Rendezvous in Black Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION - Richard Dooling

  1. - PARTING

  2. - THE FIRST RENDEZVOUS

  3. - THE SECOND RENDEZVOUS

  4. - THE THIRD RENDEZVOUS

  5. - THE FOURTH RENDEZVOUS

  6. - THE FIFTH RENDEZVOUS

  7. - REUNION

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE MODERN LIBRARY

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  ...for now mine end doth haste. I run to death, and death meets me as fast.

  —JOHN DONNE

  INTRODUCTION

  Richard Dooling

  Which of these names does not belong with the others: (a) James M. Cain, (b) Raymond Chandler, (c) Dashiell Hammett, (d) Cornell Woolrich? Put the question to the average consumer of mainstream entertainment here at the beginning of the twenty-first century and most would guess (d), and then ask: Who is Cornell Woolrich? The editors of Benét’s Readers Encyclopedia, 3rd edition (1987), presumably agreed with this assessment, for the popular reference work contained entries for Cain, Chandler, and Hammett, and nothing for Woolrich, Cornell. The volume you hold in your hands, dear reader, should convince you that Woolrich indeed belongs with the others and perhaps even surpasses them, especially if, fresh from a reading of Rendezvous in Black, the reader is asked to choose which of the four authors best deserves the overused honorific: master of suspense. (The editors of Benét’s apparently read Rendezvous and came to the same conclusion, because the fourth edition, published in 1996, contains an entry for Cornell Woolrich.)

  Revered by mystery fans, students of film noir, and lovers of hard-boiled crime fiction and detective novels, Cornell Woolrich remains almost unknown to the general reading public. His obscurity persists even though his Hollywood pedigree rivals or exceeds that of Cain, Chandler, and Hammett. Try the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) and compare the filmographies of the four and you’ll find more than twice as many films and television dramas based on the writings of Woolrich, with the breakdown as follows: Cornell Woolrich (58 entries), Hammett (25), Cain (24), and Chandler (22). Woolrich also has his fair share of film classics adapted from his works. He was the author of the story “It Had to Be Murder,” the source material for the Alfred Hitchcock suspense thriller Rear Window (1954), and François Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (1968) and Waltz into Darkness (1969) were both based on Woolrich novels. First-rate actors in the forties and fifties played characters in movies made from Woolrich tales—Burgess Meredith in Street of Chance (1942), based on Woolrich’s Black Curtain; Edward G. Robinson in Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948); Dan Duryea in Black Angel (1946); and of course, Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window.

  Woolrich’s titles alone are pure noir poetry: The Black Path of Fear, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, The Bride Wore Black, Waltz into Darkness, and of course, Rendezvous in Black. The words black, night, dark, and death recur with such regularity in Woolrich titles that his oeuvre is credited by some for suggesting the label “film noir.”

  What Woolrich lacked in literary prestige he made up for in suspense. Nobody was better at it. He achieved financial success and even fame during his lifetime, but enjoyed neither, living alone or with his ailing mother in a series of decrepit New York City hotel rooms for most of his life.

  Shortly after losing a leg to gangrene out of sheer self-neglect, he died, miserable and alone, of a stroke on September 25, 1968. Five people attended his funeral. He left his money ($850,000) to Columbia University to fund a writers program.

  Most of what we know about Cornell Woolrich is contained in Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die (New York: Mysterious Press, 1988), an excellent biography by Francis Nevins, an Edgar Award winner and accomplished mystery writer himself, as well as a meticulous hagiographer of Woolrich and a perceptive literary critic of the Woolrich canon. Nevins’s encyclopedic compendium makes for a haunting tale in its own right, because Woolrich was possessed by the same despair and terror that haunts his doomed characters. First You Dream, Then You Die also makes discerning use of Woolrich’s autobiography, Blues of a Lifetime (Popular Press, 1991), written in the early 1960s after the author had put away his typewriter. On the first page of Blues, Woolrich wrote in his own handwriting: “I have not written this for it to be well-written, nor read by anyone else; I have written it for myself alone.”

  Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was born December 4, 1903, in New York City to parents who were divorced soon after. He spent his boyhood in Mexico with his father, and later moved back to New York City where he lived with his mother and her family. Love and death are twin inescapable terrors in many of Woolrich’s tales, so it’s worth examining his early experiences of each. In Blues, Woolrich recalled his first overpowering intimation of mortality on a starry night while he was still in Mexico with his father:

  I was eleven and, huddling over my own knees, looked up at the low-hanging stars of the Valley of Anahuac, and knew I would surely die finally, or something worse. . . . I had that trapped feeling, like some sort of a poor insect that you’ve put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can’t, and it can’t, and it can’t.

  Sisyphus meets Sylvia Plath.

  As for love—an implacable, often destructive force in Rendezvous and many other Woolrich tales—he wrote in the opening pages of Blues: “I never loved women much, I guess. Only three times, that I’m fully aware of. . . . The first time it was just puppy-love, but it ended disastrously for at least one of us.” Woolrich then devoted seventy pages to “the disaster” in chapter two. Lucky for us, Nevins recounts the story of that first love in some detail, weaving in Woolrich’s own version of the heartbreak; the reader of Rendezvous in Black will recognize the vibrations coming off the prose, and the tragic finale.

  At age eighteen, Woolrich met Veronica Gaffney (“Vera”) through a pal (“Frank”), and the young Cornell (“Con”) was instantly infatuated. Vera was “shanty Irish” and lived in a tenement near the elevated train. Though Woolrich had only just met her in passing on the street, he waited three nights by the El tracks for her to appear (the “love-wait” as he called it, not unlike the vigil Johnny Marr keeps for his Dorothy in Rendezvous). Finally, on the third night, young Woolrich and his buddy, Frank, worked up the nerve to go inside the building. They knocked on the door of the flat where Vera’s family lived. Her parents were impressed with the skinny, nervous youth because Con was a “college boy,” and Vera promptly accepted his invitation to go for a walk.

  Later that night, they kissed on a bench by a quaint Catholic church, and Con eventually made a pass at Vera, which she rebuffed, and for which he respected her. Their chaste but intense relationship continued for two or three months, until Con’s mother accepted an invitation her son had received to a birthday party on Riverside Drive. Con asked Vera to go with him. Vera vacillated for several days because she was uneasy about attending a party given by rich people, but eventually she accepted his invitation and was thrilled to be going.

  On the night of the party, Vera appeared in a new party dress and “a glossy honey-brown full-length fur coat.” In Woolrich’s words, “She was hugging it tight to her, caressing it, luxuriating in it. . . . She even tilted her head and stroked one cheek back and forth against it. . . . She made love to it.” Vera explained that she had made a small down payment on the coat and would return it after the party for a refund. On to the party, which was a magnificent success. Vera was so excited to be accepted into that rarefied social swim that when she and Con returned to the tenement flat and found no one home (her family wa
s at an Irish wake), she asked Con in. He suspected that this time his overtures would not be rebuffed, but on this occasion it was young Con who thought better of going too far: “I had this image of her. I wanted to keep it, I didn’t want to take anything away from it.”

  Woolrich left in a state of physical and emotional panic. It was the last time he saw Vera alone. As Nevins (quoting Woolrich) describes it in First You Dream:

  She didn’t come to their special bench the next day, or the next, or the next. When he knocks fearfully on the door of her flat, her mother glares at him ferociously and begins screaming at him. “Isn’t it enough you’ve done? Well, isn’t it? Stay away from here. There’s no Vera here for you.”

  Devastated, young Woolrich haunted their special bench every night and waited in vain. Several weeks later, Frank told Con what had happened. Vera had been arrested for “borrowing” an expensive fur coat from a rich old lady on West End Avenue for whom she had worked part-time. She served six months in an upstate reformatory. End of story, but for a chance meeting at a block party, which concluded with Con watching Vera and a girlfriend climb into a black sedan full of mysterious, prosperous-looking older men. He never saw her again.

