A WOMAN'S SECRET

Singing sensation Estrellita (Susan Crenshaw) decides to quit the business. After a quarrel with her mentor, Marian Washburn, she is shot and seriously wounded in the Park Avenue apartment the two women share. When the police arrive, Marian confesses.

Marian’s accompanist and boyfriend, pianist Luke Jordan, believes there must be more to this. He hires attorney Brook Matthews, who has a past relationship with Susan, and explains at length to Police Inspector Fowler, a sympathetic ear, how he and Marion came to know Susan.

In a series of flashbacks Luke relates how rags-to-riches star Marian lost her voice.

After an audition where Luke had played for prospective talent, Susan, then an aspiring singer from smalltown California, collapsed from starvation in front of him and Marian. The couple took her home to take care of her, and heard her voice - astoundingly sultry, and according to Luke “drenched in hormones“. They decided to promote Susan's career, with the affluent Marian taking her to Paris to study voice and acquire the patina of culture.

Overwhelmed by it all, and fed up with Marian, Susan fled to Algiers with a French shoe salesman and his empty promise of an opera lead there. Luke retrieved her, and on the ocean voyage home he and Marian secure a stateside debut for Susan by ensnaring their mark, bachelor heir and theater dilettante Brook Matthews. Future star “Estrellita” is born. Susan and Brook embark on a relationship, spiked in advance by Brook’s overprotective mother.

Back in the present Susan fights for her life in a hospital. Outside her room, Luke meets abrasive stranger Lee Crenshaw, who is also anxious to see and speak to her at the first opportunity.

It turns out Crenshaw is a mysterious soldier whom both Marian and Susan met in France several years earlier. Susan had recently been in New Orleans to perform at a benefit for his unit’s reunion. Overcome with romance and alcohol, she had secretly married him. Realizing the impact of her impetuous decision and still being in love with Brooke, Susan tried to commit suicide. Her gun went off as Marian struggled to wrestle it away. All the time Marian was seeking to cover for her.

It is revealed that Susan accidentally shot herself during a struggle with Marian as she attempted suicide, and Marian was trying to protect her.

The climax reframes Marian’s earlier confession as an act of loyalty, not guilt. The truth reveals Susan’s vulnerability and the weight of personal responsibility within the tangled relationships. The resolution transforms the film from a simple whodunit into a meditation on the costs of sacrifice and the complexities of human connection.