The Ghost and Mrs. Muir Read online

  Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic films that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered through the publication of the novels on which they were based.

  Movie Adaptations of R. A. Dick’s

  THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR

  1947: Produced by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Starring Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison. Screenplay by Philip Dunne. Academy Award nominee for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White.

  R. A. Dick

  THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR

  R. A. Dick was the pseudonym of Irish writer Josephine Aimee Campbell Leslie, who was also the author of The Devil and Mrs. Devine. She died in 1979.

  BOOKS BY R. A. DICK / JOSEPHINE LESLIE

  The Devil and Mrs. Devine

  The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

  She Walked to the Wedding

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2014

  Copyright © 1945 by R. A. Dick

  Foreword copyright © 2014 by Adriana Trigiani

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in hardcover by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, Chicago, in 1945.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Movie Classics and colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dick, R. A., 1898–1979.

  The ghost and Mrs. Muir / R. A. Dick; foreword by Adriana Trigiani.

  — First Vintage Books edition.

  pages cm. — (Vintage movie classics)

  1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Ship captains—Fiction.

  3. Haunted houses—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6023.E774G48 2014 823’.912—dc23 2014028962

  Vintage Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8041-7348-3

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-7349-0

  Cover design by Evan Gaffney

  Cover photograph © The Francis Frith Collection / SuperStock

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Movie Adaptations of R. A. Dick’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Part One

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Part Two

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Part Three

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Part Four

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  FOREWORD

  by Adriana Trigiani

  They had me at Lucia.

  You’ve heard of pregnant women craving ice cream, burnt bacon, or green olives, but when I was expecting, I craved an old black-and-white movie from 1947 called The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

  Lucy Muir (the elegant Gene Tierney) is a young widow in the early 1900s with a daughter (nine-year-old Natalie Wood) she adores, living with her suffocating in-laws, who represent the oppression of the Victorian era. Fed up, Lucy takes her small annual stipend, only child, and faithful maid and leaves. She heads for the coast, where she finds a house called Gull Cottage in the village of Whitecliff-by-the-Sea. Evidently, it has stood vacant because it’s haunted by a Captain Gregg (played by Rex Harrison) who died there in a house fire.

  Mr. Harrison was called “Sexy Rexy” in Old Hollywood for good reason. Apparition or not, in this picture, the actor earned every pant from the audience.

  I fell into this movie like a spoon into a bowl of mint chip.

  The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is based upon a lean Victorian novel by Josephine Leslie (who published under the name R. A. Dick in 1945 for fear of misogyny leading to no or low sales). The novel is a romantic ghost story, more novella than epic.

  Philip Dunne, one of the great screenwriters during the Golden Age of Hollywood, adapted the novel for the screen. Mr. Dunne was a master dramatist, keen and spare in his process. He would take apart a novel, pulling threads from it like a lacemaker. Mr. Dunne would hold on to some characters, discard others, restructure timelines, winnow down scenes, remove some altogether, and add new ones to create the most powerful screen narrative from the source material. His dialogue is smart; at the time this was a necessary talent because so were the audiences.

  His plots build with tension and surprise. (Another of Mr. Dunne’s brilliant screenplays is the adaptation of How Green Was My Valley, whereby he took a doorstopper of a novel and told the story in flashbacks from the point of view of the youngest son in a Welsh mining family to splendid results.)

  Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed with style and sensitivity. But it’s the screenwriter who makes the movie soar, as Mr. Dunne crafted the script to be as much about the art of writing and creativity as he did romantic love.

  Settings are always evocative and lush in a Dunne screenplay. The very British Gull Cottage built by Hollywood craftsmen was an ideal movie setting, as it invited the audience into the world of the characters. The cottage was set high on a sunny cliff overlooking the ocean, with monkey puzzle trees in the yard, a big kitchen, massive windows, and a spacious master bedroom on the second floor with a terrace outfitted with a telescope to watch ships and stars. Okay, it was Malibu, but it looked like England through the lens of the great Charles Lang, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on this film.

  I wasn’t surprised when I read Mr. Dunne’s autobiography, Take Two, where I learned that Mr. Dunne lived with his wife and daughters high on a cliff on the California coast overlooking the ocean much like Lucy Muir. If the movie felt personal, it’s because the screenwriter knew how to make the broad scenes intimate and the setting feel like home.

  Mr. Dunne writes every character with specificity, no matter the size of the role. The crusty comebacks of the servant Martha (played by Edna Best) could have been considered throwaways, but in the hands of the accomplished screenwriter, they add texture and an au courant energy to the story. Every line packs a punch. Consider this exchange as the lady of the house climbs the stairs with her maid.

  LUCY

  You’ve lived a very useful life, Martha. I have nothing to show for all my years.

  MARTHA

  I suppose you call Miss Anna nothing.

  LUCY

  Oh heavens, I can’t take any credit for her.

