Karina: Fade in, exterior Music Corporation of America parking lot. Beverly Hills. Dusk. A well-dressed middle-aged man, silver haired, late fifties sits at the wheel of a 1950 Oldsmobile. Time passes. He intermittently checks his watch, his monogrammed cufflinks catch the dim light from the street lamps across the way. The initials read WFW. Manicured fingernails grip the steering wheel a little too tightly. Another car drives by it's headlights flashed the rear view mirror. It's 5:30 PM. WFW looks up with desperate eyes, a 38 automatic rests on the empty seat next to him. We follow his gaze, a man and a woman park one car, get out and walk to another car parked nearby. A kelly green Cadillac convertible with the top down. The woman is beautiful. 41, but looks younger. The man in his mid thirties is a dead ringer for Fred MacMurray in "Double Indemnity." He holds the door open as she gets the drivers seat. Then hovers by her window sharing a few last words. There is an intimacy between them, but what else? WFW on foot hurries across the darkness of the parking lot brandishing his pistol pointing it right at them his hand is shaking. The woman, Joan ,looks up and sees him a dozen feet away and gaining. 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "Get away from here. Leave us alone." 

Karina: The young man, Jennings, turns in horror and puts his hands up in the air as if under arrest. 

Jennings Lang [Reenactment]: "Oh don't be silly Walter. Don't be silly." 

Karina: Joan looks terrified as the older man, Walter, tightens his finger on the trigger, but then stops short. A split second of doubt defeating his resolve. 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "Don't , don't." 

Karina: Walter drops his aim lower and fires two quick shots at close range.*Bang bang* Two vivid white flashes, light up the air. One bullet goes wild against the car. The other ricochets off the pavement striking its targets in the groin. Jennings slumps to the ground with hardly a sound blood running down his pant leg. 

Jennings Lang [Reenactment]: "Ah, everything's all right. There's, there's nothing wrong." 

Karina: Joan flings the car door open grabs the gun off the pavement, looks at it with disgust, and throws it in the back of her car. She tends to the man on the ground, her lover who's gone pale and collapsed in agony. The parking lot attendant rushes over. She glares at the other man, the shooter, her husband.

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "Oh, Walter, he's just an agent." 

Karina: Interior, Beverly Hills police station, night. Walter Wanger, once one of the most powerful and respected producers in Hollywood, stumbles toward popping flashbulbs and whirling newsreel cameras all on Norma Desmond in the final scene of Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard." Calm. Detached. Cool. He is ready for his close-up.

Walter Wanger [Reenactment]: "I've just shot the son of a bitch who tried to break up my home." 

Vanessa: This isn't a scene from a movie, though, the story behind it did inspire the Oscar winning Billy Wilder film "The Apartment." It really happened 12 days before Christmas in December, 1951 in the parking lot of the biggest talent agency in Hollywood. The man with a gun was my grandfather, and the woman in the car was my grandmother. My mother's parents were the Hollywood film producer, Walter Wanger and actress, Joan Bennett. 

Karina: That's the voice of Vanessa Hope. Vanessa is a film producer and director, and she's an expert in Modern China. Her movies have competed at major festivals like Berlin and Sundance, which is where she and I met in my past life as a film critic. My name is Karina Longworth. And for the past seven years, I've written, hosted and produced a podcast called "You Must Remember This" about the secret and forgotten histories of 20th century Hollywood. 

Vanessa: You don't get much more secret or forgotten than the story of Joan Bennett and Walter Wanger. One of the top Hollywood power couples of the 1940s. They collaborated together on some of the movies that would invent the genre of film noir with my grandmother as a pioneering femme fatale. 

Announcer: "Among the hosts of movie celebrities flocking to Portland, Oregon, our producer, Walter Wanger, and his wife, Joan Bennett."

"Joan Bennett. Joan Bennett." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "I was alone. I don't like to be." "Oh, come on. Keep me company." "You mean you're afraid, of me?" 

Karina: This is one of the great unexplored stories in Hollywood history, encompassing everything from PTSD to parenthood, to sexual fluidity. It's the story of an 18 year old single mother who became a movie star to feed her baby and of a committed liberal who figured out how to game the system to both fight for progressive causes and make money. It's the story of how Hollywood tried to have it both ways. Elevating icons of dangerous female sexuality, and inviting audiences to thrill to taboo breaking behavior while also protecting the patriarchy by any means necessary. And, of course, it's the story of a marriage and how two gunshots fired in a moment of desperate paranoia have had reverberations for decades within a family and within our culture. Over 10 episodes, Vanessa and I will lead you through the story of Joan Bennett and Walter Wanger, to try to understand how they ended up staring at one another over another man's bloody body in December 1951. 

Vanessa: Why would my grandfather, a successful movie producer, a liberal thinker, a man who helped Jewish emigres escape Hitler, take a gun to confront his wife? Why would my grandmother, a beautiful movie star who had all but invented the archetype of the film noir femme fatale and was then starring in a hit franchise of family films, risk everything to sneak around with her agent? 

