Who knows why The Ghost and Mrs. Muir ended up on my Netflix list — I must have realized that I’d seen the TV version but never the film original. I thought it was kind of a gothic-ish, romance-ish film, which it was. But golly, it was also about a book!
Gene Tierney plays a young widow who rents a beachside house haunted by the ghost of a salty old sea captain. Yeah, really salty: salty language, sea-captain clothes, rough seaworthy beard. He tries to scare her away, and when she won’t run, well, you can guess what happens. What you might not remember is that when Tierney’s funding stream dries up, she and Rex Harrison — the sea captain — hatch a plan. He will write a book, she will publish it, buy the house and, when she dies, leave it as a retirement home for other men of the sea.
The book is bawdy in ways that code-era Hollywood could only allude to; it’s full of “blast” and “blasted,” too, an antique curseword that served as 1947’s “frak.”
The book finished, Tierny goes to a publisher’s office, determined to have it seen. George Sanders (one of my favorite charming film cads) sees her with the manuscript clutched to her chest. The last thing he suspects is that she’s carrying the racy memoirs of a dead sea captain.
Is it a cookbook? I hope not another “Life of Byron.” Or is it a book of dreams?
Dreams. Cookbooks. Byron. Those were the topics lady authors were expected to explore in the mid 1940s. “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” was a popular 1945 book by R.A. Dick, so popular that the film rights went fast — the movie came out just two years after the book, in 1947.
But add a “U” and you get U.R.A. Dick, and I think that’s not a mistake; Dick was a pseudonym. The book was written by a woman, Josephine Aimee Campbell Leslie, who lived for 81 years and published just one other novel. My short, frustrating internet searches have turned up little else about her — on a message board, someone claims her father was a sea captain, and that’s about it. In its capsule review of the film, allmovie doesn’t even mention her, indicating that the woman never fully emerged from behind the pseudonym.
There is an obvious authorial frustration embedded in the film, which gets lost in the pretty Bernard Herrmann score and weepy love story. It’s funny — or is it sad? — that a woman is the front for a silenced male author in the novel/film, whose author, in turn, is a pseudonymous, androgynous front for a silenced, almost forgotten woman.
Thanks for this.
The actress Gene Tierney’s life story is interesting and tragic as well, and well worth some exploration.
You said Josephine Aimee Campbell Leslie, published just one other novel but you did not give the name of it. I loved the book The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and would be interested in reading another of her books.
I know this answer is a little late, but I just came across this blog. The other book she published is “The Devil and Mrs. Devine”.
I have not had a chance to read that book, but it followed the Muir book. Josephine published The Ghost and Mrs. Muir when she was 47 years old in 1945. The movie came to theaters in 1947 and Gene Tierney was at her most beautiful stage when it was shot. As Carolyn wrote, there is very little information about Josephine Leslie available, but I am still trying to find what I can about her.
A little clarification: When I wrote “followed” I meant it came after The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, I don’t know at all what the story line was.
I hope this helps.
The other book the author wrote I think was: the Devil and Mrs Devine.