Shorts like the Pete Smith Specialties reveal another issue Hollywood considered in relation to married couples: what did the audience want in a mate—what was a good wife or a good husband? Couples, as they were designed in marriage movies, were partly created to suggest the definition of an ideal mate. Audiences embraced one set of star “love teams” so thoroughly that the actress was labeled “the perfect wife,” even though in real life she was married unsuccessfully four times. Myrna Loy was effectively paired as a wife with many actors, but it all began with William Powell. Their first film together was Manhattan Melodrama (1934), but the one that “wedded” them for all time was The Thin Man (also 1934), in which they played the glamorous screwball couple Nick and Nora Charles. Their pairing as the Charleses was so effective that they went on to star together in five more Thin Man movies.
At first glance, the sophisticated Loy might seem to be the least appropriate candidate for the title of “perfect wife”—why not June Allyson, or Ruth Hussey? No one ever fully defines exactly why this super-elegant and cool female was found to represent the aproned masses better than any other Hollywood actress, but most likely it was all because of her casting as William Powell’s wife in The Thin Man. As Nora Charles, Loy was the epitome of married equality and fun. In the early films, Nora is rich and sheltered and chic, but she gamely enters Nick’s world of guys and dolls, hoods and hoodlums, showing no class judgment or fear.19
The marriage of Nick and Nora Charles was the one most moviegoers coveted. The one with the cocktails, the furs, the noisy parties, the fun, the excitement—and all the money. The Thin Man told audiences that, instead of dull arguments about who was going to take the kids to school … instead of yet another meat loaf on the table … instead of in-laws and bills and dull routines … a married couple could be out on the town trading clever remarks with each other, solving crimes, and throwing back martinis. Loy and Powell are an alternative to Hepburn and Tracy’s yuppie-competition marriage. Hepburn and Tracy have material advantages and freedom from dull routine, but the best they can think to do with it all is try to one‑up each other. Loy and Powell know how to have fun with their assets. And how to cooperate without losing individuality. They’re Fred and Ginger off the dance floor. The Nick and Nora routine is still, almost eighty years after the first Thin Man movie, the marriage everyone thinks is perfect. Of course it’s perfect—it’s not a marriage, it’s a relationship. Nick and Nora (at least in the early films) don’t live a conventional married life. Neither has a job, and they rove from New York to San Francisco, from case to case. Even after they become parents to Nick Jr., the issues of their daily life have more to do with whodunit than with what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it. Nothing interferes between them other than Nick’s cases. Loy’s chore is to dress up and find a way to insert herself into Nick’s sleuthing, and his is to pretend to walk the dog when he’s really going off to chase a murderer … or visit his bookie. The dog, Asta, is more a child to them than their child. (Asta, by the way, is impeccably played by the inestimable Skippy. All over America, people name their dogs Asta, thinking they are naming them after a real dog. They are, but the dog’s name was Skippy.)20
William Powell and Myrna Loy found marital fame as Nick and Nora Charles in the celebrated Thin Man movies: the Charleses “at home” in a gambling den, looking sleek and sophisticated in tuxedo and long gloves (Song of the Thin Man) … (Photo Credit 2.39)
… or “at home” with gangsters and murder invading their domesticity (with Edward Brophy from the original Thin Man). (Photo Credit 2.40)
Loy’s ability to be resigned in the face of utter stupidity made her the perfect wife onscreen because all too often that’s how the wife’s role was depicted. Stand by. Watch horror happen. Stand by, and accept that you have no control other than subterfuge, and the ultimate weapon: the mate’s love. Loy could stand by, all right, but with a look of disdain and an ever-so-slightly raised eyebrow. She could lay down a trench of implied disapproval, disgust, or contained impatience. She was American womanhood—Blondie for the smart set.
