I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  Vivacious Lady juxtaposes these two marriages. It definitely endorses the younger one, and definitely criticizes the older one. It’s an example of a movie comedy in which the richer, better-educated, snobbier characters have to learn they are wrong, and must learn not only to accept the hardworking, commoner, more down-to-earth characters, but also to know that people who are “without” are better than they are. Since marriage movies existed to reassure audiences, they pretend that class differences can be overcome by love, but what they actually demonstrate is that characters use manipulation and lying to get the job done. The older marriage is successful only because the wife is a trickster; the younger one between two unsuited people from different backgrounds, with different goals, is resolved through chicanery and comedy. (If it’s funny enough, any marriage problem can be overcome.) Casting Ginger Rogers as the uneducated wife who hoofs it in a nightclub helps solve a large part of the class problem. Rogers has a phenomenal wardrobe, and the audience, like Jimmy Stewart, first sees her bathed in a white-hot spotlight of glamour, presented as desirable, as a star. By opting in favor of the unmoneyed, lesser-educated class (the have-nots), as represented by a radiant Ginger Rogers, Hollywood didn’t lose its audience. Everyone would be willing to step down to Rogers—the men to bed her and the women to look like her.

  When Jimmy Stewart goes to New York City, he finds a fabulous bride (Ginger Rogers, in a nightclub), but bringing her back to his college classroom isn’t as easy as he thought it would be. With Phyllis Kennedy and Grady Sutton. (Photo Credit 2.69)

  Jimmy Stewart wasn’t the only small-town brother asked to retrieve an erring sibling from the clutches of a big-city gal. In The Shining Hour, Robert Young travels from the family dairy farm (a pretty palatial place) to New York to knock some sense into Melvyn Douglas before it’s too late. Actually, it is too late: he’s already proposed to the famous nightclub dancer played by Joan Crawford, who has herself warned him it’s not going to work. “The difference between the Wisconsin Lincolns and the Tenth Avenue Rileys is more than just a thousand miles,” she’s told him in one of her many class-motivated refusals to his proposals. Just before Young arrives, Crawford finally gives in. Not only does Young himself end up madly in love with Crawford’s character, “Olivia” (real name Maggie), but the third sibling, a very irate Fay Bainter, burns their honeymoon house down. Unfortunately, all that does is trap Young’s own wife, the patient and forgiving Margaret Sullavan. Crawford has to run into the conflagration and rescue her while the men stand around.

  Movies such as Vivacious Lady and The Shining Hour, the first a comedy and the second a drama, illustrate the same fundamental lesson about class in marriage. If you marry outside your tribe, something is likely to destroy you, your home, your career, and certainly your ill-considered marriage. These movie lessons are tribal—they remind audiences of the basics the elders want enforced. Your own ways are the best, the safest, and the most reliable. One of the great achievements of the Hollywood movie was its ability to reinforce the tribe’s rules while offering a glamorous glimpse of the other: the bride from the nightclubs of New York City. Overall, there’s a fundamental endorsement of the American concept of democracy in such stories. The bride, despite her adoring audiences, her furs and gowns, her tiny feet that fly over the parquet dance floor, is at heart someone who wants what Wisconsin (or the audience) has: a home, a family, and love.

  If one is going to marry outside one’s class, the direction to go is for the most part downward. To be happy, a rich man or woman should marry someone from the lower classes, an energetic opposite, full of life and good old American know-how. For instance, in One More Tomorrow (1946), rich boy Dennis Morgan tries to marry working girl Ann Sheridan, but she initially spurns him. The conniving Alexis Smith catches him on the rebound and marries him solely for his money, although promising faithfully to be a happy homebody and have lots of children. (Earlier, a friend tells Smith that “there’s more to marriage than a shopping trip,” and she cynically replies, “Like what, for instance?”) Smith turns Morgan’s life into a false hell of socializing, political correctness, and lack of love (and children). The lesson is obvious: working girl Sheridan was the right one for him. She would have given his life purpose, working alongside him and having kids, too.34

