I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  Woman of the Year, Tracy and Hepburn’s first onscreen pairing, is a movie in which they meet, woo, and wed in one half, then try to make a marriage out of their essentially opposite lives in the other.11 Thus they first appeared onscreen as an incompatible married couple who had to learn to compromise—something audiences knew was a real-life “couple” issue.

  In The Sea of Grass, a dreary soap opera directed by Elia Kazan (who complained of the assignment for years afterward), Hepburn and Tracy are mismatched and never really solve their problems, despite a final reconciliation. After Hepburn commits adultery with Melvyn Douglas, Tracy exiles her and forbids her to ever see their children—and that’s the story of that marriage. When State of the Union opens, the stars are separated and Tracy has taken up with the highly political and sophisticated Angela Lansbury. Hepburn must pretend their marriage is okay because Tracy’s running for political office. In the end, they reunite—but only after he’s forced to step down from his candidacy.

  One of the most popular of the Hepburn/Tracy marriage films is Adam’s Rib, which sparkles with rock-hard wit. She’s a lawyer; he’s a prosecuting attorney.12 They’re put forward as an idealized successful married couple. Today, we could call them yuppies: no kids, plenty of money, both happily self-focused, very high-living and sophisticated. They’re the people we’d be if only we had better brains, better clothes, and a better apartment. But in Adam’s Rib, Hepburn and Tracy compete hideously; they try to humiliate each other publicly—and if the movie weren’t so funny, it would break your heart. Professional couples, says Hollywood (in a position to know), seldom have any real chance at happiness or marital longevity.

  At some level, this sense of intense competition that hovered between Hepburn and Tracy was what made them seem so right and true to audiences. Moviegoers knew that equality was hard. It wasn’t really the romance between these relatively cold and unusual two people that drew audiences to them. It was the sense that here indeed was a real-life married competition and thus a real-life married couple. The Hepburn/Tracy movie “marriage” felt real to audiences because they were a couple who generated a sense of incompatibility, competition, class difference, and underlying tension.

  Perhaps the most famous today of all the “love teams” paired in multiple movies are Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, who could play domestic and happy as they rustle up a late-night snack in Adam’s Rib … (Photo Credit 2.33)

  … or angry and estranged as they try to solve their sleeping arrangements in State of the Union. (Photo Credit 2.34)

  The union of Hepburn and Tracy is often oversimplified—nearly everyone says it’s a class thing, with her all upper-crusty and him all down-to-earthish.13 Yet one only has to imagine The African Queen (1951) with Tracy instead of Bogart to realize that Tracy is pretty uppity himself. Where Tracy with Hepburn exudes a sense of honor and superiority, Bogart truly embraced the commonness of Charlie Allnut. He played it low, obedient, even dumb. He wasn’t afraid to be less than Hepburn. Tracy’s snobbery is often veiled, presented as a religious conviction, scientific knowledge, a moral code, or a peasant’s intuition. It’s self-righteousness all the same, but it helps Tracy in comparison seem more human, more understanding and tolerant, than Hepburn. He’s an American kind of man, one to bring Hepburn (representing those traits we drummed out of ourselves when we sailed on the Mayflower) down to where she belongs. Tracy and Hepburn act out an intellectual’s version of The Taming of the Shrew, in which Tracy masters Hepburn (not vice versa, as some people think). Hepburn has to learn her lesson, but what makes this palatable for most people is that Tracy, again by comparison, seems ordinary. If he took on a New England accent and played a rich guy who went to Harvard, audiences could see more easily why he and Hepburn were such a well-matched pair.

  Tracy as an actor was always grounded, but Hepburn seldom was. (If, as Hepburn said of Tracy, he was a baked potato, she was his very sour cream.) He was in the earth, of the earth (onscreen), and she was always in some kind of nearly hysterical flight, a hummingbird. She’s hoity-toity; he’s homespun. She’s idealistic; he’s practical. He took the edge off her, even as she became spontaneous when working opposite him. Except for Tracy, Hepburn never really made an honest pairing with another actor, not even Cary Grant. Tracy, on the other hand, could be teamed up literally with anyone, including Lana Turner, Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow—and let’s not forget Mickey Rooney, Jack Oakie, and Clark Gable.

