleep
She laughed. It was a silly pooped-out little laugh like a child trying to be supercilious at a playroom tea party.
—Of Mavis Weld in The Little Sister
“Put some rouge on your cheeks … You look like the snow maiden after a hard night with the fishing fleet.”
But perhaps the two most extended pieces of Marlowe misogyny are the descriptions of “Blonde Agnes” Lozelle, the assistant he meets in Geiger’s bookstore in The Big Sleep—
Her smile was tentative but could be persuaded to be nice … [but when she realizes what Marlowe is up to, the smile] was now hanging by its teeth and eyebrows and wondering what it would hit when it dropped … she was as sore as an alderman with the mumps … her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust … the smile came back, with a couple of corners badly dented.
—and the girl in the cigarette kiosk in The Little Sister who gives Marlowe the full benefit of her femme fatale act:
A straw blonde with a long neck and tired eyes … She had a low lingering voice with a sort of moist caress in it like a damp bath towel … She did something slow and elegant to the back of her head, exhibiting what seemed like more than one handful of blood-red fingernails in the process …
A deeply unimpressed Marlowe departs …
Many of Chandler’s women suffer from what we would now call low self-esteem:
“I’m a tramp. I’ve smothered in too many hall bedrooms, stripped in too many filthy dressing rooms, missed too many meals, told too many lies to be anything else.”
—Jean Adrian in “Guns at Cyrano’s”
“We’re all bitches. Some smile more than others, that’s all.”
—Mavis Weld in The Little Sister
“A half smart guy,” she said with a tired sniff. “That’s all I ever draw. Never once a guy that’s smart all the way around the course. Never once.”
I grinned at her. “Did I hurt your head much?”
“You and every other man I ever met.”
—Blonde Agnes in The Big Sleep
Fortunately for Chandler (and Marlowe), feminism hadn’t found its voice at the time he was writing. If it had, he would certainly have come up with an evocative simile for it. As it was, male chauvinism tended to rule when it came to describing women …
She had a good figure, if you liked them four sizes bigger below the waist than above it.
—Farewell, My Lovely
Audrey Totter as Adrienne Fromsett in The Lady in the Lake. “She had a figure and didn’t act stingy with it.” Photofest (illustrations credit 7.3)
She had a figure and didn’t act stingy with it.
—The Lady in the Lake
I looked down at her legs. I could see them all right and the flag that marked the goal line was no larger than it had to be.
—The Little Sister
Velma’s photo in Farewell, My Lovely shows that she has “nice legs and generous with ’em.”
“I like a well-crowded stocking myself.”
—“Bay City Blues”
But appearances could all too often be deceptive …
From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.
—Of Mrs. Morny in The High Window
“I’ve seen hard women, but she’s the bluing on armor plate.”
—Of Carol Donovan in “Goldfish”
I left her with her virtue intact, but it was quite a struggle. She nearly won.
The sad fact of life is that men and women don’t understand each other—and never will …
“Is Morny dangerous to women?”
“Don’t be Victorian, old top. Women don’t call it danger.”
—The High Window
One of those sidelong looks that women think men don’t understand, the kind that feels like a dentist’s drill.
—“Mandarin’s Jade”
Women have so few defenses, but they certainly perform wonders with those they have.
—Playback
Despite all the above, “American girls are terrific”—as Chandler had Marlowe conclude in The Long Goodbye—as long as they stayed girls. But “American wives take in too damn much territory”:
The air began to be spattered with darlings and crimson finger nails.
The goddam women will start waving their hands and screwing up their faces and tinkling their goddam bracelets and making with the packaged charm which later on in the evening has a slight but unmistakable odor of sweat.
