IN & OUT OF CHARACTER: an attempt at analysis Part III

I think all the oddness of everything we have read between the leaves of IN & OUT OF CHARACTER pales to nothing beside the extract I’m sharing with you today:

“…[Ouida]was both my secretary and my banker; and it was certainly not her fault that on two consecutive weeks in Texas my week’s salary was stolen, putting a considerable crimp in Ouida’s well-thought-out and carefully guarded budget.

On the first occasion our hotel suite was entered in the dead of night and my week’s salary stolen, while Ouida and I and Moritz all slept soundly! This was unquestionably an inside job. The following week was on her way to the post office – my salary was in her handbag. She stopped at the hotel newsstand and put her bag don as she turned over the pages of the latest Vogue or Vanity Fair. In a flash a hand grabbed her bag and as she turned and shouted “stop that man,” he was through the revolving doors and out into the street. This moment of the unexpected is so often what this type of thief relies on to make his getaway. Before those in the lobby of the hotel realized what Ouida was saying and what had happened, maybe fifteen valuable seconds had passed. There was no time for details of identification and once in the street the thief could swiftly get lost – and did! “

My first reaction is hard to express. If this was tumblr I’d do some sort of keyboard smash and a lot of question marks. It’s basically just a very very weird segment. Let’s start with this:

“…she was both my secretary and my banker; and it was certainly not her fault that on two consecutive weeks in Texas my week’s salary was stolen, putting a considerable crimp in Ouida’s well-thought-out and carefully guarded budget.”

Ouida Bergere-Berger-Branch, one-time bankrupt and Olympic-class compulsive shopper, had never “carefully guarded” a budget in her life and never would. The only thing Ouida ever did with money, her own or other people’s, was spend it until it was all gone – and then spend some more. She would have had less chance of carefully guarding a budget than being President of the United States, or winning an Oscar for one of her screenplays. So, if BR wrote this he was either lying or had been smoking some serious stuff.

But that is nothing compared to the story of the double-robbery it segues into.

“On the first occasion our hotel suite was entered in the dead of night and my week’s salary stolen, while Ouida and I and Moritz all slept soundly! This was unquestionably an inside job. The following week Ouida was on her way to the post office – my salary was in her handbag. She stopped at the hotel newsstand and put her bag down as she turned over the pages of the latest Vogue or Vanity Fair. In a flash a hand grabbed her bag and as she turned and shouted “stop that man,” he was through the revolving doors and out into the street. This moment of the unexpected is so often what this type of thief relies on to make his getaway. Before those in the lobby of the hotel realized what Ouida was saying and what had happened, maybe fifteen valuable seconds had passed. There was no time for details of identification and once in the street the thief could swiftly get lost – and did! “

Are we actually supposed to believe this? First a thief breaks in to their hotel room – with (we are told) a German Shepherd dog asleep in it – steals the money and exits, while the dog did nothing in the night time. Then the following week, a completely different thief steals Ouida’s purse, with another pay check in it, while she’s browsing at a magazine stand? No mention of police being called. No mention of any other witness beside Ouida.

I don’t know why it’s in the book at all, let alone why it’s introduced with the words “and it certainly wasn’t her fault.” Because the one thing that this narrative makes almost painfully obvious is that both robberies were entirely Ouida’s fault, because it was Ouida who did them.

It reads either like something written by a fairly clever writer who wants people to know beyond doubt Ouida stole the money without actually having to say so, or like something written by a very obtuse, narcissistic writer who has no idea how absurd and implausible their cover story is.

In other words, it could be BR telling the story of his wife’s deceit in such a way that Ouida would ok it – thinking he was absolving her. Or it could be Ouida telling the story herself, in the belief that her cover story was perfect and would fool everyone.

Which is it? I’m really unsure on that. It could be BR, it could be Ouida, or maybe both – BR’s story with Ouida’s interpolations. I can see her adding in the stuff about “carefully guarded budget” and “it certainly wasn’t her fault,” because to a naïve and childlike mind such as she seems to have possessed, this simple stating of things like “it wasn’t her fault” is enough to make everyone believe them. The possibility of it having the very opposite effect – drawing attention to the very thing being denied – would be beyond the scope of her imagination.

But whoever wrote it, I think the one thing we can take away from this is that Ouida stole her husband’s pay checks and made up bad lies about what happened to them. Lies so transparent it seems pretty unlikely anyone believed them. (In fact according to one of our readers, Katharine Cornell opined at one time that Ouida had stolen the money, but I’m not able to verify this at the moment).

And I think the major question for us is – what does this say about Ouida and her marriage?

Why was she stealing from her own husband? Was this an isolated example or something she did regularly? Did she just steal from him or from others too?

Is it time for a diagnosis of this woman who seems to have lied at any opportunity, stolen from at least one close family member, manipulated people ruthlessly,been impervious to their consequent suffering, and obsessed with her own image to the point of delusion?

And why did BR endure it? Why didn’t he realize no good was going to come of being married to someone who did this kind of thing, and just get out while he could, before there was a child to consider? Why did he put himself in this compromized and hellish position? Because whether he wrote that story about the theft of his pay checks or she did, it shouldn’t be an issue being dealt with in this way, in public, years after the event.

Why was he still there, thirty years later, trying to deal, or letting her deal?

That’s the real question isn’t it.