  Whenever they worked, star pairings were successful in creating a strong sense of a “married” couple—useful both in marriage movies and elsewhere. Nevertheless, they did present Hollywood with a financial challenge: the need to spend two dollars instead of one—that is, to cast two stars. In many Hollywood films, a big-name star, male or female, was used to introduce a younger one the business hoped to develop upward—an economical pairing. The marriage movie made it difficult for this system to work without throwing the balance of the “married couple” out of whack. (An audience’s sympathy would gravitate to the “name.”) Hollywood solved this issue for marriage movies by creating low-budget acting couples who could be repeated from film to film, ensuring business because of the characters, not the stars.

  Series films, such as the Blondie and Dagwood and Ma and Pa Kettle movies or the imitation Thin Man plots,14 were developed around low-budget performers who were actually cast as married couples. (There were also ongoing portraits of marriage in “family” films such as the Andy Hardy series, the Jones Family and Henry Aldrich movies, even though the younger, unmarried characters were the primary focus.) One of the most typical—and successful—of these low-budget movies was the Blondie and Dagwood series. Blondie and Dagwood didn’t need movie stars, because they came presold. The audience knew the Bumsteads offscreen.

  Mr. and Mrs. Dagwood Bumstead were married on February 17, 1933, after a fairly long courtship.15 They had first met on September 8, 1930, in the debut of a comic strip drawn by Chic Young. Dagwood, the bumbling playboy son of a billionaire railroad tycoon (J. Bolling Bumstead), was the kind of guy whose polo pony would pull up short during a chukker to nibble a bit of grass. Blondie, his girlfriend, was a typical 1920s flapper, with a great many suitors flocking around her. The Depression was already under way when the strip debuted, so when Dagwood decided to marry Blondie, J. Bolling conveniently disinherited him, turning the couple into two people who, like their readership, now had to worry about money. Their 1933 “wedding ceremony” features a guest who says, “They’ll never be happy, mark my words.” Dagwood, however, makes a definitive statement to his new wife: “I don’t mind giving up everything for you. You’re worth it. I’ll get a job.” Blondie serenely replies, mouthing words that would often be used in the movies in future years, “We’ll live on love.” (“What a pity,” said Dagwood’s still unsympathetic dad.) Blondie and Dagwood, however, defy the odds. They do live on love, and still do today, eight decades later.

  The movies based on this enormously popular comic strip are unique. First, there were an unusually high number made (twenty-eight, starting in 1938 and ending in 1950), and second, they were all produced by Columbia Pictures and all starred the same two leading actors, Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake. It was formula filmmaking at its simplest, most economical and efficient, and also a rare example of a totally successful movie format that endured.

  Singleton and Lake were a miraculous pairing, a perfect onscreen Blondie and Dagwood. They both had the physical definition required, and the solid presence to fill their roles. Both had talent, but neither had overwhelming star quality and neither was a name, either before or after the series. They were not second-rate, but they were not too big for their jobs. They were very much like the actors who become television stars today. Just as Barbara Billingsley became famous because she played June Cleaver, the Beav’s mother, but famous only as June Cleaver, Singleton and Lake became famous as Blondie and Dagwood. They were Blondie and Dagwood—and nothing else—for the rest of their
performing lives.16

  Blondie and Dagwood were so much a part of American popular culture that they, cartoon figures, could be used to endorse products and promote advertising contests, as in this layout from the Johns-Manville roofing, siding, insulation, and ceiling materials company. (Photo Credit 2.35)

  Lake seemed immediately to be the perfect Dagwood, but Singleton was cast as Blondie only after the original choice, an actress named Shirley Deane, was let go because she seemed too harsh when she nagged Dagwood. Singleton had a softer, sweeter quality. (She did have to dye her dark hair blond.) She takes the edge off the Bumsteads’ bickering, making it more palatable, a significant factor in what made the films popular for so many years. Blondie and Dagwood relieved marital pressure for the audience by reconstituting their ordinary problems into easily resolvable comedy. There’s a comforting quality to them: they never change, they never fail. In what Preston Sturges called “this cockeyed caravan of life,” they could be counted on.