  For Americans, one of the simplest ways to delineate a sense of “class” or any hierarchical difference was just plain sex. Male vs. female: two different worlds, two different levels of mobility, two different, albeit oversimplified and sexist, attitudes toward life. In Woman of the Year (1942), Hepburn and Tracy marry across “class” lines that are essentially male and female. He’s a sportswriter (male) and she’s a high-class political columnist (female for the times—the brink of World War II, when Eleanor Roosevelt was setting a pace for women). He’s ballpark and pub, she’s the corridors of Washington and cocktail parties, yet they fall in love, marry, and have to sort it out.

  Joan Crawford, another import from the nightclub scene, tries to be a good wife to Melvyn Douglas, but disapproving in-laws Fay Bainter, Robert Young, and Margaret Sullavan hover in the background in The Shining Hour. (Photo Credit 2.70)

  It’s love at first sight between Hepburn and Tracy in Woman of the Year, both on and off the set. She’s a globe-trotting columnist and he’s a sportswriter, but they wed anyway.

  Woman of the Year, a delightful film, gets its strength from the fact that its co-stars, playing two oddly matched individualists who fall in love, were in fact, offscreen, two individualists who fell in love. And it shows. The movie story charmingly reverses male-female marriage ideas. She’s too busy for him, forgets to come home for dinner, neglects an adopted war refugee, and doesn’t notice his new hat—all things associated with husbandly behavior. When he finally leaves her, she chases him down to make breakfast and prove her love. Much has been made by feminists over the clever political analyst’s inability to work a waffle iron, but the point of the movie, as stated clearly by Tracy, is that anyone can make breakfast; he just wants her, as herself, to be with him as his companion. By reversing the traditional marital roles—Tracy becomes a sort of wife, Hepburn a powerful husband—the movie suggests that it’s wise to know where you fit and marry accordingly. The concept was simultaneously strengthened and diminished by its remake, the stylish Designing Woman of 1957. Gregory Peck plays the Tracy role, and he’s still a successful sportswriter. Lauren Bacall takes over the Hepburn part, but she’s not a powerhouse political figure—she’s a fashion designer. She is highly successful, independent, and wealthy, but her role is feminized by the standards of the time. He’s sports, and she’s fashion. They really are in two different worlds. (Tracy and Hepburn were working for the same newspaper, just in separate departments.) On the one hand, Peck and Bacall finally understand each other and come together in Designing Woman, which says something honest about compromise. On the other hand, it also suggests men and women don’t like the same things and can never live together, being, as they are, fundamentally different. It’s the class issue sexualized, polarized, even trivialized.

  Difference, for the movies, was difference. Making marriage work was an unlikely task in which you needed everything on your side. Movies could call it “class,” but what it meant was an unmistakable attitude toward matrimony that the audience understood: marriage was hard to make work, so, once again, you’d better marry within your own kind.

  INCOMPATIBILITY (COMPETITION, CONTROL, COMMUNICATION)

  Incompatibility movies had multiple goals and different shadings and different tones of comedy or tragedy, but they all boiled down to one thing: they were about the marital mistake. They were all about not getting along with your mate, about the reasons your mate is wrong, about relieving your disappointment (through laughter or empathy). These movies speak loudly to people who don’t like being married, or at least have decided they don’t much like the person they’re married to. Of course, in the great tradition of the history of motion pictures, they are also
charmingly designed for people who do like their mates, or are glad they got married, etc., etc. These are the heart of the “I do” and “I don’t” versions of married life. Incompatibility is clever, and easily varied, but it also carries a melancholy subtext. Movies that depict competition between men and women, the day-to-day fight for control, or a lack of any real communication all carry a sadness running underneath the surface. They speak to loneliness, the desire for a true companion, for balance and for comfort. They are a desperate subliminal cry for love and an even more desperate cry for what was promised by the romantic comedy. Those couples all started out disliking each other and then found harmony and joy. They reconciled all of their little issues—so why can’t we? Incompatibility seems trivial, solvable, but it’s the murky category into which all the bad stuff gets dumped. These films say to audiences: “Laugh if you can at the well-written version of the marriage movie that is, in fact, usually trying to pretend it’s a romantic comedy, but in your heart you know the truth.” The subliminal message was that marriage isn’t like the movies, and not like you thought it was going to be. That was the point of the “incompatibility” marriage: it was used to illustrate conflict, control issues, competition, and lack of communication between a man and a woman, with or without the laughs.