As “the perfect wife,” Loy had another asset. She could pair well with any actor. She was comfortably married to William Powell, Cary Grant, Fredric March, Clark Gable, Ronald Colman, Spencer Tracy, Robert Taylor, and Clifton Webb. She adjusted accordingly. For Powell, she was cheeky and sharp, but for Grant, sophisticated and real. With Gable she was sexy, and with Clifton Webb, a suitably desexed life partner. She knew to get in her co-star’s groove, and be the yin to her partner’s yang. If her own screen personality had been more dominant and less laid-back, she could perhaps not have found her stardom. (She underwent a long apprenticeship, often originally cast as an Asian.) She was born to be the other half, but without losing her own presence in the frame. If her half of the married couple was the lesser role, she was never diminished by it. She could establish equality with very little.
A demonstration of why Loy could continue to be thought of as “the perfect wife” beyond Nora Charles is revealed in a scene in the 1948 Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, in which Loy is “married” to Cary Grant. Her ability to play inside a couple, both with and off a male actor, is on full display. When Grant and Loy wake up in the morning in their overcrowded Manhattan apartment, and set about preparing for the day, balancing their needs with those of two young children, it’s clear that someone, somewhere, understood the pressures of daily marital life and knew that Loy could play them effortlessly. (Mr. Blandings was based on an autobiographical book by Eric Hodgins.) When the couple wake up, it’s 7:30 a.m., and the image is focused on a ringing alarm clock. From frame right comes an obviously masculine arm and hand that grope sleepily around until the buzzer is found and shut off. This is immediately followed by an obviously female arm that emerges from frame left to turn it back on … back and forth, back and forth. A relationship has been established. The man wants to avoid the inevitable, and the woman won’t let him. Grant and Loy: Mr. and Mrs. Blandings.21
As this urban couple arise, they enact an honest early-morning ritual for a couple who’ve been together a long time. Grant and Loy barely speak. He gets up and blindly begins to drag himself through what he has to do—shave, shower, dress, and juggle his timing for the use of the single bathroom to avoid its monopoly by his two young daughters. Loy does not get out of bed … she just sits up and stares blindly ahead. Then she drops her head and, still sitting, goes back to sleep. He brings a cup of coffee and hands it to her. She responds by murmuring an automatic and impersonal thank you to him. They never look at each other, acknowledge each other, or register each other’s presence. Each knows what the other needs, wants, feels, and will do. She knew he’d turn the alarm off and that it was her job to turn it back on to force him up. He knew she’d not be able to get out of bed without her coffee. When they finally begin to communicate, the issue is where are his socks? “Jim, dear, I do wish you’d try to make a little effort,” she murmurs, barely aware of what he’s asking. “I’ll try, dear,” is his own detached, meaningless reply. He might as well be promising to find a cure for cancer. (Grant and Loy are dancing their version of Laurel and Hardy’s “commence a-prancin’.”)
Throughout Mr. Blandings, Loy nags at Grant when she has to, and he nags back. (“Bicker, bicker, bicker,” observe their daughters.) Most of the time, however, she accepts her fate, knowing that nothing is ever really going to change between them. They’re a committed couple. Whatever happens with the bum deal they make in buying a house—they pay double what it’s worth, then learn they have to tear it down and rebuild—they’ll just go on: they’ll argue, lose faith, get jealous and resentful, but they’ll stick it out. In short, they’re married. (“It isn’t a house we’re building, it’s a home.”) Audiences read the Blandings as a real couple because the movie doesn’t just stress their domestic situation (something of a disaster); it also gives it hope through the building of a new home, a newer, better domesticity.
Loy lasted longer as a top st
ar than many other actresses of her generation. (Perhaps that was because she aged so gracefully, so negligibly. Always beautiful and youthful, she had no need to hide her maturity.) Unlike other great female stars who began their careers in the late 1920s or early 1930s—Joan Crawford and Ginger Rogers are two good examples—Loy never became frozen-faced or hardened. She always remained relaxed, natural. Where another contemporary, Katharine Hepburn, embraced the signs of aging as an asset, letting her hair grow gray and showing herself to be an unusually spry, agile, and energetic older woman, Loy just seemed to stay the same. In other words, she accepted age; she neither used it nor had anything to fear from it. In this same way, onscreen she accepted marriage, her husband’s idiocies, and whatever tiresome chore came her way. She was long-suffering, but in the most delicious, languid way possible, a way that said: “Well, I will put up with this, but believe me, it’s not because I have to.” She clearly indicated what nonsense it all was, but she accepted. As a result, she endured. There was an honesty to her, and a subtext that put her quietly in charge of everything.