  Blondie and Dagwood (Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake) pose with their son Alexander (Larry Simms) and their family dog, Daisy, a perfect family portrait … (Photo Credit 2.36)

  … and they share their morning toast, bacon, and eggs the way the average family is supposed to do. Alexander was known as Baby Dumpling until, as is shown here, he got too big for “Baby.” (Photo Credit 2.37)

  The titles of the Blondie movies indicate the simple, recognizable events the movies present, events that any audience understands: Blondie and the Boss, Blondie on a Budget, Blondie Brings Up Baby, Blondie Has Servant Trouble, Blondie Takes a Vacation, etc. Each movie maintains a simple plot structure: Dagwood screws everything up, and Blondie sorts everything out. Thus, the series defined a comic premise designed to empower the wife: Blondie was smarter than Dagwood, and without her he would bumble his way into tragedy. With her, he merely bumbles into disaster, and she can save him from that. Blondie Bumstead (née Boopadoop) was always unflappable unless she imagines Dagwood has gone off with another woman. Nothing but infidelity—not even the sight of her husband eating dog food—can deter her from her daily rounds of cleaning up after him in mistake after mistake, misunderstanding after misunderstanding, mess after mess.

  The earliest Blondie movies were sweet, low-key, and very natural, featuring simple problems an audience would recognize: broken vacuum cleaners, budget shortages, old girlfriends, and the neighbors’ smart-ass little boy (Alvin), who calls Dagwood a dumbbell. Later entries in the series became somewhat more complicated in their story lines, involving haunted houses and wartime shortages.

  Every Blondie and Dagwood movie featured the couple enacting familiar events. Just as Judge Hardy and his son Andy were sure to go into the judge’s library for a “man-to-man” talk, Dagwood was sure to leave his home late for the office. He would dash out the door just as the mailman was coming up the walk, and no matter how many ways that beleaguered civil servant tried to avoid the crash, Dagwood would knock him down and scatter the mail. At some point, Dagwood was sure to emit his traditional beleaguered scream for help: “BLOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNDIE!” It was simultaneously his Tarzan yell, his SOS, and his mating call. Blondie always responded.

  The series cleverly maintained a cartoonish universe. Blondie and Dagwood became flesh and blood onscreen, but they remained the cartoon figures that Americans loved. Their physical world was lightly etched, never fully filled in, and never made heavily realistic. Blondie and Dagwood lived in a kind of domestic drawing, not in a real-life domesticity. There were only two main settings, both continually repeated: the Bumstead home, indoors and out-, upstairs and down-; and the office of the J. W. Dithers Construction Co., where Dagwood worked for his always irritated boss, Mr. Dithers. Very little was needed onscreen because the definition of the married couple, Blondie and Dagwood, validated the marital storyline.

  Because of the success of the Blondie movies, Hollywood was alert for any possible similar series, and they found one inside The Egg and I (1947). When fan mail for The Egg and I referred over and over to the secondary characters Ma and Pa Kettle, Universal Pictures set up the Kettle series by first rereleasing The Egg and I with an advertising trailer that said, “We’re bringing it back because you asked for it. If you saw it once, you’ll want to see it again.” Then they immediately followed with Ma and Pa Kettle, starring the original players, Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride, who were featured in their own low-budget series of seven films. As was true for Blondie and Dagwood, the same actors always played the Kettles, and the same sets and the same comic routines (such as Ma’s hilarious way of setting up mealtime for her brood) were repeated endlessly. Audiences loved the Kettles, who had fifteen kids, all sorts of animals, and a real mess of a house. There was something about their don’t-give-a-darn attitude about keeping up with the Joneses—or with anyone—that gave subversive pleasure to American audiences. Ma’s philosophy of housekeeping was a comfort to one and all. When she first married, she says, she tried to be neat and clean, but simply couldn’t make her family work with her on it. “I can’t make Pa change and be neat,” she says, “so I might as well change and be dirty. There’s been peace in this house ever since.” The fundamental thing about the Kettles is that they are a happy couple: they leave each other alone.

