What Real Events Shaped The Mildred Pierce True Story Arc?

It’s less a true crime story than a fictional drama written with the same sort of anxieties of the 1930s and 1940s. The Great Depression created a number of circumstances, including millions of people losing their life savings and their jobs. And women who had never worked outside of the home were now forced to become breadwinners and to work in factories and as waitresses and to start their own businesses as modest restaurants, catering to the growing numbers of workers in the service industry. The novel was written by a journalist who had sat in courthouses all over the country and had read about countless crimes, and he transformed his knowledge of those crimes into a fictional drama about a woman who started her own restaurant during the hard times of the Depression. The woman, Mildred Pierce, is a sophisticated and driven woman who struggles with issues of class and pride, and her story is fundamentally one of economic anxiety in the hardest of times.

When I think of a “true story arc,” I think of the ways in which Cain drew on the cultural freak-outs of the 1930s, the sensational trials, the tabloid coverage of domestic scandals. Of course, trials and scandals are always material for melodrama, and in the case of Mildred Pierce the writer was able to use his journalism background to probe the social contradictions of the depression era. But in addition to these ‘‘true’’ stories, Cain also drew on the emerging culture of the movies, of celebrity, of social climbing, of public humiliation. In other words, in the 1930s and 1940s the story of a woman who, in order to support her children, opens a restaurant and struggles to come to terms with her daughter’s increasingly mixed feelings toward her, is a very urgent one, and one that continues to be urgent today.

This is not a true story. When HBO adapted the novel to the screen in 2011 and used the title to name a miniseries of five hours running time, they did not write a documentary about a single crime case covered by the journalist and writer James M. Cain. They tried to reconstruct the historical circumstances of the late 1930s in which the novel was written, a time of the end of the post-war boom and the beginning of the Depression. Cain wrote Mildred Pierce as a crime novel of the kind he was writing as a journalist on police beat for newspapers. The situation of the single mother in the Depression was historical reality. And it is also the situation at the core of the novel.

There is no individual case that Mildred Pierce is confessing as having inspired the novel. Rather, a combination of the economic circumstances of the 1930s, the scandals and trials that were being sensationalized in the press around the time Cain wrote Mildred Pierce, and the changing expectations for women during this time all found their way into Cain’s work. The “truth” of Mildred Pierce is all of these things, and the way in which Cain has woven them together to create a work of fiction that is so honest and powerful even today is part of its lasting effect on me.

I also noticed that there is no supportive community of women for Mildred in the story. There is no mentor for her, no friend. She is totally alone. This isolation creates the arc of the story. Without anyone to give her a different perspective, her obsession with Veda just grows. All her interactions with people are transactional: with the employees at her shop, with her customers, with her lovers who don’t love her.

It’s a good story about entrepreneurial loneliness, and about the particularly awful way that divorced women were treated in this era. The story is the psychological reality of someone with no one to talk to, who has no one to tell her that her daughter is manipulating her. And that silence allows the tragedy of the story to ferment. The absence of support in the story is as powerful as the betrayal.

For the sake of comparison, consider how Cain approached crime in other novels — such as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, both of which were actually based on true crimes and are thus primarily crime stories. But the ‘crime’ at the heart of Mildred Pierce is of a quite different kind — emotional and financial, and engendered by the same sort of suspense and moral ambiguity that he brought to his representation of the domestic sphere as potentially heinous as any back alley.

Cain adapted the hardboiled, radically skeptical, worldview of the noir detective to that of mother and child. The arc of a ‘heist’ was thus successfully transferred to a loan application by a mother at a bank, and the typical betrayal of the noir plot was effected between mother and daughter. Indeed, in Cain’s novel the true story is the domestic one, for home can be as threatening and dramatic as the darkest back alley of his other writings.