  “Incompatibility” was a subject well understood by Hollywood. In fact, grounds for divorce in that world were almost always “incompatibility,” so much so that it became a familiar comedian’s schtick for jokes about movie stars. (It was also called “irreconcilable differences” in Hollywood divorce cases.) A classic example of how easily the concept could be defined is the opening scene of The Bride Wore Boots (1946), starring Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Cummings.35 A couple are horseback riding along a trail in an idyllic setting. The very first words heard on the sound track present what is obviously a very old quarrel between Stanwyck and Cummings, who have already been wed seven years. As she is reminding him how much she really, really loves horses, he is seen behind her falling off his. As she sits her mount perfectly, ignoring his dilemma, she nags about how he said he loved horses before they wed. (“On a boat,” he reminds her.) He says he actually hates horses: “First thing I remember hating was my hobby horse … I hate merry-go-rounds … I hate Black Beauty … I’ve wanted to tell you this for seven long years.” She listens, and asks him the thing all marriage movies ask: “What’s happened to us, Jeff, what’s the matter?” He responds bitterly, “You mean, besides horses?” This movie opens directly into incompatibility, fully defined, using horses as the metaphor. As is always the case in these two-faced movies about marriage, it will end there, too. To win Stanwyck back, Cummings is forced to ride a bad horse in an amateur riding contest, getting thrown and nearly breaking his neck. This illustrates the Evel Knievel Theory of Marriage: no matter how unlikely you are to succeed at your task, just keep getting up and trying to do it again. “My hero!” she cries over his bandaged body. They kiss. All’s well. According to The Bride Wore Boots, a perfect marital relationship would have a man trying and trying by falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up, and finally nearly killing himself so his bride can claim him as her hero. It’s a story of incompatibility, but incompatibility made allegedly compatible by a comedy overlay with sinister undertones.

  Hollywood was skilled at depicting incompatibility. In 1941’s Appointment for Love, starring Charles Boyer and Margaret Sullavan, almost everything on the screen screams, “No, no, no, a marriage between these two will never work.” The first thing an audience sees is a couple standing in front of a bed, locked in a passionate kiss. But then a stage curtain comes down, revealing the scene as part of a play, a false marital happiness. One could leave right there and have had the only moment of real entertainment the film has to offer. Onscreen, however, events plow onward. In the audience sits Sullavan, a very bored theatregoer, barely able to stay awake. She grabs her wrap and tries to flee, but before she can get up, the cry of “author, author” is heard, and she’s trapped when from out of the wings comes that author, a very pleased Charles Boyer. As he begins to address the crowd (on his own behalf), Sullavan sits back down and promptly dozes off, her head rolling forward. Boyer notices, and armed with the ironclad ego of a theatrical writer/director, he assumes she’s fainted—how could he possibly be boring her? Boyer calls out the line one hears only in the movies: IS THERE A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE? Sullavan snaps awake at once, ready to go, because—and here’s our big witty reveal—she’s a doctor!

  Appointment for Love has opened up grounded in a fake reality (the stage scene), a grotesque misunderstanding, a display of egoism, a lack of mutual appreciation, and a disconnected professionalism. In short, it has established all too well its theme of incompatibility. In their first meaningful conversation, Boyer tells Sullavan that “love is illogical and unreasonable,” and she explains to him that, no, “love is logical, a chemical reaction.” Naturally, within minutes they are wed.