  The Kettle series, which was highly successful, was less about an actual marriage than was the Blondie series. The Kettle movies took on issues such as postwar housing for returning GIs, advertising contests, newfangled labor-saving devices, etc. They confirmed something about audiences that Hollywood was soon enough to learn from television: they liked familiar characters in repeated situations, and it was just fine if those characters were married. Series stars, series situations, and low-budget filmmaking with no-name stars would become more and more familiar in the media during the 1960s and 1970s.

  The success of series movie couples like the Kettles and the Bumsteads was directly related to the presentation of a recognizable married couple. Their marital woes were ordinary, solvable, and funny, never grounded in any real threat. This type of comic reference to marriage issues was a sort of plotted stand-up comedy routine.17

  A real American happy marriage: the Kettles of Ma and Pa Kettle and The Egg and I: Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride. (Photo Credit 2.38)

  Even the shorts that accompanied features often undertook a jokester look at common marriage complaints from couples. For instance, a 1950 Pete Smith Specialty was titled A Wife’s Life, which presents the beleagured woman wringing her hands as she copes throughout her day with dirty dishes, bad plumbing, naughty children, a leaky icebox … and a sleeping husband, blissfully unaware and unconcerned. In 1946, Pete Smith presented I Love My Husband, But! The star of the Smith short subjects was Dave O’Brien, who in this episode plays a husband designed to demonstrate what’s wrong with the species. The short begins by announcing that its goal is to “present some husbands and wives, with emphasis on some annoying habits of husbands.” These are: the husband who leaves home looking natty and well groomed, leaving a sloppy bathroom mess behind him; the breakfast grouch (his wife pushes a grapefruit in his face, thus avenging her sex against Jimmy Cagney for all movie eternity); the guy who can’t fix anything around the house (“Chances are there’s a guy like him sitting next to you”); the man who constantly loses everything and can’t find it even though it’s right in front of him (one of those would be sitting right next to me); the one who doesn’t notice his wife’s new hat until the good-looking blonde next door comes over and tries it on; the bridge monster, who criticizes his wife’s game; and finally, the problem “waker-upper,” a type who comes in several variations. First there’s the nice guy who gets up on his own, never disturbing his wife, tippy-toeing around quietly—until he hits the kitchen and drops and breaks everything. Then there’s “Slumbering Sam,” who can’t be gotten up even when his wife slaps him silly; and the valiant one who tries to save his wife from hearing the alarm, but pokes her in the nose while trying.

  Natu
rally there was a companion piece for I Love My Husband, But!—the opposite list of complaints. I Love My Wife, But! (1947), another Pete Smith Specialty, wasted no time listing the things that annoy men about their wives. Waiting for a woman to finish dressing when they are going out makes a man “unhappier than a glass blower with the hiccups.” Men hate listening to their wives’ endless gabbing, waiting while they can’t make up their minds when shopping for a hat, and having them say “uh-uh” (meaning “no, no”) to smoking in the house. Then there are the slave drivers who make their husbands do chores on the weekend—Mrs. Simon Legrees, they’re called. The pièce de résistance for the finale is the wife who thinks she can back the car out of the driveway all by herself—a maneuver no wife, it seems, is even capable of accomplishing without knocking down trees and wrecking the car.

  Audiences loved these shorts, which addressed them through a narrator who talks directly to them about what they know all too well to be often true.18 Movies such as the Blondie series did something similar, but without the voice-over pal describing what they could see onscreen and recognize as the experience of their own lives. “Might as well laugh about it” was the effective strategy for these presentations, in which they reached audiences directly through the identification figures of a married couple.