Notes For April 8th, 2025
This Day In Literary History
On April 8th, 1954, The Bad Seed, the classic final novel by the famous American writer William March, was published. An iconic, disturbing psychological thriller, it was the perfect novel for the author, who died suddenly a month after its release, to go out with.
March, born William Campbell in Mobile, Alabama in 1893, was intellectually gifted, but his family was dirt poor, so he had to leave school at 14 to work. At 24, he enlisted in the Marines to serve his country during the Great War and was a highly decorated soldier.
In fact, March was awarded the Marines' Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross, and the French Croix de Guerre for refusing to leave after being wounded twice in battle, opting instead to keep fighting the Germans and rescue his own wounded men.
He had also endured a mustard gas attack. His war experiences left him psychologically scarred for life, and he would suffer from anxiety, depression, psychosomatic throat and eye issues, and other mental illnesses. He also struggled with his sexual orientation.
March's war experiences would inspire his classic debut novel, Company K (1933), which followed a company of Marines during the Great War. A grim and brutal antiwar novel, it's been compared to Erich Maria Remarque's antiwar classic, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929).
Though William March wrote six quality novels and was an O. Henry Prize winning short story writer, he saw little commercial success during his lifetime. As he died of a heart attack at 60 just a month after it was published, he never got to bask in the glory of his final novel.
Ironically, he had dismissed The Bad Seed as a mediocre novel, never realizing the commercial juggernaut and cultural icon it would become. The novel was the result of March's expertise in psychology - he was very well read on the subject, given his own issues.
To her mother Christine, eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark seems like the perfect child - she's highly intelligent, charming, loving, obedient, polite, well groomed, and diligent in her studies. Yet, Christine can't help suspecting that something might be wrong with the girl, who also seems cold, calculating, manipulative, narcissistic, and self sufficient beyond her years.
At first, Christine blames her suspicions on her worsening anxieties, as her husband Kenneth's job keeps him out on the road and away from his family most of the time. Her landlady, close friend, and mother figure Monica Breedlove assures her there's nothing wrong with Rhoda.
Monica, who considers herself an expert in psychology, claims she was once psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud. When she invites Christine to a luncheon at her home, the party is attended by Monica's brother Emory and his friend, true crime writer Reggie Tasker. The psychopathic mind becomes the subject of discussion.
When Tasker begins discussing cases of female serial killers - women who murdered family members and others for monetary gain or to start a new life - the name of a particularly infamous killer, Bessie Denker, triggers Christine's recurring memories of living with a different family and running in terror from a different mother. Then she hears a chilling news report on the radio.
A child has been killed during a school outing - her daughter Rhoda's school outing. The identity of the victim is not released. Fearing that it's Rhoda, Christine runs back to her apartment. Rhoda returns home, very much alive, and is totally unaffected by the tragedy. She tells her mother that a classmate of hers, a boy named Claude Daigle, drowned.
Christine knows that name. Rhoda had been furious when Claude won a penmanship award at school that she believed was rightfully hers. Later, Christine learns from Claudia Fern, who founded the private school with her sisters, that Rhoda has been expelled. On the day of Claude's death, Rhoda had been harassing him.
The other kids hated Rhoda, but more than that, they feared her. It didn't bother Rhoda at all; she had no use for friends. Christine also learns that although Claude Daigle's death was ruled an accidental drowning, he had unexplained crescent-shaped marks on his face and his penmanship medal was never found.
Overcome with dread, Christine fears that Rhoda may have killed Claude, though it seems impossible. But someone else sees through Rhoda's act - Leroy Jessup, the janitor, groundskeeper, and gardener for Monica Breedlove's apartments. He's a depraved sociopath and recognizes Rhoda's sociopathic nature.
Leroy sees a kindred spirit in Rhoda, but he's troubled by her meanness, which is greater than his own. He wants her to be nice to him, so he teases her by claiming that he knows she murdered Claude Daigle. He knows no such thing and doesn't believe for a minute that an eight-year-old girl could kill anyone.
Rhoda loathes Leroy and isn't about to be nice to him. So he constantly follows her around, and like an evil Uncle Remus, tells her stories about forensics and how the state has special little electric chairs for children who kill - a blue one for little boys and a pink one for girls like her. She discovers that he naps on a makeshift mattress in his shed when he's supposed to be working.
Meanwhile Christine, who recalls other strange deaths surrounding Rhoda - the puppy who fell out of a window after Rhoda got bored with it, an elderly babysitter who fell down the stairs to her death after promising to leave Rhoda a fancy trinket in her will - asks Reggie Tasker for his crime case histories.
Especially interested in the Bessie Denker case, she learns that beginning when Bessie was a little girl, all of her family members were mysteriously killed, leaving her the sole owner of the family's farm and bank account. Later, she married and had children, but murdered her husbands and kids, either for money or to start a new life.
When she was finally caught, Bessie had murdered her current husband and all but one of her children with an axe. The surviving child's name? Christine Denker, Bessie's youngest daughter. Arrested, tried, and convicted of multiple murders, Bessie died an agonizing death in the electric chair.
The man Christine thought was her biological father, the famous journalist Richard Bravo, best known as a war correspondent, was working as an investigative reporter when he saved Christine from her murderous mother. Then he and his wife, unable to have children of their own, adopted her.
