Directed by Dorothy Arzner and adapted from a French play by screenwriter Hope Loring, Get Your Man presents not only a powerful female character but a story that pits the Old World traditions of Europe against the modern views of America. Nancy is modern in her thoughts about love and in her willingness to do whatever it takes to satisfy her desire for marriage, but these traits are characterized in the film as not only modern (especially for a woman) but American as well. Not bound by tradition, as evidenced by her lack of historical knowledge at the wax museum where she and Robert fall in love, Nancy bends tradition to suit her needs without damaging the social order. No one loses his or her social standing, even though the traditional bond of betrothal was broken. This balancing act, between opposing tradition without destroying it, is at the center of all Clara Bow’s 1927 films. She is the aggressor in courtship, but her ultimate goal is matrimony; she is the embodiment of the modern, yet she seeks a traditional outcome. She does not seek to change the status quo, yet she criticizes it by failing to abide by it.
Yet this balance between modern aggressiveness and traditional submissiveness was a delicate one to maintain. In Children of Divorce, Bow plays Kitty Flanders, who seeks marriage, not for love, but for money. This mercenary approach to marriage is due mainly to her mother (played by Hedda Hopper before her career as a professional gossip), whose views on marriage are tainted by her own divorce. As a result of this upbringing, Bow seduces Ted Larrabee (Gary Cooper), also the child of divorced parents. Ted marries Kitty, after a drunken night of immorality, despite the fact that he is in love with Jean Waddington (Esther Ralston). Realizing their mistake in marrying, Ted and Kitty refuse to divorce as both their parents had, leaving little room for a solution to a bad situation. Eventually Kitty does the only thing she feels will correct the situation: she commits suicide, leaving Ted free to marry Jean. Most Bow characters get the marriage they want and the marriage they deserve, but in this movie, an undeserved and loveless marriage is still preferred to a divorce. The traditional double standard comes into play, since divorce is seen as detrimental only to women and not men. This double standard is evident when Children of Divorce is compared to Bow’s next film, Hula, in which Bow plays Hula Calhoun, an heiress in Hawaii who falls in love with a married British engineer, Anthony Haldane (Clive Brook). Haldane arrives on the Calhoun plantation to build a dam, and Hula quickly falls in love with him. In order to get the marriage she wants, Hula dynamites the dam he built. The resulting humiliation is too much for his wife to take, and she divorces him, freeing him to marry Hula.
Audiences preferred a strong, aggressive Clara Bow to a victimized one. Children of Divorce was not a big hit, but it did respectable business primarily based on Bow’s popularity. Despite the glimpses of her dramatic abilities (director Victor Fleming proclaimed Bow’s death scene as the “greatest ever done on the screen”), the public preferred Bow in less dramatic, more lighthearted, and especially more sexual roles. Bow’s other 1927 releases, Hula and Rough House Rosie, followed the formula that proved so successful in It, a carefree Clara Bow playing a character just like Clara Bow. To increase profits even more (since making money was the main concern here) producer and studio executive Ben Schulberg decreased costs by cutting back on everything in these films except Clara Bow. Unknown, and therefore less expensive, leading men and budget productions limited costs yet did not diminish the films’ appeal at the box office. Their success was due to the fact that Bow was in them. Even when the big-budget war film, Wings, opened in limited release in August 1927, Clara Bow, though she played a supporting role to the two lead actors, was the only actor named above the title of the film. She had become the best commodity Hollywood had to offer in 1927. Not only her films but her private life as well made money for Hollywood and the press, since the public eagerly consumed stories containing Bow, whether filmed or printed, true or false. Most stories revolved around Bow’s multiple engagements, first to actor Gilbert Roland, then to director Victor Fleming, and then to Children of Divorce costar Gary Cooper, none of which resulted in marriage. But it wasn’t just her romances that made news; stories of her wild parties circulated around Hollywood, including a false one in which Bow was said to have hosted an orgy with the entire University of Southern California football team at her Hollywood home. Bow both benefited and was victimized by her celebrity, and many of the pitfalls she experienced (exploitation by the studio, for example) became commonplace during the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s.