Karina: We'll begin today, by going back to the beginning to explain how Joan Bennett ended up married and pregnant by 17 and why she became a movie star as a last resort to support her child. We'll trace her early career to her fateful first collaborations with Walter Wanger, a married man and established mogul who becomes her lover and her Svengali. I'm Karina Longworth. 

Vanessa: I'm Vanessa Hope. This is Love is a Crime.

What do I mean, when I say love is a crime? I think that the prerequisite for love is equality. And equality requires that a couple be able to speak truth to each other and challenge each other and be vulnerable and empowered at the same time. So love, which requires equality and patriarchy, which feeds on inequality are so incompatible that it's actually as if in patriarchy, which is the world of film noir, violence is love, and that makes love a crime. You know, terms like sexual harassment, they didn't exist when my grandmother was coming of age in Hollywood. So I think it's beneficial to be able to look at what went on in our history, through the lens of today, because the more acquainted we are with it, the better we can do going forward.

Karina: When I first met Vanessa more than 10 years ago, I had no idea she was connected to one of the most violent scandals of Hollywood history. A film noir played out in real life, which lived on in Hollywood as a kind of dirty joke that was used to reinforce the strict gender roles and repressed sexuality of the 1950s turns out her family is tried for decades to put it behind them. 

Vanessa: The scandal happened when my mother was only about eight and a half to nine. It was highly traumatizing to have the world looking at her family's private life and feeling infiltrated, humiliated, being sent to boarding school, to avoid the press that plauged them anyway. When I was about nine, I first remember my mother telling me a limited version of the story, probably because she wanted to protect me, and I reminded her of herself at that age. I think more gets passed down generation to generation in unconscious ways than we realize. I had no understanding for what my grandparents or my mother had been through when I would repeat the line that had been handed down to me that my grandfather shot the balls off my grandmother's lover in a parking lot in Beverly Hills in 1951. I would say it with some glee on the school bus. It definitely gave me cache only later did I finally realize what the true implications of that story, even that one sentence, really are. 

Karina: This scandal was cataclysmic for Joan Bennett and her family in part, because in one fell swoop, it obliterated the control Joan had had over her own image. And as we'll come to learn, Joan Bennett didn't like feeling out of control and she certainly did what she could to take that control back. Joan published an autobiography in 1970 making her one of the first stars to contribute to a fertile moment for purportedly confessional books, authored or co-authored by performers of the 1930s and forties from Betty Davis to Lana Turner. Joan's book written with Lois Kibbee is called, "The Bennet Playbill," and before it gets to Joan's own career and a scandal, it tracks the multiple generations of Joan's family that proceeded her into the entertainment business. Joan's mother, Mabel, who preferred to be called Adrienne was herself the daughter of two performers. Adrienne was a sensation on Broadway in "The Squaw Man," five years before Joan was born in February 1910. By that point, Joan's father, Richard Bennett, was two decades into his career as one of the most important stage actors of his generation. 

Vanessa: Joan felt that her mother's acting career had been successful and distinguished, but after having children, she just wasn't as ambitious. Whereas her father was, he was quite a headstrong, passionate person. He was an idealist and he was known for impromptu curtain speeches. He loved to hold forth on anything from public taste and morals to politics and income taxes. I think he also loved to drink. So he was particularly fond of railing against prohibition, and he believed the theater was not just for entertainment, but for people to use their minds. He held it in higher esteem than the movies. 

Karina: Like his contemporary John Barrymore and countless other bad boy actors to come, Richard was known for his intensity on stage and off. When he drank, he could be scary. Adrienne and Richard fought over whether or not she should have the freedom he had to pursue an acting career over her small rebellions, like smoking and bobbing her hair, and over his frequent infidelities. In general, Richard seemed to want to live his own life with no rules or limits, but he was extremely do, as I say, not as I do. He had strict expectations of others, especially if they were female. 

Vanessa: Joan wrote in her autobiography of a troubling scene that occurred when she and her sisters were kids. 

Karina: Interior, Greenwich Village, night. An elegant four story townhouse near Washington Square with high ceilings, shiny wood pegged floors and gleaming brass fixtures. Joan Bennett, age eight, and her sister, Barbara, 11, are asleep upstairs. The eldest Bennett sister, 13 year-old Constance, carefully turns her key and the lock hoping to sneak in past her curfew. Her father, Richard, furious greets her at the front door. 

Richard Bennett [Reenactment]: "How dare you break my rules for this house by coming home so late." 

Constance Bennett [Reenactment]: "But it was impossible to be home any earlier, I tried." 

Vanessa: Richard lunges for Constance. Adrienne, her mother, makes a failed attempt to calm them. Roused from their sleep, Joan and Barbara creep to the top of the stairway to watch. 

Richard Bennett [Reenactment]: "I will skin you alive for this rebellion." 

Karina: Constance darts past Richard and flies up the stairs. Interior, Joan and Barbara's room, continuous. Constance dives under Joan's bed. Joan and Barbara rushed to her side. Richard walks in pointing a gun at the girls. 