  That winter, whenever Woolrich passed Vera’s tenement building, he imagined her standing in the doorway, a morbid illusion that reminded him of the suffocating sense of mortality he’d suffered so long ago in Mexico. A “sense of isolation, of pinpointed and transfixed helplessness under the stars, of being left alone, unheard, and unaided to face some final fated darkness and engulfment slowly advancing across the years toward me . . . that has hung over me all my life.”

  His first novel, Cover Charge (1926), garnished reviews comparing him favorably to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his second, Children of the Ritz (1927), earned $10,000 in prize money and a stint in Hollywood as a screenwriter, with all of the usual Faustian temptations and bargains. The Hollywood sojourn also provided the occasion for Woolrich’s next experience of “love”—a brief marriage to Gloria Blackton, daughter of studio mogul J. Stuart Blackton. According to Nevins, Woolrich idolized his new wife in a bizarre, platonic way, and was at the same time consumed with self-loathing over his own promiscuous, clandestine homosexual activity. The marriage was never consummated and ended in annulment three months later, after which Woolrich went to live with his mother in New York City.

  Several years later, Woolrich returned in print as a writer of hard-boiled crime fiction for magazines such as Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Dime Detective. In 1940, he moved on—with many other crime writers—from the pulp detective magazines to hardcover fiction with The Bride Wore Black, his first and probably most popular novel of suspense, later made into a film by Truffaut. By this time he was a true professional, so obsessed, reclusive, and devoted to his craft that he dedicated The Bride Wore Black to his Remington portable typewriter.

  Woolrich’s critics would probably say that Chandler, Cain, and Hammett were silver foxes who could do it all—plot, complex characters, lean, precision prose, snappy dialogue—and that Woolrich was a pathetic hedgehog who had an immodest facility for doing one thing altogether too well: fingernail-gnawing suspense. Woolrich, too, judged himself harshly for failing to live up to his youthful literary promise, and in the end he could not bear to have his own work around him. As he wrote to one fan: “I’m glad you liked Phantom Lady but I can’t help you, you see. I can’t accept your praise. The man who wrote that novel died a long, long time ago. He died a long, long time ago.”

  At the end of his life, Woolrich described himself to his literary agent as follows: “I wasn’t that good, you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn’t write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried to tell the truth.”

  In the fall of 1951, shortly after Woolrich had stopped writing and had begun a long slow descent into alcoholism, loneliness, and illness, he told a fan that, of the novels he’d written, his two personal favorites were The Black Angel (1943) and Rendezvous in Black (1948).

  The life of Woolrich the author, only briefly described above, makes for fascinating reading, but the less said about Rendezvous in Black by way of introduction, the better; its hallucinatory clout depends on the reader being as violently dislocated as the doomed lover, Johnny Marr.

  They had a date at eight every night. If it was raining, if it was snowing; if there was a moon, or if there was none. It wasn’t new, it hadn’t just come up. Last year it had been that way, the year before, the year before that.

  Johnny Marr and his girl, Dorothy, aren’t characters, they are migratory animals that move with the polar ordination of bees, geese, salmon, or sea turtles. Instead of gravity or geomagnetic forces, Love governs Johnny and Dorothy’s every movement, as surely as Fate and Chance will govern Johnny and the other mortals in the tale once Dorothy is violently taken from him.

  When a bizarre, improbable accident ends Dorothy’s life, Johnny vows insane revenge on five men, only one of whom could have plausibly “caused” the accident that killed his lover. Instead of murdering the five men, Johnny plots a far more diabolical and pathological retribution, and leaves them alive to enjoy it, with a note, asking each of them in turn: “Now you know what it feels like. So how do you like it?”

