I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  Davis finds out what her life as a divorced woman will be when she takes a cruise and visits Jane Cowl, who is now living in an island paradise. Cowl’s cohabitant is Arthur, a young man who she claims is writing a history of the island “in iambic verse.” “Arthur is my protégé,” she explains; but later she breaks down and tells Davis the truth. “At first I had a dog … then an old widower … then a lady companion … now I have Arthur. I don’t know what I’ll have next … It’s a bad thing to be lonely … When a woman starts getting old, time can be the avalanche and loneliness a disaster.” Needless to say, Davis arrives home for her daughter’s wedding a greatly sobered woman.

  The film’s inevitable denial of its own presentation happens when Sullivan and Davis attend the wedding. The groom and his family represent everything Davis had hoped to move away from: an ethnic group with no money. The Polanskis are happy and full of the simple joy that only movie ethnicity can represent. (We’re poor, we’re loud, we eat salami, but we’re happy.) The groom’s mother, Mrs. Polanski, is presented as a frankly older woman, neither chic nor glamorous—the subtle implication being that this is the proper way for wives to be. She advises the young couple that “life is stones as well as flowers … nothing’s all happy.” Davis comes unhinged by all this wisdom and wedding cake, and after the youngsters fly off, she breaks down and weeps. When Sullivan takes her home, she tells him of her loneliness without him. “I didn’t know how much a part of you I was.” At this moment, the movie has arrived at the false reunion of a couple the audience has just been told have absolutely no chance of making their marriage work because of their fundamental differences, outside pressures, and deeply rooted misunderstandings. “Joyce,” says Sullivan to Davis, “if we tried again, do you think we could find what we had in the beginning?” Since the audience has been shown that what they had in the beginning was based on lies, the suggestion seems improbable; but the husband tells his conniving wife, “I want you back, Joyce.” He is as alone and lonely as she is. The woman he had loved in a genuinely caring and sharing relationship (Frances Dee) has left him because of pressure exerted by Davis. (Threatened with the revelation of their affair, Dee moves on because of her “job at the university.”) Davis plays a big scene: “Are you sure you don’t just pity me … I owe you something, David … Be sure … Don’t decide tonight.” After telling him that tomorrow, or even the next day, will do, she adds, “I’ll be waiting.” It’s the Scarlett O’Hara resolution. Sullivan has lost everything—money, home, lover, status, confidence—but he has not, apparently, lost Davis.

  There is a demented quality to Payment on Demand, the sense that audiences were forever to be denied marital happiness … that the only divorce they could have was a flashback that would then be refuted. Hollywood cleverly granted divorce for its audiences for about fifty cents a ticket, but figured this was the only type of divorce they could afford. Payment also shows them a marriage that made every mistake in the book and still survived. However fake, it was reassuring because it contained a raw honesty inside. As the youngest daughter (Betty Lynn) says: “Funny things happen to married people sometimes. They start to hate one another.”

  The ending of Payment on Demand (originally called The Story of a Divorce) finds Bette Davis and Barry Sullivan divorced, standing on the threshold of their former home, poised for a shaky reconciliation. Will they reunite? Yes, but should they? (Photo Credit 2.9)

  The Marrying Kind is one of the more honest portraits of an average marriage that have been told onscreen. Everything about it—its sets, its costumes (even with the “gowns by Jean Louis” credit), its location shooting in New York City and surrounding areas—is grounded in reality. Its script, by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, carries a brother-and-sister relationship to their more sophisticated, upbeat marriage movie, Adam’s Rib (1949) starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The married couple of Marrying Kind, Judy Holliday and Aldo Ray, are a Hepburn and Tracy for the masses. Holliday, an extraordinary talent and presence on film, managed to be the perfect embodiment of an ordinary woman. A little too plump, a tad less than chic, and with just the hint of the “dumb blonde” about her,16 she was nevertheless capable of elevating an average female into a noble creature not only to be sympathized with, but also admired. Aldo Ray, who was introduced to moviegoers in the film, was a likable, lumpkin Spencer Tracy. He was big and solid, with a raspy voice, and he seemed to be a kind and loving man whose big-bear body would be a secure place for a woman to seek haven. The movie business had so much confidence in Ray’s future stardom that Marrying Kind carried not only a special credit (“Introducing Aldo Ray”) at the front end, but also an unusual tribute at the finale. After “The End” appeared, Ray’s image appeared again onscreen with the caption “You have just seen our New Personality, Aldo Ray. Please watch for his next picture.”17

  The Marrying Kind also bears a strong parallel with another marriage film, King Vidor’s 1928 masterpiece, The Crowd.18 Both couples marry with great optimism after relatively short acquaintances, and both feel the pressure of money problems. Both bank on a big dream coming true, and both husbands lose their way when financial burdens overwhelm them. Both men are pictured working as cogs in a big American business machine: Aldo Ray in the post office, and James Murray, the hero of The Crowd, in an office. Both women, Holliday and Eleanor Boardman, give up work to make a home for the family. Both movies are stories of marriages between ordinary people, and both aim for honesty in the storytelling process. Both speak of recognizable pain—the death of a child. Both reaffirm the marriage at film’s end, with the couple reunited, but with the sadness not taken away or made light of.

