I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  Too Many Husbands uses the story to present a woman directly with a sexier problem: which husband should she choose? It’s quite a problem, since she likes both. (Complaining about the issue, Arthur intones, “These things always happen when I eat veal.”) Suddenly, she realizes she has a good deal—these men are going to fight over her, and in so doing will pay attention to her. “I’ve been a very lonely wife … twice,” she says, thinking she deserves their discomfort and their attempts to woo her. They decide to draw lots for her—“like I was a free trip to Niagara Falls,” she complains.

  Movie posters celebrated the delicious possibilities in Too Many Husbands, but only in advertising. (Photo Credit 2.55)

  If the person stranded is a woman, these movies say, the husband must remain faithful, particularly if they have children (a key issue). If, on the other hand, the stranded person is a man, the woman is free to sleep around, because that’s probably what those gross men would do. Besides, it is stated, “Any woman would be thrilled if her husband fell in love with her all over again.” And two husbands … ? Well. The “infidelity” is a safe form of fantasy for women in the audience, the available soft-core porn of the era. In the end, both films go for saucy resolutions, but true to itself, My Favorite Wife stays within safe boundaries, made deliciously titillating only by the skill of Dunne and Grant.13

  It was always the woman who got to make the choice in the “too many husbands” marriage movie. In My Favorite Wife, Irene Dunne was married to Cary Grant but stranded on a desert island with Randolph Scott. (Photo Credit 2.56)

  Movies about infidelity could shape audience sympathy toward either the male or the female point of view. Was it a henpecked man, desperate for the love he deserved, committing the sin? Or was it the woman who was not properly loved by a cold husband, finding at last the love all women dream of? Whose fault was it? Was it justified? Was it noble or was it cheap? And who had to pay? Because someone for sure was going to have to pay. The very same night Mildred Pierce sleeps with her landlord (and she was actually separated and getting a divorce), her daughter dies of pneumonia. There are direct causal relationships in the movies when infidelity enters the scene. And the location of sympathy for the wronger or the wrongee must be spelled out clearly.

  When it came to deciding where an audience should put its sympathies regarding adultery, most Hollywood movies of the decades 1930–1960 were more sympathetic to women than to men. Marriage was deemed to be a woman’s career, not a man’s. Since marriage stories often starred the iconic female actresses of the studio system, plots were shaped around them and their sufferings; these movies were women’s pictures. For a woman, adultery was thought to be a serious decision, while for a man it might be casual. (If the woman adulterer is an unsympathetic sinner, the movie is built as a cautionary tale.) Thus, the more dynamic plot could be worked up over a woman’s straying, although there were always exceptions. (Carrie, for instance, the 1952 movie made from the Theodore Dreiser novel Sister Carrie, starring Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones, remains true to the original, in which a man is destroyed by his adultery. Similarly, Nora Prentiss [1947], starring Ann Sheridan and Kent Smith, tells a story of a man’s downhill slide after he falls in love and becomes unfaithful.)

  Most movies about infidelity created sympathy for women as a link to female viewers. Two infidelity films offer examples: The Sea of Grass (1947), starring Hepburn and Tracy, and East Side, West Side (1949), with Barbara Stanwyck and James Mason. The wife is the adulterer in Sea of Grass, and the husband is the sinner in East Side, West Side.

  Sea of Grass shows viewers clearly that Katharine Hepburn is a lonely and unappreciated wife. Her husband (Tracy) ignores her for his cattle business and has no sympathy for her eastern ways—her interest in little things like art and beauty and conversation. When a man appears who does like all that, and even more, in the form of Melvyn Douglas, she resists and resists, as is appropriate, but finally gives in as the plot requires. While she is giving birth—in a demure and censorially appropriate place offscreen—she apparently blurts out the truth about the newborn son. He’s Douglas’s, not Tracy’s. (Audiences can infer this by the disgruntled look on Tracy’s face when he exits the birthing room. Viewers have been asked to await the news out in the hallway.) Since the film was made in 1947, no details about the infidelity are ever fully clarified, and yet, as is typical for movies of the time, it is still made abundantly clear. Hepburn is “suitably” punished, separated from both her baby son and her little daughter, and sent into exile. Years later, after much tragedy (too much) has ensued, Hepburn is allowed to return for a formal reunion with Tracy, and the film completes its circle of sin and punishment for its leading lady. The presentation has never once strayed from its position of sympathy for her—not for her sin, the actual adultery, but for her emotional needs, which generated an understandable action. Movies did not condone adultery, but they explained it and thus, by extension, justified it as escapist need.

