I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  What The Last Time I Saw Paris puts onscreen is hopeless, so much so that it is possible to believe that a deathbed reconciliation is the only kind that would work for this couple. They don’t divorce each other—but only because one of them dies as another way out. The death relieves the pressure—and provides a form of reaffirmation through his sobriety and embrace of parenthood.

  Both the “I do” and the “I don’t” approach to the marriage movie tell the same story, of course: they are about failed dreams, hopes, and love. Both maintain the patterns of destroy-and-rebuild. Both are equally false, equally true. Box-office returns don’t really endorse either mode. Between 1930 and 1966, very few of the twenty to twenty-five top-grossing movies could be labeled as being about marriage or divorce specifically and exclusively.22 Lack of financial success in a big way, consistent over time, caused Hollywood to begin to make fewer and fewer marriage movies.23

  The “I do” and “I don’t” variations of the pure marriage movie worked, but they tied the leading man and woman down. Since the real bread-and-butter for the motion-picture business was always a romantic love story, it was inevitable that movies would be made that would find a way to play with marriage: to keep its available sex, and yet create a reason why a married couple couldn’t have it. Not being allowed to have sex created the essential frisson of the romantic comedy: the leading man and woman dying to make love, but unable to do so. The movie could take a couple to the edge and let them hover there while the audience shared the excitement. (This is probably why the “romcoms” of today don’t work: there’s no need for anyone not to have sex. It’s a real screenwriting challenge.)

  In most romantic comedies, the big question is: Would the boy really get the girl? Could he and she sort out their basic misunderstandings and make it to the altar? By working a clever variation on this question, a marriage movie could be turned into a variation on the romantic comedy. A story could be told in which a couple had already gone to the altar for some crazy reason—something unpredictable, catchy, funny. They were married … but not really. They could have sex … but not really. Creative screenwriters found two useful plot strategies for this: the “without love” marriage and the “Oops! We’re not really married” variation. The resulting films are disguised romantic comedies, but they maintain the basic pattern of “affirm, question, reaffirm, and resolve” indigenous to the marriage movie, and thus confirm that the subject of marriage in the movies was defined cinematically in a specific way. A Photoplay review of the “without love” pretend-marriage movie The Doctor Takes a Wife (June 1940) imagined the story conference that thought up the idea: “We can have ’em married … and still not married … so the romance will keep.”

  The “without love” marriage sounds ridiculous, but it wasn’t all that hard to sell. Lots of movie marriages are entered into for a dubious premise.24 The “without love” scenario just had to come up with some credible reason—the need to escape, a cash reward, an inheritance, a misunderstanding, a voluntary substitution—for a couple to agree to marry. They would forge a bargain in which they would cohabit but not have sex because theirs would be strictly a business arrangement. (This is a subliminal form of divorce, an acceptable form in days in which divorce itself was socially unacceptable.) In Hired Wife (1940), Rosalind Russell marries her boss (Brian Aherne) to save him from a tax problem. In The Lady Is Willing (1942), obstetrician Fred MacMurray agrees to marry actress Marlene Dietrich so she can legally adopt a baby she finds on her way home one day (just lying out in the street, it seems). What does MacMurray get out of it? Financing for his laboratory experiments—plenty of equipment and lots of rabbits.25

  What a “without love” marriage purported to do was give an audience their boy-meets-girl situation in a fresh way. Husband had to “meet” his wife under new circumstances: husband meets wife; husband gets wife, even though, strictly speaking, he’d already got her. What made such a concept interesting was that the main object of any courtship—marriage—was already accomplished. What had not been achieved was the fundamental accepted action of marriage: sex. Thus the “without love” marriage movie found a clever way to heighten the need for sex, increasing the audience’s sense that it was available at any minute, just waiting to happen. (Hollywood’s ability to inject sex into a frame in which no sex was allowed was always remarkable.) It also found a way for marriage to be romanticized.

