Cain’s writing on music started early, when he was working for The Baltimore Sun. One of his first bylined pieces appeared on the op-ed page in 1922 and deplored the then current boom in America for Gilbert and Sullivan. Cain charged in, attacking English music in general and Gilbert and Sullivan comedies in particular, advising the songwriters around the country who were imitating the British musical comedy team to try something exciting — like jazz. Music was also one of his favorite subjects when he was Walter Lippmann’s human interest writer on the editorial page of The New York World, as well as when he wrote his syndicated column for the Hearst papers in the early 1930s.
In the mid-1930s, after Postman was published, the Cains moved from Burbank back into Hollywood and a large, attractive home on Beiden Drive. One of his Hollywood friends was Henry Meyers, a playwright who had worked on the scripts for “Million Dollar Legs” and “Destry Rides Again.” Meyers, like Cain, was a music enthusiast who could sight-read and play almost anything on the piano. One night, Cain and Meyers were talking about music and deploring the fact that people did not play instruments or sing in their homes as they used to do before the radio and phonograph began to dominate family life. But they decided human nature had not changed and that, given a chance, people would step forward and, if nothing else, display their exhibitionism. They decided to organize musical evenings, mostly devoted to serious music, every Friday night at Cain’s house, and it was during this period that he started on a story his agent could sell to a magazine as a serial.
The theme was one that he hoped he could someday turn into a major work — which he eventually did in his novel Mildred Pierce — the story of a woman whose husband walks out on her, leaving her to raise the children. The story began to take shape: a woman, a successful buyer in a department store, is married to one of those nice guys who cannot make a success of anything, though she loves him and is decent about his deficiencies. Then, by accident, he finds he has a voice and actually goes out and has a fling with an operatic career. Now his wife is unhappy; his failure endeared him to her, but she cannot stand his success.
Cain mulled it over and decided it did not work. So he made the woman a singer with a career thwarted by domestic considerations. But he did not like that, either. Then he thought: Why not make her a singer and a bitch? He did, and the story took off. He called it “Two Can Sing,” wrote it in 28 days, and sold it almost immediately to 20th Century-Fox for $8000. But then, oddly enough, it did not sell to Liberty, which had been crying for anything as a follow-up to Double Indemnity — anything, it seemed, except a “comic adventure,” as Cain called the story when it appeared six years later in hardcover under the title Career in C Major. It created a mild sensation when it appeared in American, and the editor wrote Cain, saying it was “the most popular short novel we have ever published,” and pleaded with him to do another. Cain also liked “Two Can Sing,” because, as he wrote Mencken, “it is merely a pleasant tale with no murders in it.”
But even without the murder, like Postman, it was eventually made into two major movies — the first, entitled Wife, Husband and Friend, had a cast which ensured success: Warner Baxter, Loretta Young, Binnie Barnes, Caesar Romero, Eugene Pallette, and Edward J. Bromberg. Then, in 1949, 20th Century-Fox made a new version, entitled Everybody Does It, which had an equally good cast — Paul Douglas, Linda Darnell, Celeste Holm, and Charles Coburn — and received rave reviews as the comedy of the year. Bosley Crowther, in The New York Times, said the movie was a “historic milestone” for Hollywood because it was the first starring role for Paul Douglas, who until then, was best known for his supporting role in “Letter to Three Wives.”
But the real milestone was that Career in C Major firmly established Cain as a novelist capable of comic writing. And I think there is little doubt that he would have preferred to be remembered as a comic rather than tough guy novelist. “I am probably the most mis-read, mis-reviewed and mis-understood novelist now writing,” Cain said in his Introduction to Three of a Kind, the 1941 Knopf collection that included Career in C Major. And the misunderstanding, he always maintained, concerned his tough guy label. His first two successful novels — Postman and Double Indemnity — both concerned premeditated murder, which, in addition to his celebrated lean, sparse writing style, helped establish him as a tough guy writer. But, as Cain went to great pains to explain, the murder was incidental to the love story he was trying to tell. It was meant to serve for what his mentor, Hollywood screenwriter Vincent Lawrence, called “the love rack.” Cain always felt that perhaps Dorothy Parker made the most perceptive comment about Postman when, one night at dinner, she said: “To me it’s a love story and that’s all it is.”
Career in C Major is also a love story, in which the love rack is music rather than murder. And considering how genuinely and intentionally comic it is, we are reminded again of Edmund Wilson’s remark that Postman was “always in danger of becoming unintentionally funny.”
After reading Career in C Major and Cain’s light fiction, you cannot help but wonder whether the comic scenes in Postman were really unintentional.
Career in C Major
1
All this, that I’m going to tell you, started several years ago. You may have forgotten how things were then, but I won’t forget it so soon, and sometimes I think I’ll never forget it. I’m a contractor, junior partner in the Craig-Borland Engineering Company, and in my business there was nothing going on. In your business, I think there was a little going on, anyway enough to pay the office help provided they would take a ten per cent cut and forget about the Christmas bonus. But in my business, nothing. We sat for three years with our feet on our desks reading magazines, and after the secretaries left we filled in for a while by answering the telephone. Then we didn’t even do that, because the phone didn’t ring any more. We just sat there, and switched from the monthlies to the weeklies, because they came out oftener.
It got so bad that when Craig, my partner, came into the office one day with a comical story about a guy that wanted a concrete chicken coop built, somewhere out in Connecticut, that we looked at each other shifty-eyed for a minute, and then without saying a word we put on our hats and walked over to Grand Central to take the train. We wanted that coop so bad we could hardly wait to talk to him. We built it on a cost-plus basis, and I don’t think there’s another one like it in the world. It’s insulated concrete, with electric heat control, automatic sewage disposal, accommodations for 5,000 birds, and all for $3,000, of which our share was $300, minus expenses. But it was something to do, something to do. After the coop was built, Craig dug in at his farm up-state, and that left me alone. I want you to remember that, because if I made a fool of myself, I was wide open for that, with nothing to do and nobody to do it with. When you get a little fed up with me, just remember those feet, with no spurs to keep them from falling off the desk, because what we had going on wasn’t a war, like now, but a depression.