Lucille Fletcher

Lucille Fletcher
Born	Violet Lucille Fletcher (1912-03-28)March 28, 1912 Brooklyn, New York
Died	August 31, 2000(2000-08-31) (aged 88) Langhorne, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Citizenship	American
Alma mater	Vassar College
Occupation	Writer
Known for	The Hitch-Hiker Sorry, Wrong Number
Spouse(s)	Bernard Herrmann (1939–1948) John Douglass Wallop III (1949–1985)
Children	Dorothy Louise Herrmann Wendy Elizabeth Herrmann

Violet Lucille Fletcher (March 28, 1912 — August 31, 2000) was an American screenwriter of film, radio and television. Her credits include The Hitch-Hiker, an original radio play written for Orson Welles and adapted for a notable episode of The Twilight Zone television series. Lucille Fletcher also wrote Sorry, Wrong Number, one of the most celebrated suspense plays in the history of American radio, which she adapted and expanded for the film noir classic Sorry, Wrong Number (1948).

Biography

Early life

Violet Lucille Fletcher was born March 28, 1912, in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents were Matthew Emerson Fletcher, a marine draftsman for the Standard Ship Company (a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey), and Violet (Anderson) Fletcher.

After attending Public School 164 and the Maxwell Training School, Fletcher went to Bay Ridge High School and became president of the Arista honor society and editor of the school magazine. At age 17 she was declared the champion student orator at the regional competition of the National Oratorical Contest on the Constitution of the United States, sponsored by The New York Times at The Town Hall May 17, 1929. The only female finalist in the New York zone, Fletcher received an all-expenses paid trip to South America, a gold medal, a cash prize of $1,000 and an opportunity to compete for the national championship. Fletcher placed third in the national competition May 25, 1929, judged by five justices of the United States Supreme Court, with an address titled, "The Constitution: A Guarantee of the Personal Liberty of the Individual."

Fletcher attended Vassar College, where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1933.

Career

From 1934 to 1939, Lucille Fletcher worked as a music librarian, copyright clerk and publicity writer at CBS. There she met her future husband, composer Bernard Herrmann, who conducted the CBS orchestra. The couple dated for five years, but delayed marriage due to her parents' objections. They finally married on October 2, 1939.

Fletcher's first success came after one of her magazine stories, "My Client Curly," was adapted for radio by Norman Corwin. It was later adapted for the 1944 Cary Grant film, Once Upon a Time.

As Fletcher once explained in an interview, Sorry, Wrong Number was partially inspired by an incident from someone else's life. While Herrmann was sick at home, Fletcher went down to the corner drug store for medicine. Innocently striking up a conversation with her pharmacist, a longtime friend, she raised the ire of an elderly woman who had apparently been waiting first. The woman interrupted and approached the druggist, complaining about poor service and demanding to "know who this interloper is?!", referring to Fletcher. Finding the woman's shrill voice and demeanor particularly irritating, Fletcher went home with the intention of writing a script based around a character with those traits who becomes embroiled in a precarious situation.^{[citation needed]}

The radio drama premiered in 1943 and became one of the most legendary radio plays of all time. Agnes Moorehead created the role in the first performance and again in several later radio productions. Barbara Stanwyck starred in the 1948 film version and, in 1952, performed the original radio play over the airwaves. A 1959 version produced for the CBS radio series Suspense received a 1960 Edgar Award for Best Radio Drama.

Fletcher and Herrmann collaborated on several projects. He wrote the score for the November 17, 1941, radio presentation of her famous story The Hitch-Hiker on the Orson Welles Show. Fletcher adapted the Emily Brontë novel Wuthering Heights into a libretto for her husband's opera of the same name. He completed the opera in 1951, by which time they had divorced.

Fletcher is interviewed in the 1992 documentary, Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann, which was nominated for an Academy Award.

Personal life

Lucille Fletcher and Bernard Herrmann had two daughters, Wendy and Dorothy. The couple divorced in 1948, over his affair with her cousin Kathy Lucille (Lucy) Anderson. In 1949, Bernard Herrmann married Lucy.

Fletcher married Douglass Wallop, a writer, on January 6, 1949. They remained married until his death in 1985.

Lucille Fletcher died August 31, 2000, after suffering a stroke.

Bibliography

Novels

• Sorry, Wrong Number, 1948, with Allan Ullman
• Night Man, 1951, with Ullman
• The Daughters of Jasper Clay, 1958
• Blindfold, 1960
• And Presumed Dead, 1963
• The Strange Blue Yawl, 1964
• The Girl in Cabin B54, 1968
• Eighty Dollars to Stamford, 1975
• Mirror Image, 1988

Plays

• Sorry, Wrong Number, (broadcast 1944), 1952
• Wuthering Heights, librettist, 1943–51
• Night Watch, 1972

Radio plays

• My Client Curley, 1940
• The Hitch-Hiker, 1941
• Remodeled Brownstone
• The Furnished Floor
• The Diary of Sophronia Winters
• The Search for Henri Le Fevre
• Badm Dreams Fugue in C Minor
• Someone Else
• Night Man
• Dark Journey and The Intruder

Awards

Sorry, Wrong Number received the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

External links

• Lucille Fletcher at the Internet Movie Database
• Lucille Fletcher at TV.com
• Obituary, The New York Times, September 6, 2000
• Lucille Fletcher: Radio's First Queen of Screams
• Obituary
• Suspense: Diary of Saphronia Winters
• Suspense: Fugue in C Minor
• Suspense: The Hitchhiker
• Suspense: Sorry, Wrong Number
• Suspense: The Thing in the Window