  The reader finds no shelter in a comfortable central character or crime-solving Hollywood “hero” and is instead disgorged onto a doomscape where paranoia, death, and meticulous, unseen vengeance rule with the caprice of wanton boys swatting flies. Instead of the Hollywood archetypes of truth-seeking tough guys, the cops in Woolrich tales are usually sadistic thugs or incompetent bureaucrats. We find both in Rendezvous.

  Johnny Marr, who is nowhere near ready to face the unbearable truth of his lover’s sudden, violent death, still waits for Dorothy every night at their appointed spot, until a helpful cop sets him straight:

  “Your girl’s dead. . . . They told me about that. She’s buried. She’s lying in the ground, in the cemetery up on the hillside, this very minute. I even went up there and seen the plot and the marker with my own eyes. I can even tell you what the headstone says on it. . . . Now move on, and don’t let me find you here again.”

  By contrast, the detective in charge of “solving” the revenge murders orchestrated by an omniscient and nearly omnipotent Johnny Marr is MacLain Cameron, a mere accessory to a story governed by the mighty forces of murder, retribution, and fate:

  He was too thin, and his face wore a chronically haggard look. . . . His manner was a mixture of uncertainty, followed by flurries of hasty action, followed by more uncertainty, as if he already regretted the just preceding action. He always acted new at any given proceedings, as if he were undertaking them for the first time. Even when they were old, and he should have been used to them.

  To appreciate the raw power of Woolrich’s nightmarish vision, the reader should tear through Rendezvous in Black, and then read the portions of First You Dream, Then You Die wherein Nevins performs a kind of postmortem of its many plot weaknesses and gross factual errors, not one of which any warm-blooded reader will have noticed on first reading. There are clunkers aplenty; “His heart was frothing hate like an eggbeater” comes to mind, but the reader doesn’t care and will suffer any indignity of syntax and strained credibility to find out what happens next. As Anthony Boucher wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “Critical sobriety is out of the question so long as this master of terror-in-the-commonplace exerts his spell.” Or as the undercover policewoman observes at the end of Rendezvous, “Instinct, in the deranged, can be supremely accurate; it has no reason or logic to contend with.”

  Nevins goes so far as to claim that Woolrich’s imperfections are a happy marriage of form and function:

  Without the sentences rushing out of control across the page like his hunted characters across the nightscape, without the manic emotionalism and indifference to gra
mmatical niceties, the form and content of the Woolrich world would be at odds. Between his style and his substance Woolrich achieved the perfect union that he never came within a mile of in his private life.

  Sown amid the discord of gushing, purple prose there are gems, often visually splendid ones, which help explain Hollywood’s enduring fascination with Woolrich’s work. A wealthy, desperate, adulterous husband sneaks out of his mansion after midnight, on his way to murder his blackmailing mistress, offering a camera-ready moment: “He went rapidly down their slowly curving stairs. . . . A grotesque shadow of himself rippled along beside him over the ivory-pale wall panels . . . like a ghostly adviser spurring him on to evil deeds.”

  At the end of Rendezvous, those who know Woolrich’s life and work hear his voice speaking through the thoughts of the undercover policewoman who finally lures Johnny to his doom: “How cruel this is. Why does it have to be so cruel? Why couldn’t it have been some other way?”

  In an afterword to The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich (Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), Barry Malzberg, Woolrich’s agent, quotes Woolrich at his darkest: “Life is death. Death is in life. To hold your one true love in your arms and to see the skeleton she will become; to know that your love leads to death, that death is all there is, that is what I know and what I do not want to know and what I cannot bear.”

  Born fifty years later, Woolrich probably would have graduated from a twelve-step program and gone on a maintenance dose of serotonin reuptake inhibitors. But then we would be the poorer for being deprived of his unremitting nightmares. Handwritten on a scrap found among his papers, Woolrich left perhaps the most honest explanation of his writing: “I was only trying to cheat death. I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me. I was only trying to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone. To stay in the light, to be with the living a little while past my time.”