  East Side, West Side is a marriage film that is somewhat confused. It’s a marriage story but also a murder mystery—who killed Ava Gardner? (As it turns out, a minor character did it, leaving the audience in one of those “Huh?” positions.) Primarily, however, it is the story of the marriage between the very wealthy Stanwyck and the ne’er-do-well Mason. He has been spectacularly unfaithful with Gardner, but has gained his wife’s forgiveness and returned to the fold—a very rich fold—largely because Gardner left town. Alas, she returns, and everything between them starts over. The details are not very interesting, but the final speeches between Stanwyck and Mason are significant. Stanwyck, usually a fiery presence who burns disobedient men with her cigarette lighter, has in this movie effectively played the role of the genteel and long-suffering wife. After Gardner is dead, Mason tries to return to Stanwyck yet again, working his charms to recover status. First, he goes to Stanwyck’s mother (well played by Gale Sondergaard), begging her to intercede because, as he puts it, “your happiness and peace of mind” mean so much. He calls Sondergaard “Mother.” “Mother” tells Mason she cannot help him, because “you’re vain and self-centered and worthless … I no longer have to make you welcome in this house.” Mason is stunned, but warns his mother-in-law he is confident he can worm his way back into Stanwyck’s graces. In that case, says “Mother,” who doesn’t believe it, “it will be dinner as usual next Thursday night.”

  In his attempt to persuade Stanwyck not to leave him (she’s all packed), Mason gives an interesting speech that a viewer has heard many times in movies, a speech designed to remind audiences that it’s important to stick things out, to go the distance. (No matter how badly old Hollywood depicted marriage, it never endorsed divorce.) Mason says he has no real defense, but “I just want you to look at this marriage of ours coldly and objectively. Make a balance sheet of it, the good and the bad, the assets and liabilities, before you throw it away, before you throw away both our lives. We started with as much excitement and hope and love for each other as two people ever had. We started a good marriage, Jess. It grew better as it went along. We came to terms with it … We said a hundred times a week, ‘How did we live before we met?’ We planned exactly how we’d be when we were old. I made you promise not to die before me. You remember?” (He counts on it.) During this speech, which would fit into almost any marriage movie about adultery, Stanwyck has stood listening, her eyes like little slits. She tells him, “Yes, I remember.” However, in a surprise move, she leaves anyway. In the doorway she turns and says, before exiting, “I thought my love for you would never end and if it did the whole world would end … But I was wrong.”

  This is clear punishment for the male adulterer, and strongly, boldly sympathetic to the wronged wife. Stanwyck is not leaving him for someone else (although there may be a future love with a character played by Van Heflin). She does not forgive him. There are no children to influence her, no parents to persuade her. The sanctity of marriage is not held up as a standard to be respected and maint
ained. She just goes, leaving him standing there. The idea of the wife sacrificing for marriage, for her man, for her family and her class, is off the books, out the window. And Mason has mounted the main movie argument: LOVE! We must respect and honor our love, he says, but she doesn’t buy it. Stanwyck packs and leaves in the kind of movie that previously would have had her melting into Mason’s arms and saying, “You’re right, let’s start all over again.” Instead, she’s outta there. When a female moviegoer put her money down, she got sympathy (even empowerment) when the sin was Ava Gardner.