—The Long Goodbye
All the well-to-do and almost well-to-do crowd accomplish in their lives is an over-decorated home—the house beautiful for gracious living—a wife who, if she is young, plays tennis at the Beach Club, lies on the beach until her visible skin looks like brown sandpaper and feels the same, I have no doubt, swills several cocktails before dinner (almost always in company with friends), several highballs after dinner and ends up either being pawed by some other girl’s husband or shrieking with laughter at some joke which hardly merits more than a mild “huh.” If she is verging on middle age she is very chic in a tasteless way, talks a great deal about how she is going to have the guest room done over by some jerk with long sideburns, has her husband so tamed that he is afraid to sit down in some of the chairs, and however tired he may be, he must shower and shave and put on his white dinner jacket (in summer) because Mr. and Mrs. Whoosis are coming over to play bridge, which he hates almost as much as he hates Mr. and Mrs. Whoosis.
—Letter to Michael Gilbert—September 6, 1956
Chandler’s older women tend to be either vague …
One of those ageless women you see around municipal offices everywhere in the world. They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don’t have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without quite being polite and intelligent and knowledgeable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.
—The Little Sister
…or venal—like Jessie Florian in Farewell, My Lovely—
Her bathrobe was just something around her body … she was as cute as a washtub.
or Mrs. Murdock in The High Window, who had
large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones … as hard as the bricks in her front walk … “a grand old war horse,” I said. “A heart of gold, and the gold’s buried good and deep.”
In the Chandler Gallery of Leading Ladies, one of those who smiled and smiled and turned out to be the ultimate villainess was Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep:
She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable … She walked as if she were floating … Her eyes were slate-gray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith and as shiny as porcelain. They glistened between her thin too taut lips.
She comes on to Marlowe on sight.
“You’re cute,” she giggled. “I’m cute, too.”
When her father subsequently mentions his younger daughter, Marlowe replies:
“I met her in the hall … Then she tried to sit in my lap.”
(In the film, director Howard Hawks adds: “… while I was standing up.”)
Later in the book she’s a lot less cute. She sucks her thumb and giggles frequently:
She began to giggle. I put her gun in my pocket and patted her on the back. “Get up, angel. You look like a Pekinese.”
She tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be bothered.
Later, when she tries to shoot Marlowe,
her face had the scraped bone look. Aged, deteriorated, become animal, and not a nice animal.
By contrast her older sister, Vivian Regan,
Martha Vickers as Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep. One of Chandler’s chillier characters—“Her face had the scraped-bone look. Aged, deteriorated, become animal, and not a nice animal.” Photofest (illustrations credit 7.4)
was worth a stare. She was trouble … I stared at her legs … They seemed to be arranged to be stared at … The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem.
Mona Mars (Eddie’s wife)—also in The Big Sleep—was living proof that appearances are, more often than not, deceptive:
When Marlowe first sees her:
She was so platinumed that her hair shone like a silver fruit bowl … It was a smooth silver voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll’s house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought about it … She brought the glass over. Bubbles rose in it like false hopes.
As, indeed, they should. Her hair was a wig. Marlowe from then on calls her “Silver Wig.”
Claire Trevor as Mrs. Grayle/Velma in Farewell, My Lovely. “She had a full set of curves which nobody had been able to improve on … She put her head back and went off into a peal of laughter. I have only known four women in my life wh
o could do that and still look beautiful. She was one of them.” Photofest (illustrations credit 7.5)
Because of Chandler’s practice of “cannibalization,” we often encounter characters in more than one reincarnation.
We first meet Carmen Sternwood as Carmen Dravec in “Killer in the Rain,” where her “white face … looked as intelligent as the bottom of a shoe box.”
Mrs. Philip Courtney Prendergast appears in “Mandarin’s Jade”—“a blonde with black eyes. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” She is the one who gives private eye John Dalmas the smile he could feel in his hip pocket. Mrs. Prendergast is known to take a drink—or two. She “put her drink to sleep with one punch and looked at the bottle. I milked it again.”
“ ‘Moths in your ermine,’ Mrs. Prendergast said, and threw it down the hatch.”
In a later encounter, “Her face had, for a brief moment, a sort of half-silly, nymph-surprised-while-bathing expression.”