Cape Fear Dead Ahead: Transforming a Thrice-Told Tale of Lawyers and Law
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Law in Popular Culture Collection - E-texts Legal Studies Forum Volume 24, Number 3 & 4 (2000) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum CAPE FEAR DEAD AHEAD: TRANSFORMING A THRICE-TOLD TALE OF LAWYERS AND LAW FRANCIS M. NEVINS* I. THE RIVER In the real world the Cape Fear river flows in east central North Carolina. It is 202 miles long, the longest river entirely within that state, and during this country's colonial period was a main route into the interior. Formed by the junction of the Deep and Haw rivers at Haywood, it flows southeast past Lillington, Fayetteville, Elizabethtown and Wilmington, where it turns south as an estuary and, three miles west of the cape that shares its name, enters the Atlantic.1 In the world of the imagination the name Cape Fear has come to stand for three versions of the same fundamental story about law, lawyers and our legal system; a story whose similarities and differences are the subject of this essay. II. THE NOVELIST John D(ann) MacDonald was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania on July 24, 1916, the son of a strong-willed workaholic who rose Alger-like from humble origins to become a top executive at a firearms company in Utica, New York. A near-fatal attack of mastoiditis and scarlet fever at age 12 confined young John to bed for a year, and lack of anything else to do in those days before radio and TV and computers virtually forced him to read or have his mother read to him huge quantities of books. Once back on his feet he began haunting the public library and compulsively devouring every book on its shelves. MacDonald graduated from the Utica Free Academy in 1933, and from Syracuse University five years later with a B.S. in Business Administration and a fellow Syracuse grad as his wife. In June 1939 he received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. After a year of [611] working at jobs he hated, he accepted a lieutenant's commission in the Army and was assigned to procurement work in Rochester, N.Y. until mid-1943 when he was sent to Staff Headquarters at New Delhi, India. A year later he transferred to the OSS, serving in Ceylon as branch commander of an Intelligence detachment and rising to Lieutenant Colonel's rank. During idle times, instead of writing his wife letters he knew would be censored, MacDonald began writing and sending her short stories. One of these she sold. "I can't describe what it was like," he said near the end of his life, "when I found out that my words had actually sold. I felt as if I were a fraud, . as if I were trying to be something that I wasn't. Then I thought, my goodness, maybe I could actually be one." At the end of the war MacDonald was entitled to four months of stateside terminal leave with pay before his discharge. He spent those months behind the typewriter, working 80 hours a week, cranking out 800,000 words worth of short stories and beginning to sell some of them. For the next several years most of the family's income came from magazines, primarily the pulps whose gaudy and lurid covers could be seen on every newsstand in those immediate postwar years. In 1950 he began publishing novels, most of them softcover originals, and through that decade and most of the 1960s he wrote paperbacks so prolifically and well that he forced critics and intelligent readers to take notice of a new book-publishing medium that they might otherwise have dismissed as trash. Most years he also produced one novel for hardcover publication. In 1958 that novel was The Executioners, which takes place nowhere near the Cape Fear river but was the starting point for the two later movies that did. III. THE NOVEL It begins quietly on an early summer afternoon with attorney Sam Bowden and his wife Carol and their three children-the oldest a 14-year-old daughter on the brink of womanhood-relaxing on the beach of a tiny island in a lake near the town of New Essex, which is apparently in upstate New York. Amid banter between the couple Sam recounts to Carol an incident that happened a few days earlier, an incident whose roots date back to World War II, approximately fifteen years earlier, when late one night on a dark street in Melbourne, Australia, Lieutenant Bowden came upon the brutal rape of a 14-year-old girl by 25-year-old staff sergeant Max Cady. Bowden had managed to subdue Cady, who was court-martialed and sentenced to life at hard labor. But now, Sam tells Carol, Cady is out-and accosted him outside his law [612] office in New Essex a few days before, ending the encounter with the words "Give my best to the wife and kids, Lieutenant." (9). Carol then reveals that several days earlier she had noticed a stranger at the edge of the Bowden property who fits her husband's description of Cady. Sam goes on to describe how he had talked to the New Essex city attorney and had been told that the police would roust Cady until he left the area. When Carol asks why they don't simply lock the man up, Sam offers a mini- essay in conventional jurisprudence. "My God, it would be nice if you could do that, wouldn't it? An entirely new legal system. Jail people for what they might do. I believe in the law. It's a creaking, shambling, infuriating structure. There are inequities in it. But at its base, it's an ethical structure. It is based on the inviolability of the freedom of every citizen. And I like it. I live it. So maybe it is the essence of my philosophy that this Cady thing has to be handled within the law. If the law can't protect us, then I'm dedicated to a myth, and I'd better wake up." (13-14). The presentation not only of this chapter but the entire novel from Sam Bowden's viewpoint generates a huge technical challenge: MacDonald has to keep us in a state of constant tension while denying us all sorts of powerful scenes that can only be described to the viewpoint character after they happen. Learning that Max Cady has money from the sale of his dead parents' home and is therefore relatively roustproof, Bowden in Chapter Two hires private detective Charlie Sievers to spy on Cady and warns his two older children of the potential danger. In Chapter Three Sievers, the savviest private eye in the area, admits to Bowden that Cady is savvier. "He's awake every minute. He's cute and he's good. He can see in all directions at once. You're wasting your money. He expected to be covered. [A]ny time he wants to shake loose, he'll figure out a way. ." (35-36). When Bowden asks how he can protect his family, Sievers replies: "Don't quote me. I'd make some contacts. Bounce him into a hospital a couple of times, he gets the point. Work him over with some bicycle chain." Bowden: "I'm sorry, Sievers . I can't operate outside the law. The law is my business. I believe in due process." Sievers: ". A type like that is an animal. So you fight like an animal. Anyway, I would. ." (36-37). Late that Friday afternoon Bowden gets a frantic call at work from Carol: the family dog has been poisoned and died horribly in front of all three Bowden children. When Sam points out that there is no evidence Cady did it, Carol says: "I have proof it was Cady. No evidence. No testimony. Nothing legalistic. I just know. What kind of a man are you? This is your family. Are you going to look up all the precedents and prepare a brief?" (43). [613] Next morning the Bowdens and all three children take turns shooting at targets with Sam's .22 automatic. That afternoon at the local boat yard while Sam and 14- year-old Nancy are making repairs to the Bowden vessel's hull, Cady appears for the first and virtually the only time in the novel. After gazing lustfully at Nancy in her bikini and piously denying he poisoned the dog, Cady tells Bowden how his wife divorced him and remarried while he was in military prison, and how after his release he visited her. "I had to bust open the screen door to get to talk to her. I drove her over [to a town fifty miles away] . and that night. I had her [call home] and say she was taking a little vacation from [her present husband, a plumber] and the kids. I made her write me a love note and date it. I made her write it full of dirty words. When I had enough of her, I told her that if she ever tried to yell cop, I'd mail a photostat of the note to the plumber. And I'd come around and see if I could throw a couple of the plumber's kids under some delivery trucks. She was impressed. I had to put damn near a whole fifth of liquor into her before she passed out. Then I [left her in the wilderness without clothes and] give her a good chance to work her way home." (64-65). On Monday morning Bowden presents his problem with Cady to detective captain Mark Dutton, who admits he has used extra-legal methods in the past "to avert a definite threat to the whole city" but refuses to do so for "just one individual." (87).