  The Marrying Kind begins at the New York Domestic Relations Court with two “arguing” sounds: the cacophony of divorcing couples yelling at each other overlaid by Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. This ironic juxtaposition says much, but also sets both the essentially comic tone of the movie as well as the cinematic style it will maintain: show an audience the opposite of what character narration claims, a visual denial of verbiage.

  As the story begins, Holliday and Ray are divorcing, and Keefer vs. Keefer is next up on the court docket. They tell the judge they are a hopeless case: “Ours is not a sick marriage. It’s a dead one.” It’s six p.m., the end of the day, and the judge (significantly, a woman) says she’d like to hold their case over for the next morning. Then, as she gathers herself to leave, she sits down to talk to the Keefers. “I don’t do this very often,” she tells them, and explains why: her husband doesn’t like her to get home too late. Three things are indicated by this woman: she postpones because she has a hunch about them (and we all know about female intuition); she’s happily married, putting her husband before her court schedule; and Holliday and Ray’s story is both typical and atypical.

  The judge asks the Keefers to tell her about their marriage. “How did you meet?” They immediately disagree: “It was just a pickup,” he says, and “It was not!” says she. As they narrate, the audience is taken to the past to learn their story. As events unfold, working back and forth from the past to the present, each past segment is triggered by specific questions from the judge and introduced by contradicting narrations and opinions by Holliday and Ray. Cleverly, the audience is shown how wrong they are about their marriage. As each one describes an event (“I got a frosty hello”), viewers see the opposite (a warm welcome). The couple argue over their memories, and it’s clear that their basic problem is that although they both remember the same events, they don’t see them the same way.

  Holliday and Ray are an average couple akin to Stewart and Lombard in Made for Each Other.19 They live in a small apartment, and he works for the post office. She has given up her former secretarial job at his request, so they have a limited income after their two children are born. Their troubles were small in the beginning—or so they say. “The way it all started … ” they tell the judge, was with “little things.” They answer incorrectly when a quiz show calls their house,
and lose the much-needed prize. When they save up for a big anniversary night out, his sister and her husband (the designated babysitters) show up drunk, so they can’t go. Most of all, when Ray has a brilliant idea—“Slide-Airs,” a ball-bearing roller skate—they can’t get financial backing, although later on, someone else patents the idea and makes a fortune. Nothing goes right for them, and the pressures of bills and children give Ray a hideous nightmare (shot on location in New York City’s main post office).

  None of this, however, is really the problem. “Are you saying that not getting rich broke things up?” asks the judge. When they deny this, she probes, asking Holliday, “What did you want out of marriage?” (“What I didn’t get.”) “What makes you incompatible?” (“Being married to one another.”) What’s really destroyed the Keefers is finally revealed in a brilliant scene, a flashback that moves from a tone of comedy and joyous camaraderie to one of desperate tragedy: their son drowns on a family picnic. One year ago, they finally admit, their family of four took off for a little holiday excursion to a lake. Happy and relaxed, they laugh and eat and talk. When their son runs off to swim with friends, Holliday picks up her ukulele and begins to play and sing, “How I love the kisses of Dolores … ay yi yi, Dolores.” As she lazily strums, behind her the audience sees action, and increasing agitation. Holliday is reclining, so only the legs and feet of other picnickers are observed running by, first in one direction, then in another, and then in a terrible, confused frenzy, until word is brought: “Joey!” Their son is dead.

  In the return to present time, Holliday collapses in racking sobs, and Ray brings her a glass of water. “What’s the use?” he asks, and then he, too, cries. “I don’t know how we lived through it. Maybe we didn’t.” Holliday, an ordinary woman unable to articulate her grief with any eloquence, says, “I got all tired out.”

  The Marrying Kind doesn’t shirk its dark side, or pass over it lightly. Unlike some “flashback/divorce” films, it continues in a downbeat mood for significant minutes. One of the most honest parts of the film involves the role of the little daughter who is left behind. She has tantrums and wakes up screaming. When she enters the kitchen to find her parents quarreling over breakfast, she makes them sit down and sing their “good-morning song” with her. A dejected and discouraged Holliday and an impatient and distracted Ray sing along, while their daughter, with an almost demonic look, forces togetherness on them:

  Good morning to you,

  Good morning to you,

  We’re all in our places

  With sunshiny faces,

  And this is the way

  We start a new day.

  It’s an insane re-enactment of an earlier, happier shared moment, and a ghastly comment on a happy 1950s family breakfast scene.

  There is more tragedy to come. Walking to work, Ray sees a street vendor selling toys and stops to buy one for Joey, forgetting he’s dead. Shocked when he realizes what he has done, he crosses the street in a daze and walks in front of a truck. The resulting hospitalization, and required upstate rehab (for one month), is the couple’s undoing both financially and emotionally. Holliday is forced to go to work, something Ray hates. Worst of all, after he’s finally home, her former boss has died and left her a sum of money: $1,284.63. Over this small bequest, which triggers Ray’s jealousy and sense of inadequacy, they quarrel … and quarrel … and end up in divorce court after seven years of marital commitment. The marriage in The Marrying Kind breaks up over surface issues (money, in-laws, broken dreams, competition over earning power) and one deeply ingrained tragedy that has made it impossible for them to continue to be with one another.