Myrna Loy continued to play the perfect wife throughout her career, here with “husband” Cary Grant, giving him architectural instructions in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. (Photo Credit 2.41)
If Loy was “the perfect wife,” was there a movie “perfect husband”? This issue reveals how differently Hollywood defined the roles for a married man and a married woman. If Loy is the perfect wife because of her patient forbearance, then the perfect husband is … W. C. Fields. He forbears! Right in your face. Nobody forbears the way Fields forbears. Trooping along, muttering under his breath, a phony smile pasted on his puss, Fields can weasel his way out of any tight spot, or at the very least, bear up under its weight. Fields is no real parallel to Loy: he’s the Imperfect Husband, and as such represents the male aggrieved rather than the male as an object of female desire. Where Loy is onscreen to demonstrate to men what a perfect wife is all about (a companion to play with, a beauty to love and possess, an equal in wit and sense of fun) and to show women what an ideal life could be (as well as to remind them to put up with things on their own terms), Fields is there to endorse a male idea that it is women who wear the pants in marriage and that men should best avoid the situation if they want any peace out of life. For men, he was a comic relief from an oppressive married status; for women, he was a nightmare husband.
Fields does not always play a married man—but when he does, look out. He’s a really mean version of Dagwood. Fields makes a triumph out of his loser status, ramping it up into our American favorite: the underdog. He makes kvetching an art form, a noble cry for recognition and recompense. Oddly enough, he is, although perfectly harassed, a perfectly believable husband. The movie business always claimed that female filmgoers didn’t like Fields—only men did. (I’m one female who disputes this claim—I find him hilarious.) Fields represented a man trapped in a horrible situation, and genuinely angry about it. He struck back in whatever little ways he could (such as getting drunk in the basement). Fields is never really half of a couple even when he plays a married man.
Three of his movies illustrate Fields as the husband’s favorite husband: My Little Chickadee (1940), It’s a Gift (1934), and The Bank Dick (1940). Each provides a slight variation on the role. In Chickadee he’s a newlywed. In Gift, he’s satisfactorily settled down, and in Bank Dick he’s trapped in a marriage that’s as horrible as it gets, because when W. C. Fields is a married man, he is a miserable man, a beleaguered man. It’s a Gift weds him to a wife (Kathleen Howard) who just never quits. Fields is the classic male victim of a shrew. “Of all the driveling idiots!” is her standard evaluation of her mate, and she follows with a never-ending set of instructions for him (“Don’t smoke at the table,” “Don’t throw matches on the floor”), a continuous list of complaints (“I haven’t a stitch to my name,” “I have no maid, you know, and probably never shall”), and a real lineup of warnings (“If any money comes into this family, I’m going to handle it!” “I am the master of this household!”), always at top volume, never letting up (“Are you listening to me? … I just have to SHOUT, SHOUT, SHOUT!”). Her admonition when he trips on a roller skate and falls down the stairs is, “Don’t be kicking Norman’s skates all around the house. I just got them fixed.” (“Do it again, Pop,” says his ruthless kid.) As he finally falls asleep one night, she yells, “Wake up and go to sleep!” He suffers a domestic hell of rotten children, collapsing porch swings, wrong telephone numbers, noisy milkmen, and falling coconuts (don’t ask). Each morning, trying to shave and shoved away from the mirror by everyone, he dances a domestic ballet of disregard, forced to use first a small mirror and then the reflection off the bottom of a can. His world shows both the small, routine ways an ordinary man must suffer at home and the bizarre, unexpected ones (those coconuts). Finally frustrated, Fields winds up to take a swing at one of his nasty children, who has complained that Fields doesn’t love him. “Don’t you strike that child!” warns his wife. “Well, he’s not going to tell me I don’t love him!” is Fields’s only defense. There is no good news in his married world, but Fields forbears.22
In comparing Loy’s “perfect wife” to Fields, the cultural attitude to male and female roles in marriage is clear. Loy’s duty is to put up with her husband, but she’s allowed a little attractively covert attitude about it. Fields gets to damn women with misogynistic fervor, expressing criticism all over the frame.