the “it” girl and the judge
In both the content of her films and the nature of her career, Clara Bow epitomized the modern woman in all her ambiguities. Bow’s characters, like Bow herself, were carefree, spontaneous, and fun-loving yet sought the stability of marriage. They were assertive in their methods of courtship, yet they never dominated their husbands. They were economically independent, but they used that independence to buy goods with which to attract a husband, or in the case of Clara Bow the actress, an audience. But Clara Bow is not representative of the “new woman”; rather, she is at the extreme of what was accepted by the mainstream. Granted, not everyone in America approved of Bow’s characters or real-life actions (indeed, even many in Hollywood saw her exploits as excessive and damaging to the growing respectability of the film industry), but her status as the biggest box office draw of the year suggests a level of acceptance unthinkable a decade earlier.
Even forward-thinkers, such as Judge Ben Lindsey, who was removed from his bench at the Juvenile and Family Court in Denver for expounding his progressive views on sex and marriage in The Revolt of Modern Youth (with Wainwright Evans, 1925) and The Companionate Marriage (also with Evans, 1927), found Clara Bow too much to take. Lindsey had seen firsthand the rising divorce rate in America through the cases that passed through his courtroom. As a result of his experiences, Lindsey advocated premarital sex to help couples determine their compatibility. Chased out of Colorado, Lindsey sought refuge in Hollywood, where he and his wife became the house guests of Ben Schulberg. The judge would bring liberal respectability to Schulberg’s Hollywood table, but he was particularly interested in meeting the person considered the least respectable. As Schulberg’s son Budd remembers, “The apostle of unmarried sex wanted to interview one of its most celebrated practitioners,” Clara Bow. Reluctantly, the Schulbergs introduced Judge Lindsey and his wife to Bow, who showed up to dinner slightly intoxicated. “Hiya Judge!” Clara shouted, “Ben tells me ya believe people oughta have their fun without havin’ t’get married. Ya naughty boy!” She then proceeded to kiss the judge smack on the lips. The judge had expected a lively discussion of Bow’s attitudes toward marriage and sex; what he got was an invitation by Bow to dance. As Lindsey tried to keep up with Bow as she danced across the living room, she started to find out if the judge practiced what he preached. As Budd Schulberg recalls, “Beginning with the judge’s top jacket button, she said, ‘Rich man . . . poor man . . . beggar man . . . thief . . . ,’ her busy little fingers unbuttoning with each designation. By the time the childhood game had brought her to ‘Indian chief,’ Clara Bow was undoing the top button of Judge Lindsey’s fly.” Shocked, the judge and his wife fled the Schulbergs’ house. Afterward, Clara asked, “Well gee whiz, if he believes in all that modern stuff like ya say he does, how come he’s such an old stick-in-the-mud?”8
Most Americans saw the judge as progressive (or even radical, according to some critics), but in comparison to the “It” girl, he was as traditional as they come. Of course, Schulberg’s characterization of Lindsey as “the apostle of unmarried sex” minimizes the judge’s ideas. The Companionate Marriage is primarily an attack on the unthinking conformity to tradition that causes so many couples to marry unhappily and on the laws that confine them to these marriages. “It is easier to force married persons to go on living together when they don’t love each other,” he wrote, “than it is to weld love and marriage into an identical thing, two sides of a shield that would be capable of rea
lly protecting the ‘Home’ that we talk so much about and do so much to destroy by our barbarous stupidities and our ignoble fears of overthrowing ‘custom.’”9 Foremost among these “barbarous stupidities” are “the irrational and dangerous sentimentalities which cluster like slimy barnacles about our conception of love.” The modern man “should by this time be capable of rationalizing and adapting [those sentimentalities] without recklessly destroying them” (17). Lindsey felt that it was the older generation who needed to do the rationalizing and adapting because the younger generation would act recklessly. Leaving these changes in social values to the younger generation would only invite disaster, whereas directed change, incorporating the ideas of the younger generation, would prove beneficial for society.