Richard Bennett [Reenactment]: "Line up. Against the wall. All three of you now. Hurry up." 

Karina: The three female children line up against the wall. As Richard in a blind rage continues to wave the gun around.

Richard Bennett [Reenactment]: "Maybe you'd prefer if I eliminated all three of you on the spot, rather than allowing you to carry on in your lazy undisciplined ways. Either you conform to my house rules and my expectations, or there won't be any family. Understood?" 

Karina: Even Constance who would normally fight back is too terrified to move or speak. Unable to sustain his anger any longer, Richard breaks down into tears. Adrienne leads him away. 

Vanessa: She refers back to this incident as though it only happened once, but I think it actually happened regularly where Richard Bennett would get very drunk, and then he would come home late, wielding a gun, and anyone who defied any of his rules, most of which had to do with getting home on time, would be in deep trouble. And Constance was usually the instigator, the one who was sneaking around and defying him, and then all the sisters would be punished and he would scare them into submission. But guns are real. I think the idea that to be a man means to wheel the gun is a terrible idea of masculinity. The threat of violence defining your manhood is terrible, but common and still with us. 

Karina: Richard and Adrienne finally called their marriage quits when Joan was 15. Around this time, Constance broke into the movies and began working steadily in silent films. Almost six years older than Joan, slim and blonde and beautiful with wide eyes and a devilish smile, Constance had the right look for the flapper era. Meanwhile, middle sister Barbara Bennett, though, ultimately destined to become the least famous and most tragic of the sisters, had started her brief career as an actress and professional dancer. Joan, didn't see how she could possibly compete with the older, more glamorous and confident Bennetts. 

Vanessa: I think Joan felt herself unattractive by comparison and kind of, you know, mousy and quiet. She was the one who liked to stay at home and wasn't as dynamic. She didn't have ambition to go into the theater. She thought maybe she would raise a family or become an interior decorator. So she suffered from shyness and near-sightedness and thought of herself as the mess in comparison to her famous parents or her really wild, older sister, Constance. 

Karina: Rather than follow her family's footsteps and risk falling into her sister's shadow, Joan wanted to strike out on her own. She convinced her mother to enroll her in a finishing school in Paris. But on the way to that destination Joan's life would take a turn.

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "Constance came to see me off at the sailing. Among the passengers she recognized John Fox, a young man she knew and brought him over to be introduced. I thought he was the handsomest man I'd ever met. He was also about 10 years older than I, and the thought of an Atlantic sailing and the company of such extreme sophistication was a delightful prospect until then I'd only dated college boys, football players, and other youthful types. Also terribly callow compared to a mature man like Jack. He began to pay me a great deal of attention. I was very impressed. I knew that one of his big romances had been Norma Shira and I was greatly flattered to be considered in the same league. None of us realized at that moment that Constance's casual introduction would mean the beginning of the end of my childhood and bring about the next vast change in my life."

Karina: A shipboard romance ensued. Joan was fully smitten, but in her youthful, enthusiasm and naivete, she missed a red flag. Jack Fox was an alcoholic. Once she was settled in her French boarding school, Joan's older boyfriend would come and take her out on the weekends, whirling her through 1920s hotspots, like the Ritz. Life was a party and Joan was unable to see that Jack always took the party too far. Though Richard Bennett was fervently opposed to the coupling, Joan Bennett married Jack Fox in London on September 15th, 1926. The bride wore Lanvin. She was on her wedding night at about the halfway point between her 16th and 17th birthdays.

Vanessa: In her first marriage, she was really only 17, so she was definitely still a child, but she felt herself more mature. And th- there were all these red flags on these men Joan would fall for. In the first marriage it was that he drank too much, and Joan says that she ignored that fact because she was so taken with him. And he, John Fox, made it clear that all he needed was her to cure him of the habit. So she believed him and believed this with all her heart, but then she questions, will there ever come a day when women stop marrying men with the idea of reforming them? 

Karina: Teenage Joan was not able to reform Jack and his drinking made their home more and more chaotic, which was especially problematic after Joan gave birth to her first daughter in February, 1928. Joan sought to control what she could. 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "I suppose, if there was such a thing as a conventional Bennett, I was it. In my desire for stability manifested itself in a number of ways, I began a pattern that was set for the rest of my life. I became a systematic compulsive housekeeper from that point on my home represented the stability I needed and felt was necessary for a well ordered life."

Karina: When the relationship became so volatile that Joan was frightened for the safety of her baby, she filed a protective order, which Jack violated. 

Vanessa: Interior, small one bedroom house. Hollywood. Joan, now 18, looks into a crib as her baby Diana cries, desperately. Jack, drunk, storms into the apartment in a white hot rage. He charges around like a wounded buffalo yelling at Joan. He demands money and then rips the telephone out of the wall. Joan flees the apartment and runs to the corner, phone booth. She frantically turns the rotary dial and calls the police. 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "Since Jack had violated the peace bond, he was carted off to jail where he spent a thoroughly uncomfortable 10 days. Then, because he was threatened with an indefinite stay I went down and bailed him out. At that point, I could have had him committed to a state institution for drying out period, but I refused, and instead he was remanded to my custody. That idea wasn't particularly appealing. I had no wish to play custodian to anyone except my baby. And after that final blow up, I refused to take him back."