  The Marrying Kind reverses the formula of Chicken Every Sunday. Aldo Ray and Judy Holliday start out already in the divorce court with Judge Madge Kennedy … (Photo Credit 2.10)

  … and through flashbacks the audience is returned to their wedding day to search for what went wrong. (Photo Credit 2.11)

  In the end, Aldo Ray admits that Holliday’s boss, as it turned out, had left the same sum of money to fifty-five other girls (“And thirty-five men,” adds Holliday). The judge, not pushing her luck, says, “You’ve had hard times … but good ones, too. We’ll finish you up tomorrow morning.” When she leaves, she tells the docket clerk to remove their names (“Scratch Keefer for tomorrow”) for good luck: she has a hunch. The Keefers are left behind to talk things over, and they decide that maybe it’s a good thing for a married couple to realize that all the things they have taken for granted—the happiness they expected the day they wed—could disappear. “Maybe it’s a good thing to know it’s possible” you may end up in divorce court: that’s the marriage message for the audience. If you’re aware you might break up, you may be more careful; you may work harder at making your marriage work. Ray and Holliday ask each other what would happen if they reconciled. “I would certainly try,” says Ray, and “I would too,” says Holliday. As they leave the building together, the clerk is removing their names from the divorce roster.

  The Marrying Kind is a particularly intelligent depiction of a married couple who are shattered by an unexpected blow, but who have enough commitment to keep going. What is not stated, but can be inferred, is that a couple like Ray and Holliday, with limited means and limited futures, really need to hold on to each other, because this is all they have and all they will have in life. Viewers are asked to get little things into perspective, because this couple, who faced something terrible, have now survived. (If they can do it, you can, too!) This is the traditional role for both the marriage movie and the divorce movie: tell the audience to keep on going. “I do, and I don’t, but I do”—that’s the story of the American marriage movie.20

  Sometimes an “I don’t” marriage movie uses the flashback format (the doom mode), but stops the marriage, not with divorce but with death. The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) is such a movie, and it is a dreary film. One of the reasons it’s so dreary is that it presents an almost honest portrait of a malfunctioning marriage. The “almost” caveat is due to its essentially fake soul, the epitome of what most people think of as a bad Hollywood melodrama. It stars Van Johnson and an awesomely beautiful young Elizabeth Taylor as an unhappy couple trying to figure out what they want out of life (and marriage) in a post–World War II Paris scene. Based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story “Babylon Revisited,” it has, underneath its oversimplified gloss, an honest set of bones. Fitzgerald, after all, knew Paris and knew marital disaster. The film version trades on cheap sentiment, and after killing off Taylor, quickly resolves such issues as Johnson’s alcoholism and lack of success. Taylor dies because she forgot her house key—absentmindedness as a source of death.21

  The Last Time I Saw Paris begins with Johnson, sober and successful, the author of a fine novel, as he returns to Paris from America to try to recover custody of his daughter (who apparently has not aged while he was away and who remembers him and everything they did together perfectly clearly). His sister-in-law, sternly played by Donna Reed, refuses to give him his child until her husband (George Dolenz) lectures her and she gives in.

  Although the average filmgoer doesn’t live in Paris, has not had an unexpected oil well come in, and probably can’t identify with the high living onscreen, he can recognize two people who get out of sync with each other and don’t know what to do about it. In particular, they can recognize the genuine self-loathing and anger put onscreen by Van Johnson in a scene in which he arrives home at eight a.m. after spending a night on the town with the glamorous Eva Gabor. He sneaks in, and as he climbs the stairs, he acts out both halves of a marital quarrel he hears in his head. He alternates between a mocking tone for himself and a nagging one for Taylor. He lets himself tell her, “I’m sick and tired of your sitting around those crummy cafés, day and night, the darling of every phony, petted by writers who don’t write, adored by painters who don’t paint.” He hears her respond, “What do you write? Interviews with useless, sloppy women!” He criticizes her for jumping into fountains
and “lapping up” all the liquor in Paris, but she counters with “Why don’t you ask me why I drink, why I jump into fountains?” He concludes with “That’s right—blame me, blame me.” When he reaches their bedroom, and has worked himself into a rage, he sees his oblivious wife sound asleep in bed. He’s ready to fight, and she doesn’t even realize he’s been out all night. Sleepily she sits up. “Morning, darling,” she says.

  Johnson’s “argument” with himself spares an audience the actual argument, giving it a new performance twist and taking the worst sting out of it by making it comic. However, it has delineated days and days of offscreen behavior for both main characters. She’s carousing while he works, but his work is taking him nowhere. He’s embarrassed by her behavior, but she has nothing else to do with herself. He’s finally taken a leaf from her book and stayed out all night. She hasn’t even noticed. This marriage may have all the glamour of Paris and the expatriate life, but it’s recognizable by the smallest-town couple as doomed, really doomed.