The Ten Faces of Cornell Woolrich: A Photo Album from the Twenties to the Sixties

The Ten Faces of Cornell Woolrich was a 1965 collection of short stories, one of two Cornell Woolrich short story collections published that year (the other being The Dark Side of Love).  It was distinguished with an introduction by Fred Dannay of Ellery Queen, who wrote rather arbitrarily that Woolrich's

ninth face....is really a mask.  For what do we know of the man inside?....Woolrich is retiring almost to the point of being a recluse.  When we add up all we know, we know very little, and Woolrich is reluctant to reveal his inner self....

The Ten Faces title was really metaphorical (and the conceit rather forced), causing Dannay to struggle in his introduction, although his observation above was perceptive.  Here I take the opportunity to show you ten actual faces of Cornell Woolrich, arranged as chronologically as I can get them from fresh youth in the Twenties to worn age in the Sixties.  As Barry Malzberg has written, in the last year of his life Woolrich was sixty-four but looked eighty-four.

FACE 1
1925 photo of Woolrich, when he was
21 years old and still in college at
Columbia University.
Contemporaries continually
described him as boyish, pale,
hollow-cheeked, shy and sickly.

FACE 2
Cornell in college?
The blurry image is
symbolic of an elusive man

FACE 3
Cornell Woolrich at the time he went 
Hollywood, 1927-30, when he was 
employed as a screenwriter

FACE 4
Photo of Woolrich and his wife of
three weeks, Gloria "Bill" Blackton
which ran in newspapers in 1930
after the couple's elopement. 
According to Bill's 1933 annulment 
suit, the marriage failed because
Cornell would not have sex with her.
Papers mockingly referred to her as
Cornell's unkissed or kissless bride.
The only photo of Cornell
I have seen where he smiles and
shows his teeth, which appear 
to be in poor condition.  Could he 
have suffered from anemia?

FACE 5
This banner story ran in newspapers across the country in 1933
after Bill filed her annulment suit in Manhattan in 1933.
See my recent Crimereads article.
The picture of Woolrich used appears to have been a rendering
of his earlier 1925 photo, making him look younger
than he did in 1933.

FACE 6
Woolrich with his other best girl, his mother,
Claire Attalie Tarler Woolrich, with whom
he lived from 1933 to her death in 1957.
He actually used this as his author's picture on 
the back cover of a short story collection,
published in 1958, the year after Claire's death. 
Does it date from the Thirties?

FACE 7
Woolrich in the late 1950s, another book jacket photo,
I believe, an iconic mid-century image

FACE 8
1958 book jacket photo
Woolrich made the effort to spruce himself 
up here, but compare to the 1925 photo
and you see a huge change, although the
paleness and sunken cheeks are the same.

FACE 9
you can see
his decline

FACE 10
Woolrich 
near the end

False Face
This artist rendering of Face 10
for the back of the jacket
of The Ten Faces of Cornell
Woolrich is like The Picture of 
Dorian Gray in reverse.
Woolrich's biographer
Francis Nevins generously calls this
"an excellent if idealized sketch of Woolrich."
Perhaps it's Woolrich as he would
have liked him to look: a heroic he-man.
It certainly is nowhere close to 
what the real Woolrich looked like.