Vanessa: She says it was sheer misery in her first marriage to be 18 with a two month old baby and a father of her baby who was a hopeless alcoholic when not in jail, and lack of money was an ever-present fear. 

Karina: When Richard Bennett found out what had happened with his youngest daughter's marriage, he showed up at Joan's Los Angeles home gun in hand, and threatened to kill Jack unless Joan filed for divorce. And if she did file for divorce, Richard said, he'd help her get back on her feet by getting her a job, co-starring in a play with him called "Jarnegan." 

Vanessa: That incident sounds terrible, but you know, I think she was afraid to divorce and I think it was maybe a relief that her father gave her this ultimatum and said, "You really must divorce him or else because I'm not giving you any money and you have a baby to support." 

Karina: It worked out for Joan in the short term, but Richard's pattern of using a gun to get his way would have a lasting impact on Joan's life. 

Vanessa: Something about telling the story of Joan's life and how frequently her father Richard entered it with a gun on more than one occasion, more than one time period, for more than one reason, made it clear to me that there's no way she would have been able to keep that from someone she was in love with like her husband. And Walter might've understood this to have a power over Joan and a power to persuade her to listen, and it's unfortunate because he then took after her father and using a gun to threaten Joan to do his bidding.

Ronald Davis: Well, of course, I'm curious, Ms. Bennett from the illustrious acting family that you were from, did you know at a very early age that you too would become an actress?

Joan Bennett: No, I had not thought about it.

Ronald Davis: Is that right?

Joan Bennett: Right. I was married and divorced at a very early age, and I had a baby to support and my father was doing a play in New York and he said, 'Why don't you come do the ingenue lead and then you can support your baby?

Karina: This is an excerpt from an oral history with Joan Bennett conducted by film historian, Ronald Davis in 1985, 5 years before Joan's death. Throughout this show, you'll hear excerpts from that conversation, courtesy of Davis' archive at Southern Methodist University. In this interview, the only lengthy recorded conversation with Bennett about her career, who's taped survives, as far as we know. Joan's answers are often matter of fact. Looking back at her body of work from the end of her life, her memories are hardly clouded with romance. As we'll hear, as this story goes along, she's usually wry, sometimes salty. Sometimes she doesn't have much to say at all. And sometimes she says a lot in just a few words. 

Ronald Davis: How did you feel about films and Hollywood? 

Joan Bennett: Alright. It was fine. 

Karina: Joan Bennett would eventually become a movie star, but as a teenager, she had no desire for celebrity, and even as an adult woman stardom itself, wasn't that important to her. Joan simply wanted to stand on her own, which would not be that easy for any novice teen, even if she did come from a performing family. So when Richard got her cast in the play, "Jarnegan," Joan submitted to an intense rehearsal period under the tutelage of her father. "Jarnegan" was a play about Hollywood in which Joan was cast as an ingenue corrupted by the film industry. Perhaps ironically, her performance attracted the interest of said industry in the end Joan's stage debut led to her screen debut when United artists, chairman Joseph Schenck came to see "Jarnegan" in search of a new face to cast opposite Ronald Colman in "Bulldog Drummond." A detective picture, which would go on to earn two Oscar nominations. Joan Bennett with thus land her first major film role just as her sister Constance was returning to the screen after taking a few years off to have her own tumultuous marriage. Constance quickly found a niche in early sound films as a coolly glamorous cog in the romantic comedies, and ripped from the headlines melodramas that kept Hollywood chugging through the depression. Her comeback began with a light romance called "This Thing Called Love," which featured a bit appearance by Jean Harlow, who would soon become Hollywood's most famous platinum blonde. Harlow's look, as refined and marketed by Howard Hughes, was kind of a vulgar update of the blonde smolder that Constance had carried over from the silent era. There was room for both Constance and Jean Harlow in blonde mad early thirties Hollywood, but was there room for a third? For nearly the first decade of her career, Joan Bennett was also a blond, happily, at least at first, as she told Ronald Davis, 

Joan Bennett: And I'd always wanted to bleach my hair. I was a blonde, but not blonde enough, and when I went out to be Ronnie Colman leading lady Sam Goldwyn said, 'You have to lighten your hair.' I was thrilled at that.

Karina: Though her hair color in her early films looks less natural than Constance's, Joan's blondness projected innocence rather than guile. In that era, there were better parts for Constance's version of blonde beauty than for Joan's. And though the younger sister started her movie career at roughly the same time, the older sister was restarting hers, Constance's star rose more quickly. Hollywood pits actresses against one another, whether they're related or not, and the Hollywood press created an air of rivalry between the Bennett sisters.