Among the changes foremost on Lindsey’s mind were changes in divorce laws to make it easier for childless couples to get a divorce without alimony. The idea behind the “companionate marriage” was to allow couples the time to adjust to married life and to their commitment to one another before they started a family. This meant it was necessary not only to allow couples who were not committed to marriage to divorce, but also to allow women the use of birth control to ensure that uncommitted couples did not complicate matters with children. Lindsey’s proposed changes to divorce laws and to laws prohibiting the distribution of information on birth control led to his characterization by critics as an advocate of everything from free love to Bolshevism.
In reality, the judge’s positions on morals and marriage were both radical and conservative. He believed in the benefits that matrimony held for society, but he felt that bad marriages were detrimental to individuals, and by extension to the rest of society, and therefore should be allowed to end. For Lindsey, morality was not a static list of allowances and prohibitions but, rather, a fluid notion of what was acceptable and what was unacceptable in a society. In an earlier book, The Revolt of Modern Youth, Lindsey had discussed the changing attitudes of youth and had argued that many of these attitudes were good examples of adjusting to modern society. In The Companionate Marriage, he begins with the idea of “The Revolt of Middle Age,” in which older, established couples are adapting to modern society by adopting new values regarding love and marriage. Lindsey provides the example of Mr. and Mrs. Blank (none of the names he uses are real, but the situations, he assures readers, came from his own experience), who have come over time to an agreement in their marriage in which they both have occasional affairs. “We agree on these things,” the judge quotes Mrs. Blank. “We love each other, but we enjoy these outside experiences; so why not take them? I think we care more for each other on account of them.” “What’s the harm,” she continued, “aside from the fact that we have always been told that it was wrong? If he has an affair with a girl he takes a fancy to, it really means nothing more to him or to me than if he took her to dinner or the theater. It is all casual and harmless unless one thinks harm into it.” The result, according to Mrs. Blank, is that she and her husband “are free, and our married life is ideal,—in spite of the whole world saying, ‘It can’t be done’” (22–23). Mrs. Blank justifies this liberation from custom and repression in clearly Freudian terms: “What I mean is that I do what I want to do, and that I find it increasingly easy to do it without my fears and my old habits of thought tearing me to pieces inside. Save for the restraints contingent on other people’s rights, there isn’t a repression in my body. I think that is the way one should be in order to be healthy and happy” (28).
Lindsey does not present the Blanks as a model for others to follow, nor does he condemn their situation. He admires the fact that their marriage is one of equals, despite his sense that this is a concession on the part of the husband and not a right won by the wife. “It is particularly extraordinary that a husband should be willing to grant his wife the sort of liberty he feels is permissible for himself. I congratulate you and your husband on having at least gotten onto the same level, regardless of whether it is high or low” (30). What is most important for Lindsey is what the Blanks’ situation says about changing ideas and values in American society. “That there are people in the world with your convictions seems to me significant and not necessarily alarming. There are some persons who regard as alarming every aberration of social conduct with which they don’t happen to agree; but I am not of their number” (31). Throughout his narrative, Lindsey writes of the Blanks in very respectful and admiring terms, much more so than in the way he writes of those whom he sees as hypocritical or self-righteous.
Despite his claims and admonitions that his ideas and proposals were conservative—that is, that they retained the best of tradition without holding on to it lock, stock, and barrel—Lindsey’s work came to represent the new ideas in sex. “The Companionate Marriage became the leading literary symbol of the American sexual revolution of the twenties.”10 Lindsey’s progressive credentials dated from the pre–World War I era and his efforts at legal reform, mainly in regards to juvenile law, but they also extended into a very public role supporting isolationism (he had traveled on Henry Ford’s “peace ship” in 1915), labor unions, and prohibition (a position he would later reverse after seeing the result of this experiment to legislate morality). His views on a variety of issues basically supported the idea of the “new woman,” the availability of birth control, and divorce laws that neither stigmatized women nor assumed that a woman’s only means of support was her husband, or ex-husband in the case of alimony. Yet when Lindsey came face to face, and toe to toe, with the most celebrated “new woman,” he fled.
