The final chapter of Laura Lippman’s Lady in the Lake is in Cleo’s voice. Years after the events in 1960s Baltimore, she still talks to Maddie in her head. “Did I tell you everything? No. I wasn’t about to trust you with my secrets, Maddie Schwartz. Who could blame me? You were careless with my life and my death.” In adapting Lippman’s novel for the small screen, it would seem Alma Har’el zeroed in on that line and took it on as a storytelling challenge. What would it have meant to get all of Cleo’s story? What would it mean to have tested how careless Maddie could be with Cleo’s life and death?
The novel ends with Maddie’s coup of a first-person story about her harrowing stabbing ordeal getting parlayed into a role at the Beacon, which led to a storied career as a first-rate journalist. Cleo’s whereabouts and the many intricacies of her story are left vague. Not so in Lady in the Lake’s television adaptation, which fittingly calls its final episode “My story.” Cleo won’t be just a narrative crutch for a young dissatisfied suburban wife’s character development. She’s no mere plot device on which to refract Maddie’s own life. Here, she is a fully fleshed woman whose agency is front and center.
So yes, after a dreamy penultimate episode, “My story” takes the narrative reins away from Maddie and hands them back to Cleo. In the process, we get all of our lingering questions answered.
We first flash back to 1952, when Dora and Cleo hope for a big break. There’s a talent show (at Shell Gordon’s space, no less!), and after being smuggled in through the back door in exchange for a nice long kiss, the two hope to finally make their dreams of stardom begin to come true. Only, even as they catch the eyes of one comedian there (that’d be Slappy), the two get caught and sent up to Gordon’s office. It’s there that Cleo first impressed the impresario with her numbers skills: If she takes over his books (like her dad once did), he’ll let them scot-free. It’s a simple agreement but one that Cleo can’t shake off once they’re back downstairs. She urges Dora to go onstage without her, which she does, of course, and beguiles everyone in attendance with a lovely rendition of “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye.” It’s a Sliding Doors moment for the young woman, the night when everything could’ve gone a different way.
Because, as we soon find out, that night, in many ways, sealed both of their fates. Dora, if you hadn’t already figured it out, was the actual “lady in the lake” after having OD’d before her performance on Christmas. And, as Reggie had been tasked with killing Cleo, the two had concocted a plan that would easily deal with all of their issues: If Reggie dumped Dora’s body into the lake with Cleo’s clothes, the water damage to the body would make it almost impossible to catch the difference. It would give Reggie the clear to tell Shell he’d taken care of Cleo while Cleo could start a new life that would allow her young boys the better life she’d dreamed for them. It was, as it turns, a rather good plan … had one Ms. Maddie Morgenstern not decided to look into that titular figure and slowly unravel the many loose threads Reggie and Cleo had left behind.
Maddie learns much of this while still recovering at the hospital where Cleo, in full nurse garb, tells her just enough to deliver one warning: Let her story go. Yes, Cleo had sent the letter that had kick-started it all (the one addressed to the “Helpline” column at the Star), but now she wanted the budding would-be reporter to let it go. “I need you to stop,” she implores. She even offers her a bigger story: “I wanna take down Shell Gordon.” And Maddie can have that front-page story all to herself.
But we all know Maddie. She’s not one to give up. Or to heed the advice, let alone the counsel of others. And so, when she’s back at her place, meeting up with Ferdie at the downstairs diner, she insists she must continue. Ferdie may want to talk about the possibility of a future together (citing what will soon become the Loving v. Virginia SCOTUS decision), but the ambitious divorcée is determined. “I feel like I just woke up from a dream,” she tells him. “I’m still wrapped up in the story. I have to see this through.”
Selling her survival scoop of a byline to the Star, Maddie gets the paper to allow her to further investigate the Cleo Johnson murder. That eventually leads her to talk to Slappy, who is still in prison for a murder that Maddie now knows no one committed. But where she imagined he’d help her once she heard what the mother of his kids had done, he stands committed to keeping up her charade. It’s a beautiful moment played with grace and tenderness (and righteous anger) by Byron Bowers, who makes a simple gesture like tapping the prison phone against the window pane that keeps Slappy and Maddie apart a thing of beauty.