Vanessa: Joan had a little inferiority complex, and I think felt overshadowed. And yet she wasn't competitive. So I think the gossip columnists of Hollywood like to spin it and say, you know, there was sibling rivalry with Constance because they were both blonde and both acting, but the way Joan saw it, Constance always played the brittle blonde sophisticate, and Joan was the sweet blonde ingenue. So they never really competed for parts and they loved to spend time together and see each other and shared friends, and I think it was a loving relationship. But I have heard many family members talk about Constance is very tough. A brittle blonde sophisticate is an understatement somehow.

Karina: Ironically, it was a film originally meant for Constance that began to turn Joan's career around. Joan's second husband was Gene Markey, perhaps the most unlikely heartthrob in 20th century Hollywood. A Chicago newspaperman turned jazz age novelist, and finally, a minor screenwriter. Markey would marry three glamorous Hollywood stars. Despite the fact that he was not exactly a looker. In photos from the early 1930s, when he met Joan, he resembled a slightly more handsome William Frawley, the actor who played Fred Mertz on, "I Love Lucy."

Vanessa: I think he wooed her with his writing. She had been on this movie and riding a horse for a scene and the horse had thrown her. I think she hit a tree and fell like a ragdoll and basically broke vertebrae in her hip, and had to have surgery and it would take three months to recover, six months until she was back on the movie. Enter Gene Markey. I don't even know from where he somehow enters her life at that most kind of vulnerable moment and really writes incredibly well I guess. He charmed her with his notes and his sense of humor and his philosophy of life. And apparently he also would spend time with Joan's daughter, Diana and she loved him. 

Karina: With stability in her personal life, Joan was on firmer ground to assess what was happening in her career. She had been under contract to Fox, but while she was popular with crews for being friendly and easy to work with the studio executives had lost interest in casting her, and she wasn't happy with what she was being asked to do.

Ronald Davis: I have a quote here from you, I guess, referring to your Fox years where you say, 'There was something vaguely, dissatisfying about it. I felt as if I were just treading in one spot.'

Joan Bennett: Well that's because they made me do any picture they wanted me to do and I had no choice. 

Karina: After Joan's marriage to Markey, Fox did not renew her contract. She had made nearly 20 films since "Bulldog Drummond" and she was only 22, but her career was in stasis. In Hollywood she was perceived to be the second rate Bennett compared to Constance, who hit the peak of her career in 1932 with George Cukor's first iteration of the "A Star is Born" story called, "What Price Hollywood." But Constance would soon find her opportunities dwindling as her studio, RKO, shifted its focus to the new flavor of the year, Katharine Hepburn. RKO executive, David O Selznick, would cast Hepburn in the plum roll of Jo in his new adaptation of "Little Women," an adaptation that had been originally conceived with Constance in mind for the Jo part. For the role of Amy, the youngest, March sister, and in this adaptation, "The Funniest," Selznick looked not to Constance, the actress he already had under contract, but to her sister. Joan knew this was a huge opportunity. And so though she found out she was pregnant before shooting began, she also knew she could well have been fired for her condition. So she kept it secret until she was showing at which point enough of the film had been shot, that she couldn't be replaced. In 1985 she'd laugh, remembering how director George Cukor handled his ensemble of actresses. 

Joan Bennett: We all had our dressing rooms on the set. You know portable dressing rooms. And when we'd go between tape or between set ups to our dressing rooms and they were ready. He'd say, 'Come on you four a little bitches, get out here.'

Karina: Little women was a major hit. It was RKO's biggest moneymaker of 1933 and it refreshed Joan's image and the imagination of the industry. Most importantly, it caught the eye of Walter Wanger. Wanger had taken notice of Joan at least twice before. Back in the twenties, he had been on board the same transatlantic ship on which Joan had met Jack Fox. Walter had noticed 15 year old Joan on deck and asked his friend Gilbert Miller. If he knew who she was. "That's Richard Bennett's youngest daughter." Gilbert told him, "Forget it Walter, she's much too young." A few years later, Walter had watched a screen test of Joan's and declined to offer her a contract under the suspicion that she would quote, "never photograph." What's amazing about Joan Bennett, particularly in relation to Hollywood's fetishism of youth, is that she wasn't particularly memorable on screen as a teen and young woman. She would photograph more and more beautifully as time went on. Part of that probably owed to her increasing confidence and skill in front of the camera. Some of that transformation can be credited to Walter Wanger, who was the first producer who really considered how to handle Joan with care. He'd be the first to have faith that Joan could handle a challenging, dramatic acting role in a prestige ensemble film. Casting her as a neglected wife who suffers a breakdown in the 1935 film, "Private Worlds." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "I'm going to have a baby."

Jane: "Really?" 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "I haven't told him yet." 

Jane: "Why?" 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Oh I can't Jane. He doesn't care what's happening to me. Alex isn't Alex anymore. He's in another world and I can't get near him." 