  The “without love” marriage movie was often disappointing because it was actually a romantic comedy under pressure. A classic example actually called Without Love (1945), starred Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. It was only the third pairing of the two, but they already were fully at ease in each other’s company. The movie was based on a play by Philip Barry that Hepburn had done on the stage with Elliott Nugent as her leading man. On stage, the action was written to serve Hepburn’s talents (Nugent wasn’t her equal in star power). On film, however, the events skew toward Tracy, who had the larger box-office appeal of the two.26 The film opens up on Tracy as he seeks a place to live and work in Washington, D.C., during the crowded wartime years. Tracy portrays a successful scientist—and Hepburn is the daughter of another. (Paging Dr. Freud!) In fact, Hepburn had met Tracy’s own father “right here in my father’s house” when she was a girl. Thus a connection is established for the couple: their fathers were respectful friends, companions, fellow scientists. This background legitimizes the reasons Hepburn and Tracy decide to marry. Others emerge: he needs a lab assistant in his work and she is experienced, and “there’s a war on,” which was a well-established motivation in World War II movies.

  Without Love qualifies as a marriage movie because its main focus is on questions about marriage: why one marries; if one should remarry when widowed; what makes a good marriage; how couples can work together; who makes a good marriage partner. (It answers none of those questions.) An audience is presented with a relatively appalling series of events that suggest that as long as you’re not in love with your mate, you’ll be fine. Hollywood apparently couldn’t easily reconcile love and marriage.

  Neither Tracy’s nor Hepburn’s character wants love, but for very different reasons. Hepburn’s character has, according to her friends, not cracked a smile in years. Although she was once married, her husband is dead. She spends most of her time in the country. She lives alone, eats alone, rides alone, and, naturally, sleeps alone. Tracy is a scientist focused on science. He only trusts “facts.” He doesn’t want love because it’s “a sickness.” He fell in love once, but she was “bright and gay and shallow … lived for parties … a witch on a broom.” He describes their relationship as a “supremely joyless affair.”

  Tracy has had the worst of it, and it’s made indirectly clear that he knows it was his sexual attraction to “Lila”—which still exists—that turned his otherwise sensible life upside down. He met Lila in Paris, and there is a subtle hint that staying away from that city might be a good plan for people who want to keep their feet on the ground. Hepburn’s marriage, on the other hand, is right out of a romance novel—and just as false. She was twenty, and he was twenty-two. “He was everything,” she says, and for two years (“but a lifetime, really”) they lived an idyllic marriage. At least that’s how she remembers it. Ever since he was thrown by his horse and killed, she has deified his memory.

  The first inexplicable thing that happens is the marriage itself. Hepburn announces she’s been “thinking” and proposes to Tracy. He looks suitably dubious, but she explains that there must be “another basis to a good and happy marriage besides love.” Ever the practical scientist, he asks bluntly, “And what would that be?” Her response is eloquent: “Things shared in common. Honesty, say, and courage and … humor … free of the jealousy, the possessiveness, the misery, the exacting, the demanding … You’d have companionship … and the independence you prize … and you could work. We could both work.” She will assist him as he tries to invent the oxygen mask that will “win the war.”

  Trac
y’s opinion? “It would never work.” But when he hears Lila is in town, he accepts Hepburn’s offer, thus blowing his credibility as a clear-thinking scientist. (He also sleepwalks and plays “Clair de lune” on the piano late at night.) After they make their deal and shake hands on it, Hepburn says, “There’s just one thing, though … I could never … never—.” Tracy cuts her off: “Madam. You would never have to give that a thought.” Thus, the issue of sex is clarified for the viewer. And in case we doubted them, we have to suffer through a sequence in which Tracy sleepwalks into Hepburn’s bedroom and climbs into her bed while she is off getting her hot water bottle ready for the night. We watch her throw him out. (The movie doesn’t trust the audience to believe they actually wouldn’t have sex, so it makes sure we see them not have it. Obviously, Hollywood understood its audience: who could, indeed, really believe in this concept?)