Meanwhile, Cleo and Reggie (who’s been helping her sons in her absence) set out to pull off a thrilling heist that will hopefully help bring down Shell Gordon. As always, the plan is both simple and implausible in equal measure: Dressed as a guy, Cleo will join Reggie as they go to the Gordon Hotel, where the books (real and cooked) are kept in the vault. They’ll have to get enough of them out (and destroy the rest) so Maddie can prove all of Gordon’s crimes (including rigging the numbers game and plotting the assassination attempt on Myrtle Summers). Their plan hinges on Teddy, Cleo’s son, distracting Shell Gordon, while Cleo (with a painted mustache and a wig!) makes her way with Reggie down to the vault and, at the moment when they’re about to be found out, sets fire to the books they leave behind.
The fire is enough of a tell for Gordon, who finds Reggie (who’s encouraged Cleo to leave him behind) at the bar, at ease with the decisions that have led to that tête-à-tête. He’s a man who’s at peace with defying his boss in the hopes of atoning for the death of his beloved Dora — and giving, in the process, Cleo a chance to start a life anew. Set to Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman,” the entire sequence is thrilling, and it gives Cleo the kind of fiery agency she somewhat lacked in the novel, where she remained a bit part of Maddie’s life and story.
Here, she takes her life back, leaving with Teddy in a car and eventually starting a new life in Paris with Slappy once she delivers to Maddie enough evidence to sink Gordon’s entire operation, which it does. It ends up giving Maddie the courage to tell Ferdie she doesn’t want to be his (or anyone’s) wife and moves away to a new place, presumably where she’ll shake off everything to do with Cleo and Tessie and finally begin anew. The show then moves quickly: MLK Jr’s assassination, the Pharaoh closing, Cleo and her kids on a boat to Paris, and Slappy getting out of prison. All those images quickly telegraph the ending of this thorny tale.
And then, the coup de grâce.
As images cut back and both between Cleo singing at a bar in Paris and also on a float during a Thanksgiving parade in Baltimore, we see two women who wrestled their stories away from the men around them and led the lives they always wished to have. “We both paid a different price for our freedom,” Cleo tells Maddie, but there’s more complexity here than in Lippman’s closing chapter. The heartbreak and resilience (not to mention the winking sultriness) that Moses Ingram brings to those final notes of “Feeling Good” are paired with a pained expression courtesy of Natalie Portman. Maddie, now older, is hawking her latest book. She may seem content and satisfied on the outside (look at her fashionable ensemble and her unruly if perfectly coiffed hair!), but Har’el leaves us with an ambivalent look on her face, the look of someone who’s written the story she always wanted to write and yet who cannot escape the way it isn’t true, it isn’t real. Where in the novel Maddie basked in her success and wondered about Cleo, here we’re allowed to see what happened to Cleo and wonder what’s behind Maddie’s inscrutable expression instead.
Clues & Things
• While we’re talking comparisons to the original source material, Har’el clearly was quite free with her adaptation. For instance, she nixed an entire subplot about Cleo’s affair with another man! And I gotta say, stealthily making the entire show hinge on Maddie’s own ill-equipped ambition was a lovely way to reframe what had often felt to me as a blind spot in the original novel where Ms. Schwartz does end up merely benefiting from Cleo’s “life and death” with little regard for the former and little respect for the latter.
• “You think every story is your story”; what a read to get from your own son! But Seth isn’t wrong.
• I almost wish Maddie hadn’t gifted Judith (who deserved a bit more narrative real estate!) The Diary of Anaïs Nin, a book that was clearly totemic for Lady in the Lake and for character and creator alike. It made it all a bit too on the nose, but then operatic self-seriousness was clearly the show’s chosen sensibility, so I can’t fault Boaz Yakin (who wrote this episode) too much for it.
• Can we begin the campaign to get a Lady in the Lake soundtrack? It feels unfair not to be able to hear Moses Ingram’s soulful rendition of “Feeling Good,” which serves as the thrilling climax of the series. While we’re at it, let’s give it up for Marcus Norris, who’s arguably given us one of the most distinctive scores of the year (those whistles from the opening credits are pretty unmistakable!).