Karina: Though in many ways, retrograde by today's standards. "Private Worlds" was Hollywood's first film to take mental illness seriously. It's a soap opera set in a mental hospital where a lady psychiatrist played by Claudette Colbert works closely with her male counterpart, a philanderer played by Joel McCrea. Joan was given the secondary role of the male doctor's wife who's loneliness and neglect leads to a breakdown. Directed by Gregory La Cava, "Private Worlds" is an unconventional ensemble film for its time. It's camera work, lighting and staging is sometimes lurid and shockingly avant-garde. Later asylum set films like "Shock Corridor" owe it some debt. It was one of Joan's favorite movies that she was in. 

Vanessa: She loved "Little Women" and she loved "The Woman in the Window" and "Scarlet Street," but then there was this fourth movie, "Private Worlds," and I thought, what is that? So I only watched it this last month and I was pretty surprised that this was one of her favorite films. Her part is pretty small and she's not that great in it. And she's got this melodramatic breakdown scene that is very bizarre, but I do think it's interesting that the film is about the mental and emotional toll on a woman who feels neglected because she's not part of her husband's intellectual world.

Karina: "Private Worlds" was a typical mid thirties, Walter Wanger production. Born Walter Feuchtwanger, the son of a German- Jew who had immigrated in 1870 and joined the gold rush, Wanger was unique amongst producers of his era. After working in a propaganda film unit during World War I, he became convinced of the power of film to influence real social and political change. 

Matthew Bernstein: Italian forces have suffered some great losses, uh, to the general morale was very low. And Walter in Rome got involved in creating propaganda newsreels. He would take newsreels, let's say the signal corps had already made, and bring them over to his office in Italy, retitled them.

Karina: This is Matthew Bernstein, author of the biography, "Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent."

Matthew Bernstein: He described one of showing all these Americans marching off to training in civilian clothes and then marching back in their uniforms as a way of telling the Italians help is on the way. And he found that this, from what he could tell, this was incredibly effective about changing Italians attitudes about the fate of the conflict, but also about Americans and what they were bringing. And this was a signature kind of primal experience for him in seeing the power of movies to persuade people, to influence their opinions and this informed his approach to filmmaking all the time. So the war experience was really formational for him. Uh, foundational for him in how he thought about movies and their power.

Karina: This was a belief Walter would hold on to, for his entire career. Here he is talking about it in the early 1960s.

Walter Wanger: The reason I've always been interested in the motion pictures is because I felt was the greatest medium to reach the masses, uh, which it is proven to be. That nothing has a penetration, affirms, nothing has changed. There were more in custom and behavior than affirms. And I also would like to add not destructively but constructively. 

Karina: Walter went on to serve as an executive for nearly every major studio, including Paramount, Columbia, and MGM before striking out on his own forming an independent production company and signing select stars to personal contracts. Wanger was instrumental in the stardom of Henry Fonda. What's more impressive is that he launched Fonda as a star in movies that had real ideas about human nature and actual arguments to make about the state of America in the 1930s. Such as "You only Live Once" starring Fonda, produced by Wanger, and directed by Fritz Lang, which uses a Bonnie and Clyde inspired story to extremely persuasively make the case that the capitalist dream sold by most Hollywood movies does nothing but grind up human life. In 1939, Walter wrote an essay published in Foreign Affairs magazine called "120,000 American Ambassadors." 

Matthew Bernstein: The title referred to movies that serve as representations of America to the world and of the world to America. That can only produce greater empathy across international lines. 

Karina: Generally Wanger's politics hold up well to our modern sensibilities. He was liberal and anti-racist and openly pushed Hollywood movies towards realism and social justice. To do this, he alternated films that felt like entertainments, but still had something to say, like "Private Worlds" with pure fluff, like "Vogues of 1938," a technicolor trifle, starring Joan. Walter was able to speak out of both sides of his mouth, quite fluently. He held a press conference in 1939 to promote John Ford's "Stagecoach" at which he staked a claim against escapism in the movies. He called for a new era in which Hollywood produced movies, which reflected that life was about something other than quote, "success, money, the girl, happiness without end." Wanger himself had produced a stunning counter to such movies two years earlier with "You Only Live Once." Wanger had the freedom to make such pronouncements and to make movies like John Ford's "The Long Voyage Home," which were rapturously received by critics and eventually historians, but failed to make immediate profits only because he also cranked out escapist hits. Later as we'll see, he bought the freedom to experiment with more serious material by also producing a lot of orientalist schlock. That balance of one for them one for me would be crucial. Joan showed up to shoot "Private Worlds," having just given birth to Gene Markey's daughter, Melinda. Markey was a great domestic partner, if not a great passion for Joan. So she wasn't out looking for love, but it was clear that Wanger was looking out for her. As Matthew Bernstein explains, 

Matthew Bernstein: He would rarely come on the set to check on progress. Although apparently he did come on the set to ogle the ladies, the actors, this was part of his prowl. Um, and this is how Joan learned he was interested in her. Uh, when she was in his film, "Private Worlds" in 1934, she was oblivious, but Claudette Colbert her close co-star pointed out that he was there on set only when she was shooting. 