Like Clara Bow, most people simplified Lindsey’s work from a complex analysis of changing social mores to a justification of promiscuity, and “companionate marriage” became synonymous with everything from “pal marriage,” “contract marriage,” “jazz marriage,” “free love,” and most often, “trial marriage.”11 Lindsey was attacked in the press, in letters, and from the pulpit. Popular radio evangelist Sister Aimee Semple McPherson denounced the judge and pronounced, “I believe only in permanent monogamous marriage.” Privately, the judge described Sister Aimee as “very human, well-meaning, and one of the most frightfully oversexed women I have ever met.”12 One young female reader wrote to Lindsey to protest his suggestions of more lenient divorce laws and blamed society’s obsession with sex as the main cause of the problems Lindsey mentioned. “Why are the young folk so obsessed with sex?” she asked, then answered, “for the simple reason that they get sex at every turn. Everybody’s talking sex. Every play or movie they see is 100 percent ‘sex appeal.’”13 Not only the films of Clara Bow, but other films and plays capitalized on the greater acceptability, and marketability, of sex.
The Companionate Marriage inspired a play, A Companionate Marriage, which opened in Chicago during the 1927–1928 season. Written by Jean Archibald, the play tells “the story of a liberated daughter who assumes all the responsibilities of matrimony without taking pains to go to the altar, but the youth in the arrangement makes a good woman of her by tricking her into a legal ceremony.”14 As with most entertainments produced for profit, such as films and plays, progressive ideas are incorporated but do not dominate. What results at the end of A Companionate Marriage, as in Clara Bow’s films, is a traditional marriage in which both parties pledge their love and devotion to one another exclusively. Several other plays produced on Broadway also illustrate this tendency. In Her First Affaire, a comedy by Merrill Rogers,15 “Ann Hood, eager for the full test of life at 20, is convinced she must have an affair or two before she will be ready to settle down to marriage.” She sets her sights on Carey Maxon, a “free-thinking novelist,” who does not respond to her advances, which include “a negligee costume and a provocative manner.” Ann is unable to seduce Carey, but “the adventure serves, however, to excite Brian Cutler to action, and he elopes with Ann.”16 In 5 O’Clock Girl,17 “Patricia Brown, working in a cleaner’s shop, carries on a telephone flirtation with an unknown young man whom she calls up at 5 o’clock every afternoon.�
�� Patricia extends the charade when she finally meets her “5 o’clock boy” by borrowing clothes from the cleaners and pretending to be someone she is not. But her tactic leads to love, “at which moment her deception is discovered and all seems lost. But is it? You know very well it isn’t.”18 Once again, the aggressive machinations of the “new woman,” attractively packaged in negligee or borrowed clothes, still results in traditional, patriarchal matrimony.
One of the best examples of the “new woman” on Broadway was not a character in a play but, rather, the actress and club owner Texas Guinan. Mary Louise Cecelia Guinan came from Waco, Texas, and had made a name for herself in rodeos and traveling shows before appearing in Broadway musicals and eventually silent films. Capitalizing on her Texas upbringing, Guinan starred in such films as The Wildcat (1917), The Hellcat, The She Wolf, The Gun Woman (all 1918), and Little Miss Deputy (1919). Known as the “female William S. Hart,” Guinan became best known as the hostess of the hottest nightclubs in Prohibition-era New York. Hired as a singer at the Beaux Arts Hotel, she quickly rose to mistress of ceremonies with her ability to trade jabs with the audience and encourage them to buy more drinks. Starting with the El Fay Club in 1924, Texas became a celebrity for both her talents as a hostess and her notoriety with the law. As hostess, or more accurately ringleader, Guinan led the frenzy of nightclub patrons, whom she greeted with her signature “Hello, suckers!” Her brassy voice and bawdy humor were as well known as her arrests for operating a speakeasy. Each time the authorities closed down her club, she simply opened another. Though never convicted, Guinan wore a necklace of golden padlocks, symbolizing the number of times her establishments had been closed down, and she even starred in her own musical revue on Broadway, Padlocks of 1927,19 in which she played herself, a nightclub hostess.
1927 and the Rise of Modern America Page 8