Sometimes Hollywood spent a great deal of time in the movies talking about what men and women wanted in a mate—what should the other half of their coupling be for maximum happiness? Again, they had no answers. In Valley of the Sun (1942), a character speaks the truth when an older man tells a young one, “There are only two things in life a woman wants … and nobody knows what they are.” What the movies will admit is that male and female goals regarding marriage are different. In Men in White (1934) Clark Gable plays a driven doctor, Myrna Loy his wealthy, pampered fiance. She feels he should be spending more time with her after they marry; he disagrees because his career is so important to him. She explains to him that she, too, is “trying to have a career: you!” Gable, patiently talking to her as if she’s a child, explains that his work and his success will make their life together important. If that doesn’t happen, she will lose faith in her own “career.” The movie presents this opinion as not necessarily the male outlook, or even a woman’s outlook, but as society’s preferred plan for a man and a woman. The man is supposed to drive himself to be successful while the woman stands behind him, receiving her reward indirectly. The Fountainhead (1949), on the other hand, a filmed version of Ayn Rand’s novel, presents a more specifically male/female disagreement. When the willful heroine (Patricia Neal) confronts the purist architect she loves (Gary Cooper), each articulates a male/female polarity regarding marriage. “Take a meaningless job,” she advises him, even begs him, “and we’ll live only for each other.” In response to her passionate plea, he has a simple and direct answer: “No.” This is the man’s view versus the woman’s. She says live for love so I can be happy, and he says that won’t work for me: I’m an architect.
Marriage movies often used a couple this way to define what men and women wanted from each other. They suggested that men wanted something noble in a wife, something fine and beautiful and pure. (This meant he wanted sex.) What a woman wanted was never that simple. If she was a bad person, she wanted a meal ticket, and if she was a good one, she wanted love; but … indications are that what she really wanted was just to get out of town, to escape, to become free and/or empowered. And yet, when movies addressed the responsibility of what an audience member should want in a mate, what a man should want in a wife seemed easier to define. Working with the idea that a man should want something good and reliable, it was easy to make a movie in which a man made a bad choice. Movies warned men that if they didn’t look out, they’d settle for physical beauty (which meant sex), and if they didn’t keep a grip on their
egos, they’d fall for someone who just pretended to admire them. Over and over again in the movies, men marry the wrong woman because she is beautiful (sexy) or because she flatters him into it. Women also marry for the wrong reasons, but they have higher stakes. They marry for money or for adventure or because they have to (again, sex). Their errors are more spectacular, but also more fun.
There is a somewhat melancholy aspect to certain films that indirectly present an audience of women with what they want in husbands. The Forbidden Street, a 1949 film starring Maureen O’Hara and Dana Andrews, illustrates the idea. Based on the best-selling novel Britannia Mews by Margery Sharp, the film is covert but clear in suggesting that most women want a more successful, cleaner, more supportive and loving version of the man they actually married. O’Hara plays a reasonably wealthy young lady whose big family home overlooks an alley: the Britannia Mews. O’Hara is drawn there by her sense of life, adventure, freedom, and, of course, sex. As a young adult, she defies her parents and runs away to wed her drawing teacher, a bearded Dana Andrews whose voice is dubbed. The marriage goes sour over his inability to make a living, his drunkenness, and his admission that he never really loved her. After shocking her with this cruel statement, Andrews conveniently falls down the stairs and dies. O’Hara, having been disowned by her family, is left alone in the slum world. Quite soon, however, a slightly tipsy ne’er-do-well comes along: another Dana Andrews, this time without his beard and speaking in his own voice.
Maureen O’Hara managed to find two versions of the same husband in The Forbidden Street: Dana Andrews as a bad one, bearded and unreliable … (Photo Credit 2.42)
… and also as a good one, clean-shaven and watching out for his little woman (with Sybil Thorndike). (Photo Credit 2.43)
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