  The “without love” variation of the marriage movie is represented by a film appropriately titled Without Love, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as a married couple facing up to the rules of their decision. (Photo Credit 2.12)

  Although it has attempted to deny marriage and reconstitute itself as a boy-gets-girl romantic comedy, Without Love puts an audience through the wringer. Suddenly (but not suddenly enough) it all goes south when a sophisticated European male (Carl Esmond) arrives on the scene. Such men in movies were either capons (Erik Rhodes in The Gay Divorcee, 1934), initiators into the pleasures of sex (Rossano Brazzi in Summertime, 1955), evil seducers (Vittorio Gassman in War and Peace, 1956), or men like this one, whose purpose is strictly plot motivation. When Hepburn and Tracy visit her Virginia country home, Esmond turns up in the neighborhood. Soon he and Hepburn are out buggy riding, reciting T. S. Eliot to each other (“April is the cruellest month”). In most movies, it’s a rule that shortly after people start quoting poetry, something ghastly is going to happen. In Without Love, it’s simple and predictable: Esmond kisses Hepburn, awakening her sexually.

  Unfortunately for him, Hepburn’s awakening is not aimed in his direction but in Tracy’s. When she realizes she loves him and tries to stir him alive, everything goes wrong between them. (She tries poetry on him, once again reciting T. S. Eliot, which the movie obviously believes inspires men to kiss with abandon. Alas, Tracy is immune.) The desire to be a romantic comedy, to deny marriage while showing an ideally paired “married” couple, has gone out of control. Here we have the news this movie delivers: theirs was a perfect marriage as long as they weren’t in love; as long as they were emotionally disconnected.

  The conclusion seeks, as Hollywood films so often do, to refute this message. Hepburn dresses up as Lila (whom the audience has never seen but has heard way too much about) and romps about the room in feathers, waving a cigarette holder. (Hepburn has trouble being honestly silly in an exaggerated female way without indicating she doesn’t believe in her own performance.) She can’t clarify whether she is mocking Lila or trying to be Lila, and Tracy appears as confused as the audience. The only way to reconnect to “audience values” is to go where audiences will always go: to sex as a solution. Once again, Tracy walks in his sleep.

  While trying to find a clever and appealing new way to tell a marriage story, Without Love accidentally undermines the idea of marriage and unfortunately doesn’t do much for “love,” either. As long as there is no jealousy, no rivalry, no competition, no family, no children—and, of course, no sex—a “marriage” is heaven. Add in anything human, turn the relationship away from professionalism to passion, and there is no possibility of it working. That is what we see onscreen, and the movie relies on a sleepwalking gimmick to change that fact.

  One of the more curious strategies of the marriage movie that tries not to be a marriage movie is the plot in which the couple are “divorced” by accident of fate. All of a sudden, two people find out they’re not really married. Oops! These stories don’t care much about the why: the judge was an impostor, the documents were never filed, or the ceremony took place in Mexico—where, in film terms, nothing can be eaten, digested, or trusted, and even if you manage to get back across the border alive, whatever you brought out will immediately break down on you. The only “why” of the “oops” plot that matters is the one in which the couple ask themselves the traditional questions of the marriage movie: Why are we still married? Do we really want to be? And what has happened to us? This “oops” variation is a freebie escape, or yet another safe form of divorce, even though the titillating “we’ve been living in sin” issue automatically dictates a finale of remarriage. Nevertheless, the issues of what is wrong with marriage are laid comfortably bare.

  “We’re not married” plots are almost always comedies. (Censorship issues made it necessary for Hollywood to deflect any serious discussions of sex without benefit of clergy. This worked best in a comic bedroom farce.) Films that used the “we’re not married” plot included Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 Mr. and Mrs. Smith, with Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery, and 1951’s Let’s Make It Legal, with Claudette Colbert and Macdonald Carey; but one that neatly sums up all the issues is cleverly called We’re Not Married.

