The Caroussos, Part 1: Dorothee -- Garbo

Back in Year 3 of this blog, I did a post about an Alfred Hitchcock anthology. This paperback had been published in 1963, but the material was taken from years-old magazines. It was a quick inexpensive way to capitalize on Alfred Hitchcock's renewed fame due to his television work.

Thus, because of the age of these reprinted stories, the writers  I'm looking at in this post worked within the time range (1938-1952) of my Kay Kemble Project.

 

Alfred Hitchcock's A Baker's Dozen of Suspense Stories contains "The Warden," written by adventure- tale spinner Georges Carousso.While I scanned the contents page, I made a note of Carousso's name as I was interested in following up on some of the nearly-forgotten writers whose work was included in the anthology.

Then, strangely, just a day or two later I happened to come across this history-based post on social media:

 

I'd never heard of Dorothee Carousso, but a couple minutes of internet searching brought me to an episode of the excellent early TV drama series "Studio One,"  an adaptation of Dorothee's story "Flowers from a Stranger. " Yul Brynner was that week's guest star.

 

Having been impressed by "Flowers from a Stranger," I looked around for Dorothee's written works. I discovered this 1942 book, which I could borrow from our state library system.

 

 Open Then the Door is a combination of fiction and memoir, based on the Carousso's life while they lived in the brownstone building featured on Twitter.  I was bowled over by Dorothee's bio on the jacket blurb which said the author had "worked at a great variety of jobs -- usherette, chorus girl, real estate agent, lingerie saleswoman, artist's model." Her hobbies included "hunting, music, football, fishing." I don't know where people in Flushing, New York would have gone fishing, much less hunting.

bio  modest shelfwear, very faint dampstain on top edge of text block, one-time owner's neat signature and date of purchase on ffep; shallow chipping at spine ends, a couple of other little edge-nicks]. The author's first (and apparently only) novel, set in Flushing, N.Y., about a young couple struggling to make it through the Depression after the husband loses his job as a magazine editor. The New York Times reviewer called it "a really appealing first novel [that] is light, modest in scale, not startlingly original, but [having] a quality of warmth and truth and naturalness that is rather rare." The author had published some poetry and quite a bit of magazine fiction prior to this book, and according to  (Her husband, Georges Carousso, was also a magazine-fiction writer.)

 

In addition to being a novelist, Dorothee was also a nonfiction writer who specialized in genealogy. I was more interested in the one about gravestones than the one about how to figure out if the Daughters of the American Revolution or some group like that would accept you. But she knew why people were doing research in those days and she wrote books amateur genealogists would want to buy.

 

 

 

A bit more research told me that Dorothee also wrote adventure tales for magazines, but it was Dorothee's husband Georges was really prolific in that genre. He definitely made more magazine sales than his wife. We'll look at some of Georges' stuff in Part 2. 

Next week:  Georges Carousso, once a well-known writer when magazines were everywhere