Karina: Wanger was married to Justine Johnston, a blonde, blue eyed Ziefeld girl who appeared in nine silent films before finding other interests.

Vanessa: I think she grew bored with dancing and acting. And she began working with doctors up at Columbia University in New York, on the IV drip and a cure for syphilis. And then when Walter wanted to move to Hollywood, she went with him, but again was finding herself, bored with her options, not wanting to act. 

Karina: To some extent, Justine and Walter lived separate lives and around Hollywood, people whispered that Wanger was in an open marriage. 

Vanessa: Justine probably knew Walter behaves the way he did, but I do wonder if they spoke about it the way we would today. 

Karina: Certainly Walter pursued women as though he were an unmarried man. And though her own marriage was not open. Joan was attracted to Walter. 

Vanessa: Walter, really paid attention to Joan. He listened intently whenever she spoke and he was kind and sympathetic. I think that the appeal of Walter being passionate about social justice and issue movies definitely came in part from respecting and admiring her father, who equated theater with elevating people's minds and telling stories that mattered and had social consequence. So she was born to fall in love with Walter. I think she found him enormously appealing, enough that she then put the direction of her career in his hands and trusted him with it going forward. 

Karina: Walter signed Joan to an exclusive contract and would make good on Joan's faith in him by finding new ways to showcase her potential. She had never looked more beautiful than in Wanger's technicolor extravaganza, "Vogues of 1938" and in this screwball gangster comedy, "Big Brown Eyes" in which Walter cast, Joan is a wise talking manicurist opposite Cary Grant. We get our first real glimpse of the streetwise saltiness that would later make her such a good femme fatale. Though she would not admit to it in her autobiography, it certainly seems likely that Joan began some sort of relationship with Walter around the time she made "Private Worlds", but Joan was not the only woman in Walter's life, personally or professionally. When it came to actresses, he had under contract, he was still reserving the best parts for Sylvia Sidney. And when it came to personal life, neither Walter nor Joan was at liberty to be together openly. And Walter was so known for playing the field that whatever Joan felt for him, he likely didn't look like a stable bet. 

Matthew Bernstein: One of the people I interviewed was Philip Yordan, who wrote the script for Wanger's film, "Reign of Terror," also known as the black book. I talk to Philip Yordan and, you know, I asked him, how did you know Walter Wanger? He said, 'Oh, we used to go out fucking together.' Okay. So that's, that's interesting. However much we, we condemn it now, this was a norm in Hollywood of the time. In the late sixties, he told an interviewer that at dinner parties at Matt Senate's house, if you didn't have sex with a woman sitting next to you between courses, you'd be considered gay. So all of this is obviously a very chauvinist, patriarchal attitude. That people like Walter and his position shared that saw women as play things and it was extremely prevalent then. And as we've been learning it's way too peripheral now. 

Karina: Maybe this is why in 1936, Joan made a move to cement her marriage to Gene Markey by changing her eldest daughter's name to Diana Markey. But while Wanger may have been the one with the open marriage, it seems as though Gene Markey left the door open for his wife to fall in love with another man. 

Vanessa: Joan saw him as the kindest of all men and said he had a really gentle wit and philosophical view of life. Everyone loved him, but eventually I guess he didn't have the substance or ambition that she would have hoped for in a husband, maybe if she was modeling him after her own father. So his sort of fluffy screenplays and lack of success, and the fact that she was financially supporting him, started to wear on her. And I think this all happened around the time when she met Walter Wanger. 

Karina: Joan and Jean amicably divorced in the spring of 1937. Amidst this split, she invested in having a home in Beverly Hills, designed and custom built for her by architect to the stars, Wallace Neff. 

Vanessa: I think it's a pretty big deal for a woman at any period of time to build their own house. I'm still in awe of the fact that she was financially self-sufficient enough to say "Let me choose a plot of land and build a 14 room French provincial house." 

Karina: When Jack Fox had turned her life upside down, Joan had sought some measure of control by becoming a domestic goddess. After the chaos of that marriage, she had run into the arms of Gene Markey in search of romantic stability. Perhaps having this house built at the close of the Markey marriage was Joan's way of ensuring that she would always have a stable home, no matter what happened with the men in her life. That was certainly the message she put out in the world via the fan magazines, to which she gave several interviews and even put her name on columns, celebrating her new found marital independence. In one interview with columnist, Gladys Hall, Joan proudly declared that in her house, she and her daughters and her all female staff were women without men. When Hall asked her, if she would marry again, Joan said, 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "I will not, not for years. Why should I?" 

Karina: This may seem like a very progressive stance for an actress to be broadcasting in the late 1930s, but in an industry in which every product was vetted by a censorship board built around right-wing Catholic values. Joan's declarations of independence were more morally acceptable than the fact that she was still involved and not matrimonially with Walter Wanger. As of 1938, Wanger and Justine Johnston were divorced, but Walter had not yet made any sort of move to make Joan his next wife. On some level, Joan had to project herself as a happy single gal because she couldn't reveal the true complexity of her relationship status.