  MARTHA

  She just happened.

  I found myself watching the movie once a day through the final weeks of my pregnancy. I didn’t think there was anything odd about this until my mother arrived. She decamped to New York City to await the baby’s arrival with me, spending most afternoons watching the movie with me. At first, she indulged me, but by the time I went into labor, she had had her fill of the ghost, the cottage, and even Mrs. Muir—with one exception.

  My maternal grandmother’s name was Lucia, and I knew that if I had a girl, my daughter would be named for her. Here’s an exchange from the movie that made me swoon and my mother cry.

  CAPTAIN GREGG

  You can call me Daniel.

  LUCY

  That’s very good of you.

  CAPTAIN GREGG
/>
  And I shall call you Lucia.

  LUCY

  My name is Lucy.

  CAPTAIN GREGG

  It doesn’t do you justice, my dear. Women named Lucy are always being imposed upon. But Lucia—now there’s a name for an Amazon. For a queen.

  My mother was misty because her Italian immigrant mother had to trade Lucia for the Americanized Lucy when she went to work in a factory in Hoboken. I cried because the deeper meaning of the name is from the Latin, meaning “light” (Muir is Gaelic for “the sea”). It might be all too thematically obvious—crossing oceans, surviving the crossing of a wild and unpredictable sea for a better life, but not to us. Lucy Muir, like so many women before her and since, including my grandmother, had to support their families, to make money to pay the rent. It seemed like a message.

  When Lucy loses her small stipend, the captain suggests she write his life story as a novel—and offers that Lucy might live on the residuals, thus gaining her financial independence. Lucy is uncertain, but soon she pushes through her fear, and the captain dictates his memoir Blood and Swash, his life story, loaded with grit, daring, violence, and sex. Lucy types his story with a vengeance, kicking her old Victorian reticence to the curb, replacing it with the self-confidence of a writer who finds her industrious twentieth-century ambition.

  Lucy engages her subconscious mind to write the novel. Lucy is the writer, but Captain Gregg is her muse. Captain Gregg isn’t just a ghost or a collaborator; it turns out that he is Lucy’s highest dream—the dream that will save her.

  When Lucy takes the train into London to sell her novel to a publisher, the process is dramatized with authenticity. Mr. Dunne knows firsthand the reality of the working writer who has to sell a manuscript in order to provide for his family.

  When Lucy falls prey to a parlor snake, fellow author Miles Fairley (played by the predatory George Sanders), we hope she can find earthly happiness. Even Captain Gregg roots for her, telling her that he was nothing but a dream and disappearing from her life. When Mr. Fairley breaks Lucy’s heart, she wonders if anything she has ever felt or known was real.

  I won’t ruin the end of the movie for you, as it is the best in the genre of romance and fantasy. I will tell you that The Ghost and Mrs. Muir will always hold a special place in our viewing library at home.

  Our daughter, Lucia, is now eleven years old, and like Anna Muir, she lives in an old house with a mother who writes books. We don’t have a telescope or an ocean view or even an apparition, but we love a good story, and I imagine that’s why we’ll always return to Gull Cottage and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

  Adriana Trigiani is the New York Times bestselling author of sixteen books, including the blockbuster The Shoemaker’s Wife. She wrote and directed the big-screen version of her debut novel, Big Stone Gap, shot entirely on location in her hometown, to be released in 2015. She lives with her husband and daughter in Greenwich Village in New York City.

  PART ONE

  I

  Mrs. Muir was a little woman. Every one was agreed upon that point. Where others were merely referred to as Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Smith, she was invariably spoken of as “little Mrs. Muir” or “dear little Mrs. Muir,” and latterly as “poor little Mrs. Muir,” for her husband, that upright member of the church and indifferent architect, had died suddenly, leaving her with two children and an inadequate income. So inadequate, in fact, that she was forced to sell the pseudo-Elizabethan house, which he had built for her as a wedding present, in order to meet the very real debts which poured in on every side, threatening to swamp her and carry away the familiar landmarks of her married life. An opposing torrent of advice poured down on her from her husband’s relatives and her acquaintances, flinging her future this way and that, now into three-roomed flats, now into semi-detached villas, now into hat shops or tea shops, and now into housekeeping for single gentlemen, while the children were swept away from her into charity schools, institutions, and even adoption.

  “This,” said little Mrs. Muir, awakening one morning to a beam of March sunlight striking through the eastern window across her face, “this has got to stop. I must settle things for myself.” And as if to encourage her in her independence, a blackbird’s brave song, full of spring and new beginnings, floated up to her from the garden below.

  “I will leave Whitchester,” she said aloud, and suddenly sitting up in bed and flinging aside the blankets, she said again, “but I will leave Whitchester! Why didn’t I think of it before! It’s the only solution.”