  The 1960s were kicked off by many stories of suburban couples who were facing issues of adultery and divorce. One that maintained the female viewpoint, and created sympathy for an unfaithful wife, is Strangers When We Meet (1960), starring Kim Novak and Kirk Douglas. Based on a novel by Evan Hunter (and with gowns by Jean Louis), the film presents again the suburban world in which active social life is maintained: dinner, picnics, barbecues, and dances; the women dress up to go grocery shopping, wearing high heels as they push their carts down the aisle, keeping busy while the husbands work. Nobody is happily married. Douglas’s wife (Barbara Rush) interferes in his business, and Novak’s husband is cold and unloving, rejecting her advances at bedtime (and Novak’s in a negligee!). Douglas and Novak have a torrid affair, but in the end, Douglas’s wife takes him back (“I want us to be the way we used to be”) and Novak is left with her loneliness and her cold bedroom. Although there is the implication that her future will be more affairs with other good-looking men, Novak is seen sympathetically throughout the film.

  Sympathy for male adulterers was possible, but only under carefully constructed circumstances. Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, and Kay Francis star in a marital triangle that shows how it could be done without the censors clamping down. In Name Only (1939), based on a novel called Memory of Love by Bessie Breuer, sets up a careful situation. Lombard is a commercial artist, supporting herself and her five-year-old daughter. Her husband died four years previously, and she has moved to the country with her divorced sister, Flora. Grant, an extremely rich man, lives nearby with his very social, very evil wife, Kay Francis.

  Lombard is established as innocent, in that she’s not looking for either a husband or a lover, and she works hard for her living. She’s a good mother. And when she first meets him, she doesn’t know that Grant is married. (He forgets to mention it.) Flora is conveniently set up in the film as the voice of anti-love, which in movies is always wrong. A disillusioned divorcee, she tells Lombard that “your husband died while you still had faith in him … You don’t know how men are … Underneath, you’re still romantic and as full of illusions as any schoolgirl.” Flora’s speech delineates the film’s tensions. Flora is right, but Flora is wrong. Lombard is right to believe in love, although she will be hurt, deeply hurt, but still end up rich and with Cary Grant. (Even Flora will reconcile with her husband.)

  The eternal movie triangle: husband, noble lover … and bitchy wife, as portrayed by Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, and Kay Francis, and as defined by such movies as In Name Only. (Photo Credit 2.57)

  In Name Only can justify its position about sympathy for a male adulterer because of Lombard’s widowhood and motherhood, and because she is on the side of true love. Grant can be excused because the adultery is not really presented as such (it’s love), and because he is miserably married to the horrific Francis. Francis is the key figure in absolutely decreeing where the audience’s sympathy should be. She lies, she manipulates, and she doesn’t give a tinker’s damn for Grant. She just wants his money and the social position he buys her. In movie terms, the fact that she doesn’t love him means she shouldn’t have him. He’s got to nearly die first, and Lombard has got to trust him again (as well as nurse him back to health), but the law of the marriage movie is simple: Lombard gets him because she loves him, and he’s sympathetic for the same reason.

  Stories of infidelity on film are clearly influenced by social changes. The shifting attitudes toward adultery, and how movies could manipulate source material to accommodate them, are illustrated by three versions of the Somerset Maugham novel The Painted Veil. The book, first published in 1925, was made into movies in 1934 (starring Greta Garbo, Herbert Marshall, and George Brent), 1957 (called The Seventh Sin and starring Eleanor Parker, Bill Travers, and Jean-Pierre Aumont), and in 2006 (starring Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, and Liev Schreiber). The story is fundamentally the same in all three versions: A young woman marries a doctor who takes her to an Asian country to live. Bored and lonely, she falls under the spell of a sophisticated man and has an adulterous affair. When her husband finds out, he is enraged, and her lover lets her down because his career would be ruined by the scandal. Her husband then punishes her by carting her off to “the interior,” where he puts his medical skills toward making the lives of peasants better. Her surroundings are alien and difficult, but she grows, learning to look outside herself.

  Each of the three films shades the basic tale to appeal to audiences of its era. In the 1934 version, all advertising was simply about Greta Garbo. GARBO, said the posters; and GARBO, said the ads. Some posters had only her name with the film’s title in small letters underneath. Others carried large portraits of Garbo, with her supporting cast and the film title underneath. The casual eye sees only the real draw: the name GARBO—not even GRETA GARBO, just GARBO. Even the credits just say GARBO (all caps). And her name never disappears off the screen: as the other credits roll, her name remains in black letters behind the new information. Nobody was going to be allowed to forget what the main draw was. The 1934 Painted Veil was a star vehicle. The novel was put in service to the Hollywood star system, and, as was the standard policy, no mention of marriage appears in the advertising.

