Vera Caspary; Wrote ‘Laura’ Book, Movie

Vera Caspary, a novelist and film scenarist whose eerie story of “Laura,” a woman whose supposed death juxtaposed some of Hollywood’s best-remembered characters in a setting of intrigue and deception, is dead at age 87.

She died Saturday at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City, said her longtime friend and colleague, George Sklar, who helped adapt “Laura” to the stage.

She had moved to New York from Beverly Hills about 10 years ago, shortly before her final work, “The Secrets of Grown-ups,” an autobiography, was published.

Miss Caspary, the widow of I. G. Goldsmith, who produced such films as “The Stars Look Down,” was a writers’ adviser before she became a writer.

Correspondence Classes

To support herself in her native Chicago, she established a $75 mail-order course in film writing, crime detection and ballet. This eclectic correspondence school was presided over by a mythical academician she named “Sergei Marinoff.” Miss Caspary used to delight in running into graduates of her school over the years. Her particular favorites, she said in an interview in the 1940s, were those who boasted of having studied with Marinoff “personally.”

She began in films by taking the script of a picture she had sold to Paramount in 1932, “The Night of June 13,” changing its plot line slightly, and shopping it around to five other studios.

Other films for which she penned scenarios or which were based on her 18 novels included “I’ll Love You Always,” “Scandal Street,” “Claudia and David,” “A Letter to Three Wives,” “Les Girls” and “Bachelor in Paradise.”

Her first novel was “The White Girl,” about a girl of mixed blood passing as a Caucasian. She followed that with “Thicker Than Water,” an examination of Jews living in Chicago, “Stranger Than Truth,” “Evvie,” about her sister, “A Chosen Sparrow,” “The Man Who Loved His Wife” and “The Rosecrest Cell.”

Most of her works dwelt on a working woman’s right to independence in the 20th Century, “the century of the woman,” as she wrote in her autobiography.

McCarthy Era Experiences

The latter book was based on her experiences in the McCarthy Era, during which she was asked by an attorney representing a congressional committee investigating communist influences in the film colony to write a letter disclaiming sympathy for communism.

She refused to write the letter and in the ensuing months was “graylisted” as opposed to blacklisted by the film industry.

For her this meant that she had to move abroad in order to sell scripts to the studios, many of them under an assumed name.

“Laura,” published in 1943, was her first mystery novel, and the film made from it the next year, starring Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb and Dana Andrews, remains a widely heralded example of film noir .