  We’re Not Married (1952) has a simple, jaunty format: five couples receive a letter stating the facts. Victor Moore, playing a slightly fuddled example of nepotism, interpreted his becoming a justice of the peace to mean that he could start marrying people as soon as he got the letter appointing him. From Christmas Eve to his official starting date of New Year’s Day, he jumped the gun and married six couples with the dithering support of his equally silly wife (Jane Darwell). Two years and six months later, his error has been discovered. Why? Well, what else? One of the six couples has decided to get divorced. Adopting a “let’s keep this simple and low-key” attitude, the state merely mails out a form letter to the other five couples, informing them, “We are compelled to tell you that you are not married.”

  “We’re not married!” each of the couples cries out. Yes indeed. And then the five stories are told:

  • Ginger Rogers and Fred Allen married only for career reasons. Theirs is a “without love” marriage, an arrangement that allowed them to snag a successful radio show called Breakfast with the Glad Gladwyns, because if they weren’t married, they wouldn’t be hired. Two years later, they’re rich and successful, pretending not only to be married but also to have a three-year-old daughter. They chatter happily away on the air, never speaking to each other otherwise. Their relationship is nothing but a series of product placements disguised as a real-life marital conversation.

  • David Wayne and Marilyn Monroe have a real baby, but no real domestic life. Wayne cooks, babysits, and waits for Monroe as she pursues the Mrs. Mississippi beauty-queen title. Monroe, not yet the name star she would become within months, parades on runways while Wayne, clutching the kid, stands by and watches.

  • Paul Douglas and Eve Arden, remembered as a couple who were “talking incessantly” as they wed, are now well-to-do Long Island suburbanites who neither speak directly to each other nor bother to listen if the other should speak. “The Book-of-the-Month Club came today” is the biggest news they share.

  • Zsa Zsa Gabor and Louis Calhern live in Dallas. He’s a rich oil man; she’s a young and nubile beauty who hoodwinked him into marriage. She has just set him up in a “love nest” with another woman so she can sue him for divorce and take him to the cleaners financially.

  • Eddie Bracken is a professional soldier; his wife, Mitzi Gaynor, is newly pregnant. He’s just learned he’s shipping out immediately, so theirs is a time-pressure dilemma.

  Oops! We’re Not Married is the news for five couples two and a half years after their wedding day. For Ginger Rogers and Fred Allen, who united only to snag a job as a married couple on radio, it’s pretty much “who cares?” … (Photo Credit 2.13)

  … but Marilyn Monroe and David Wayne (with James Gleason) shift her out of the Mrs. America pageant into the Miss America contest, while he tends to the baby either way …


  … Eve Arden and Paul Douglas stopped communicating years ago so why discuss anything now … (Photo Credit 2.15)

  … but Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was trying to divorce Louis Calhern for his money, gets a rude shock …

  … and Mitzi Gaynor and Eddie Bracken (with Harry Harvey) face a real crisis: she’s pregnant and he’s shipping out the next day … the race is on to correct their problem with a hasty re-wedding. (Photo Credit 2.17)

  Taken as a whole, these five little plots illustrate five marriage problems: the “without love” marriage; the career role reversal involving control; the death of communication and onset of marital boredom; the money matter; and, of course, what happens when you have sex. These mini-plots are almost akin to the old silent two-reelers in which marriage is lampooned.

  In We’re Not Married, four of the five “oops” marriages are happily resolved. Allen and Rogers just remarry—after all, what difference does it make? Monroe shifts out of the Mrs. Mississippi pageant into the Miss Mississippi pageant—a career upgrade for her—and Wayne still stands by with the kid. Douglas thinks about his possible new freedom, but realizes it would cost him a fortune if he started dating again. He burns the letter. Gaynor and Bracken, with the help of the United States Army, manage to get remarried in time to give their kid a name before Dad’s ship sails. Only Gabor and Calhern join the actual ranks of the divorced. Taking advantage of the “oops” factor, Calhern tells Gabor at the very last minute that she’s out of luck because “we’re not married,” and now that he’s learned the truth about her, they never will be. Looking at the statistics of the film, two of the original six couples ended up divorced—or about one in three, which was the national average at the time.