They never told Christine any of this to spare her the knowledge and stigma of being a serial killer's daughter. Remembering Reggie Tasker's discussion of the psychopathic mind and how psychopathic tendencies can be inherited, she fears that Rhoda may be a psychopath like her biological grandmother.
Then she finds Claude Daigle's penmanship medal in Rhoda's treasure box. A hysterical Rhoda confesses to killing Claude in a fit of rage. Satisfied that her mother isn't going to turn her over to the police, she returns to her calm and charming self. Not knowing whether to love or hate her daughter, Christine blames herself for "carrying the bad seed" and passing it on to Rhoda.
Then Leroy Jessup makes the mistake of teasing Rhoda by telling her that he has incriminating evidence against her - the cleated shoes she'd beaten Claude with and disposed of down the furnace chute. She sneaks in when Leroy's sleeping and sets his mattress on fire. He runs out of the shed engulfed in flames. While she watches him burn to death, Rhoda giggles and says, "You're silly!"
Racked with guilt over Claude Daigle's death, unable to stop Rhoda from killing Leroy, and fearful that the little girl will grow up to follow her grandmother's path to the electric chair, Christine tricks Rhoda into taking an overdose of sleeping pills, then commits suicide with a handgun. Monica Breedlove arrives on the scene just barely in time to get Rhoda to the hospital.
With all the evidence of Rhoda's crimes destroyed by her mother, (to avoid scandalizing her husband and his prominent family) Kenneth Penmark is left griefstricken and confused, but thankful that his daughter survived. The novel ends with Rhoda repeating her famous line, "What will you give me for a basket of kisses?"
A hugely influential novel, its title, The Bad Seed, would enter the American psychological lexicon as a theory used to explain how a person raised in a loving, stable family could be a psychopath with violent tendencies. In the 70+ years since its publication, the bad seed theory has been largely debunked.
While psychopathic tendencies can be inherited, modern technology for scanning the brain has shown that the root cause of the psychopathic personality is a defect in the temporal lobes, which control the personality - a defect that renders a person's natural capacity for empathy retarded to nonexistent. The defect can also result in sociopathic or borderline personality disorders.
Of course, nature and nurture still play a part in the development of a psychopath. A child with risk factors for sociopathic or psychopathic personality disorders may not develop them if raised in a loving and stable environment, and not all psychopaths have violent or sexually deviant tendencies. (Psychopaths make the best CEOs.) And yes, there have been violent child psychopaths.
In 1968, a 10-year-old English girl named Mary Bell was arrested for strangling two small boys. A sadistic psychopath, Mary expressed no remorse and was found guilty but with diminished mental capacity. Her father had been a violent alcoholic and criminal, her mother a prostitute who repeatedly tried to kill her and encouraged her clients to sexually abuse her.
The same year it was published, The Bad Seed was adapted as a hit Broadway play by playwright Maxwell Anderson. It starred Nancy Kelly (who won a Tony Award for her performance) as Christine Penmark, Henry Jones as Leroy Jessup, and child actress Patty McCormack in a chilling performance as Rhoda.
The play was itself adapted as a classic film two years later, with Kelly, Jones, and McCormack reprising their Broadway roles. Unfortunately, the stifling Hollywood Production Code was still in effect and it forbade showing criminals getting away with their crimes. Director Mervyn LeRoy was forced to change the ending somewhat.
To get the Code Seal and placate other censors, (at the time, states and cities had their own film censorship boards) in an obviously tacked on final scene after Rhoda survives her mother's murder attempt, she sneaks out on a rainy night to look for the penmanship medal and is struck by lightning and killed. This is followed by a cutesy "curtain call" scene - a nod to the film's Broadway origins.
In this scene, the cast members come out to take a bow, the actors introduced to the audience. After little Patty McCormack takes her bow, Nancy Kelly, who played her mother, takes the girl over her knee and playfully spanks her, while Patty laughs hysterically.
The film, which made Patty McCormack a horror icon, was remade twice, first as a made-for-TV movie in 1985 that starred Blair Brown as Christine Penmark, David Carradine as Leroy Jessup, and a talented child actress named Carrie Wells as Rhoda, who is renamed Rachel Penmark here. Panned when it first aired, this movie now has its fair share of admirers.
The second remake was released in 2018, and aired on the Lifetime cable channel. It's pretty much an "in name only" adaptation of the novel and play, but it's still worth watching for the performances of the very talented young actress Mckenna Grace as Rhoda (renamed Emma Grossman) and Rob Lowe (who produced and directed) as her anxiety-racked and overmedicated single dad.
A grown-up Patty McCormack appears as a child psychologist who assures Lowe that his daughter is "one hundred percent perfectly average. In fact, I told her that she reminds me of myself!" A sequel, The Bad Seed Returns, with Mckenna Grace reprising her role as Emma, premiered on Lifetime in May of 2022.
Legendary horror director Eli Roth has said that he plans to make a new feature film adaptation of The Bad Seed. Roth, who invented the "torture porn" subgenre of horror films with his 2005 horror classic Hostel and its 2007 sequel, Hostel: Part II, said that his version will be darker and gorier than the novel and its previous adaptations.
Quote Of The Day
"Everybody must seem crazy if you see deep enough into their minds."
- William March
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete live performance of the stage play adaptation of William March's novel, The Bad Seed. Enjoy!
