Constance Ford

            On Sunday I spent a little over an hour on my essay, mostly finding better words to present my argument. There are less than three days before the deadline and I still have to connect some of my claims to the text in order to prove them.

            I made a ham, cheese and tomato sandwich for lunch. Late in the morning I’d taken a package of ground beef from the freezer and placed it in the main part of the fridge to thaw. By evening it was still mostly frozen and so rather than forming it into two burgers I broke it into two rectangles. Instead of buns I had Bavarian sandwich bread and though I’d intended to just have one burger, both halves of the cooked ground beef fit so well in a sandwich that I just ate the whole thing.

            I watched Perry Mason. This story begins by talking about a custody dispute between David Reed and Helen Reed over their son Tommy. David wants full custody because he considers Helen to be an unfit mother. Helen’s brother Robert says if he tries to take Tommy away from Helen he won’t live to appear in court. That night we see an attractive, loud, wild, hard drinking, hard smoking blonde in a mink walk into a bar. The owner, Johnny comes out to see her, calls her Joyce and is mad because he hasn’t seen her in a week but he can’t resist her and they kiss. The next day Helen wakes up in bed and says she’s had a horrible nightmare. She describes being Joyce, behaving in a manner that’s alien to her, drinking and smoking though she’s never done those things and wearing fur even though she’s allergic. She describes going to an apartment and seeing her ex-husband’s body with a bullet hole in his head and a gun beside him. Helen asks the maid for her pills but the purse she finds isn’t Helen’s. It has the initials JM on it and there is a gun inside. It’s Robert’s gun. Robert and Helen go to see Perry Mason to give him a retainer because a murder might have been committed, since Helen’s dreams tend to turn out to come true. Helen gives Mason the purse. Mason goes to David’s office to see if he’s alive, but he has not come in. Mason and Paul go to Joyce's apartment and get in with the key in her purse. There he finds David’s body just as Helen described it in her dream. All of Joyce’s possessions have her monogram on them. Behind a mirror he finds a picture of Joyce that's been torn in half. Mason now knows that Joyce and Helen are physically the same person. The police arrive on a tip and Paul slips the picture into his pocket. Tragg confiscates the purse. Mason talks to Robert about Joyce and he explains that Joyce was Helen’s imaginary friend when she was a child. Twenty-five years ago Helen said she'd had a nightmare that Joyce had tried to kill him with a bread knife. Later he found the bread knife under his pillow. Tragg comes to arrest Robert. Mason finds the lab where Joyce’s torn picture was developed and gets the complete version from the negative. On the other half is the nightclub owner, Johnny. Mason goes to see Johnny, who admits he’s crazy about Joyce and he has no idea who Helen is. Mason leaves, but after a few minutes barges back into Johnny’s office to see Joyce with him. Mason goes to see Helen’s psychiatrist and convinces him that it’s in Helen’s best interest to violate doctor-patient confidentiality. The doctor explains that Helen did not know that she was Joyce until he started treating her but Joyce knows she is Helen and hates her. Helen could never kill someone but Joyce could. In court Mason asks Johnny if he knew Joyce was married and he says he didn’t. Mason asks to have the courtroom cleared of everyone but officials and witnesses. He calls Helen to the stand and asks her permission to have Dr Maitland bring Joyce forward. The doctor hypnotizes Helen and Joyce emerges, quite relieved to be free. She says she's the one that tore the picture apart and left the half with Johnny on it for Helen to find, just to mess with her head. Joyce says that Johnny didn’t kill David. Mason says that Joyce knows who killed David and he could bring back Helen to tell the court, thereby getting rid of Joyce forever. Suddenly Johnny stands up and shouts, “Leave her alone!” He confesses to the murder and explains that he walked in and saw her with David and he didn't know about Helen or that David was Helen’s husband.

            Helen/Joyce was played by Constance Ford, who started out as a model at 15 and in 1941 her face became famous as the first model for Victory Red lipstick. When she began acting she did a lot of TV, most of it in soap operas. She was Ada Hobson on “Another World” from 1967 to 1992.