  Such a sense of freedom possessed her that she, too, sang as she dressed, snatches of melodies that she had not sung since she was a girl of seventeen, and Edwin Muir had come to her father’s house in the country to rebuild the library wing, and had remained to court her. There had been no eligible young men in Nether-Whitley, and she had been reading a novel at the time in which the hero had had a fair lock of hair falling over his forehead. Edwin’s hair had grown in the same way, and her absent-minded father, who lived mainly in the past among the Greek poets, was no authority on hair-cuts. The novel finished with a kiss in the rose garden, and the magic words, “and so they lived happily ever after,” and Lucy Muir, having been kissed in the orchard, could see no other ending to her own romance. But the hero in that book had not been an only son with a widowed mother and two strong-minded sisters living almost on the door-step. Not that her life had been unhappy, it had just not been her life at all. It had been old Mrs. Muir’s life, full of medicine cupboards, and emulsions to be rubbed on Edwin’s chest if he should clear his throat, and tonics to be measured out three times a day after meals if he should look a little pale, and red flannel protectors and pink knitted bed-socks. It had been Helen Gould’s life, and Helen, Edwin’s younger sister, had made her join all the clubs in the town, badminton clubs, croquet clubs, archery clubs, card clubs; and it had been Eva Muir’s life, with choral societies, dramatic societies, and literary societies. What was left after all these activities and her household duties had been Edwin’s. Even at night her life had been entirely Edwin’s, and not her own, in the large double bed where his unfortunate habit of snoring shook even her dreams into his pattern. They left her nothing of her own. They chose her servants, her dresses, her hats, her books, her pleasures, even her illnesses. “Dear little Lucy looks pale, she must drink Burgundy,” and “Poor little Lucy seems to be losing weight, she must take cod-liver oil.” Lucy, who hated loud noises and argument and violence, let them have their own way, even with the children, Cyril and Anna. Indeed she had never had time to think before that it was not her way, too; only now, in the solitude from social activity that her sisters-in-law permitted her in her bereavement, was she coming to the realization that there were other ways of living that might be better suited to herself.

  As soon as she had finished breakfast, before any intruders could arrive to trample on her new garden of independence, she put on the trailing black draperies, chosen for her by Helen, and hurried to the station.

  “Where to, please?” asked the booking clerk as she hesitated outside the ticket-office window.

  “To the sea,” replied Lucy on impulse. It would be quite a new thing to live by the sea, and so good for the children. What fun they would have, digging castles in the sand, paddling, bathing, with no nurses, no governesses, no aunts.…

  “To Whitecliff?” asked the clerk patiently and for the second time.

  “Yes, thank you, to Whitecliff,” replied Lucy.

  It was one of those sunny, boisterous March days with great white clouds sailing across the blue sky, like full-rigged galleons, and a wind that blew tiles off roofs, and hats off heads, and banged doors and slammed windows. The rude, rough day blew Lucy Muir, vainly attempting to grasp her hat, her handbag, her veil, and her skirts, in her two black-gloved hands, out of the station at Whitecliff, across the yard, round the corner into the main street, and into Itchen, Boles, and Coombe, house agents, with such strength, that she could only sit breathlessly on the red leathe
r chair and lean on the wide desk that separated her from Mr. Coombe, junior partner, and stare helplessly at him, with no breath left for speaking.

  “Was it a house that you were requiring?” asked Mr. Coombe politely, gazing at her through thick-lensed glasses.

  Lucy Muir nodded. It was a small flat that she had had in mind, but at present she had not the means to tell him so.

  “Ah!” said Mr. Coombe, and pulling a stout blue book towards him, he began to flick over the pages at a great rate, reading out the details of houses, mansions, and apparent palaces at such a speed that Lucy, though she was now in a position to speak, was unable to find a pause into which she could place so much as one word.

  “Gull Cottage … three beds … two recep … bath … complete offices … gas … company’s water … small garden … charming site … ideally situated near bus route to shops on select cliff road … near church and schools … furnished … fifty-two pounds a year,” said Mr. Coombe and stopped abruptly.

  “Fifty-two pounds a year for a furnished house!” repeated Lucy. “That’s very little to pay, surely—only a pound a week!”

  “It’s an absurd price,” said Mr. Coombe crossly and slammed the book shut.

  Furnished, thought Lucy rapidly, why that would save the expense of a big move, and I could sell all that heavy mahogany and all those awful brass beds, and the palm trees and aspidistras, and those great china vases and——

  “Laburnum Mount might suit you, or Beau Sejour,” said Mr. Coombe, opening a drawer and taking out a couple of Yale latchkeys.

  “I should like to see Gull Cottage,” said Lucy.

  “That wouldn’t suit you at all,” said Mr. Coombe firmly, “we’ll go to Beau Sejour first——”

  “I wish to see Gull Cottage,” said Lucy, flushing. “It is the size that I require, and the price, though I can’t help feeling something must be wrong with it that it should be rented so low. Is it the drains?”