  Garbo’s Painted Veil (directed by Richard Boleslawski) begins with a wedding in the rain—her sister’s. (One of the most astonishing things about the film is that it casts Cecilia Parker, a pudding-faced blonde, as Garbo’s sister.) Thus, the concept of marriage is immediately introduced. At the ceremony, Garbo is thrown together with Herbert Marshall, a scientist who once was her father’s pupil. Garbo envies Marshall his sense of purpose in life, saying it must be wonderful “to be able to have something to absorb oneself.” Marshall is sincere, decent looking, but not very exciting. (When her mother tells her to find a “good husband,” Garbo asks ironically, “Must he be good, Mother? It’s not very exciting to be good.”) Marshall, who is returning to China (“like all the places I haven’t been,” Garbo muses), blurts out a proposal while she’s brewing him a cup of tea. He has been in love with Garbo ever since he first saw her when she was only twelve years old. With nothing else on her horizon, Garbo accepts. Thus begins her adventure toward adultery.

  Significantly, the audience is never shown Garbo actually accepting Marshall’s proposal. After he babbles about loving her, and the tea kettle boils over, she asks for time to think about it. (He says he’d like to change his request for a cup of tea to a scotch and soda. This seems to influence her, as she smiles.) The movie then cuts to Garbo and Marshall in a boat, arriving in China, and married. Cuts like this are efficient, and eliminate boring plot developments the audience already knows are going to happen, but they are also very effective in letting the audience know something important to the story of this marriage: there is no courtship, no falling in love—basically, no kisses. Thus, it’s made clear that Garbo has accepted Marshall, but not because of romance. With nothing else on her horizon, and with her thirst for travel and excitement, she has said yes. The cut, in its own way, explains her adultery.

  Poster, lobby cards, previews, credits—everything related to presenting the first version of The Painted Veil sold Garbo, Garbo, Garbo. No mention of marriage or even love. Just Garbo. (Photo Credit 2.58)

  In China, Garbo meets George Brent, a married attaché at the British embassy. He is not presented as a cheap philanderer, merely as a charming and experienced man with a keen eye for beauty. Since Garbo clearly does not fit i
nto the bridge-playing set at the club, and wants to see the real China, and since Marshall is awfully, awfully busy with his formulae, Brent begins to show Garbo about. An audience is shown this romance, this courtship, and certainly those kisses. Brent says, “It’s fun showing you things you haven’t seen before,” by which he means her excitement thrills him and he wants to have sex with her. Since she is a married woman, he feels no guilt. When he first kisses her, she’s shocked and says, “How could you?” “I could,” is his cheerful reply. He finally asks Garbo the question about her husband that the audience needs answered. “If you are in love with him, why?” When Garbo turns the question back on him about his own wife, he replies simply, guiltlessly, “Not and never have been.”

  In The Painted Veil, Garbo found herself at home with a rubber plant, a teapot, and a starchy husband, Herbert Marshall … (Photo Credit 2.59)

  … but with the opportunity to go out in the moonlight with an eager lover (George Brent), a turban, and the mysteries of the Orient. (Photo Credit 2.60)

  This Painted Veil sets up its adultery very carefully, turning it into love, at least on Garbo’s part. All the footage of the film that would normally be given over to showing a couple falling in love goes to the adulterers. Ultimately, it finds a perfect setting for their physical union: “the festival.” “The festival” is an unnamed Chinese holiday, and it’s a very big festival. Having been kissed and aroused in the afternoon, but running home instead of succumbing, Garbo finds herself yet again sitting at her dinner table, spooning up her soup all alone. Hearing the “festival” outside, she decides she must experience it. She puts on an Asian-style turban, the visual metaphor for the lure of adultery. She then steps out into a dark and velvety night, lit up by moonlight, fireworks, sparklers, and smoke bombs. There are blossoms on the trees, a silvery-gold Chinese fire dragon, gongs, masks, glitter, dancing, twangy music, a sun god with a naked chest, long fingernails, plenty of hokum—and, of course, George Brent. All are out there waiting.