Vanessa: The other angle actually involves her sister Constance, who is dating a man named Gilbert Roland, and living with him for a period of time before being married. And the Hollywood press did comment on Constance's relationship and several other famous stars in Hollywood who were living together, but not married and why that was problematic and sinful and not acceptable. So Joan didn't do that. 

Karina: This was in January, 1939 when Photoplay ran an exposay on Constance, Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck and other stars called, "Hollywood's Unmarried Husbands and Wives." It's surely no coincidence that most of the couples called out in the story quickly married. 

Vanessa: It is interesting to think back and wonder in our own lives if every relationship we had with a man that was relatively serious had to move to marriage as opposed to being able to live together and experience life for several years and then decide, no, this isn't my lifelong commitment. 

Karina: Joan may also have been using such articles about her fantastic home and her happy self-sufficiency. As a kind of ruse to change her relationship status.

Vanessa: There's a whole speculation about, was she using her house to lure Walter Wanger into marriage with her because he didn't have a home like this and maybe, I don't think it was her main intention and building her house. I think she built it for her family, but I do think it's entirely possible that Joan was working some reverse psychology on Walter to show that she didn't need him and make him want her more. I do know that her daughter, Diana from her first marriage felt that Joan was attempting to make Walter jealous, dating other suitors in high-profile romances, right before he divorced and before they married. 

Karina: Two decades later, Walter would look back at his relationship with Joan and acknowledge that the age difference between them was what had given him the most pause.

Walter Wanger: I cannot get over the fact that 1940 I used certain arguments with Joan about her youth and the fact that, although there was a great feeling between us, whether it would be an unsatisfactory relationship, and I was much too old for her as, uh, she was about 25 and I was 40.

Karina: Walter's professional relationship was also at an impasse. Despite providing her with a couple of good roles in the three years since he had controlled her career, Wanger had failed to come up with any real strategy for moving that career forward. Nearly a decade into her career. Joan Bennett was still something of a cipher. Even when she did occasionally get a meaty role, she didn't convey the sense that she contained multitudes. As one fan magazine put it regarding her character in "Private Worlds ," "what a pretty little thing, but she probably hasn't a thought in that pretty little head." Joan's vacuous screen image to that point is epitomized by one of the last films she made as a blonde, "I Met My Love Again," a bizarrely inert, romantic drama, featuring Joan and another Wanger contract player, Henry Fonda as star crossed teenage lovers. The movie's plot actually paralleled Joan's own experience somewhat on the verge of womanhood, a young blonde is swept off her feet by a charismatic drunk. And then when that goes bad, she and her young daughter struggle for stability. And yet the film and Joan's performance in it are both totally bloodless.

Vanessa: The blonde character wasn't in sync with who she was in the world. Joan wasn't just some kind of silly, frivolous, dumb blonde relying on other men's bank accounts or the victim in a love triangle, that wasn't her. 

Karina: Something had to be done, and Walter Wanger finally showed that he was the man to do it. His solution for taking Joan Bennett's career to the next level, simple. He just had to transform her into a different person. All that and more next time, on Love is a Crime.

Vanessa: Love is a Crime is a Vanity fair presentation in partnership with Cadence 13. Executive produced, created, written and hosted by Vanessa Hope and Karina Longworth. Starring Zooey Deschannel as Joan Bennett, Jon Hamm as Walter Wanger, Griffin Dunne as Jennings Lang, Mara Wilson as Constance Bennett, and Adam Mortimer as Richard Bennett.

Our executive producer is Chris Corcoran and our show runner is Jacquelyn Jamjoom. Production support provided by Nico Steele, Julia Doyle and Lindsay D Shoenholtz. Theme music composed by Lionel Cohen and Vybbes. Audio produced and supervised by Shelby Comstock Britten and mixed by Gintas Norvilla and Rainhouse. Special thanks to Katey Rich from Vanity Fair and Julie Shen and Kelly Bales from Conde Nast. 

Karina: Love is a Crime was written by Vanessa Hope and Karina Longworth who consulted the following published sources in researching this episode: "The Bennetts; An Acting Family," by Brian Kellow published by the University Press of Kentucky, used by permission from the University Press of Kentucky. "Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent," by Matthew Bernstein, published by the University of Minnesota press, used by permission from University of Minnesota Press. "The Bennett Playbill," by Joan Bennett, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, used by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC, Joan Bennett estate and Lois Kibbee estate. This episode also includes an interview with Matthew Bernstein. Archival clips sourced from, "The Tapes from the Ronald Davis Oral History Collection on the Performing Arts" at Southern Methodist University, used by permission from DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University. The tapes from the Walter Wanger collection at the University of Wisconsin Madison used by permission from the Joe Hyams estate and University of Wisconsin Madison. "The Canyon Passage" movie premiere in 1946, and clips from the following motion pictures; "The Woman in the Window," "Scarlet Street," and "Private Worlds." Fact checking by Laura Bullard