  Dr. Margaret Sullavan checks out playwright husband Charles Boyer with her stethoscope. Is he up to a nightly Appointment for Love? Or will their separate schedules, hers by day and his by night, render him incapacitated and her appointment schedule out-of-date? (Photo Credit 2.72)

  The film then devotes itself to the problems of their married world. Because he works all night and sleeps all day, and she gets up bright and early to have breakfast at 7 a.m. and walk to work, their “incompatibility” is defined as temporal. (When Sullavan suggests they have lunch, Boyer laments: “In the middle of the night?”) When he wants her to meet him after his show, she can’t because she never stays up late. (Of course, when we first saw her, she was out on the town alone, in an evening gown, attending a theatrical opening night.) Sullavan takes charge. “When we were married you knew that I was a doctor and that I was going on with my work. I have to be at the hospital at all hours, and you couldn’t possibly fit your life into that kind of crazy routine.” She organizes things accordingly. His apartment is on the seventeenth floor, so she rents one for herself on the twenty-second. That way, they won’t disturb each other going in and out. (Boyer says, “I only know one thing. When a man marries a woman it’s because he wants to be married to her.”) Sullavan’s solution is designed to be clever, our modern surprise twist on their love, but it’s merely tedious. The movie is in no way a portrait of a real marriage. They never consummate their vows during the running time of the film, and they are denied all forms of domesticity except for a single breakfast together. (Eating lunch in a restaurant, which they do once, doesn’t constitute “domesticity.” Technically, this movie probably shouldn’t even count as a marriage movie.) Boyer and Sullavan are a couple who spend no time together and don’t even live in the same space. (Sullavan says the different apartments will keep their marriage “perfect.”)

  Appointment for Love lays out the very modern issue of the two-career family, but it never resolves the problem. It drops it with a kiss. Although they are both free to do their own work, Boyer and Sullavan are living in a fundamentally unworkable situation. She says the most important thing is for a marriage to last, and he says the most important thing is for it to begin. (Women want security; men want sex.) When Boyer takes his troubles to his producer, Eugene Palette, Palette lays out his answer as if it were a marriage movie plot: “Act I, wife won’t play house. Act II, husband makes wife jealous. Act III, they wind up in each other’s arms. Curtain falls.” This, apparently, was the play Sullavan was watching when she fell asleep in the first place. (Boyer’s no dummy. He evaluates the idea as “too old-fashioned.”) The movie plays out with farcical elevator rides to the wrong floor, rival lovers, faked jealousies, and a confused elevator boy—all distractions grafted onto a basic story of incompatibility that was meant to be charming, witty, surprising, but that ends up just proving its own plot twist: Boyer and Sullavan are incompatible.

  Unfortunately, seen today, many allegedly charming stories of male/female marital competition often do convey the opposite
of what was originally intended. The Moon’s Our Home (1936) is similar to Appointment with Love in this regard. Despite the charm of its leads, Henry Fonda and (again) Margaret Sullavan, the story undermines itself. Sullavan is a famous movie star (Cherry Chester) whose real name is Sarah Brown, and Fonda is Anthony Amberton, an equally famous writer of books with titles like Astride the Himalayas. His real name is John Smith. Her marital philosophy is that it should be “like a ski jump, a sudden swift recklessness, starting on the heights, leaping into the void, never knowing the end, never caring.” His is more basic: “Give me a simple primitive woman with a small, high chest.” The plot maneuvers them to Moonsocket, New Hampshire, known to each other as Brown and Smith. (It is carefully explained to the audience that he never goes to the movies so he has no idea who she really is, but there’s no explanation for her not knowing who he is, since everyone else does. It just assumed that any moviegoer would realize a famous star would never read a book.) Marriage is treated as a game, and yet also offered up as the single most important goal that either could pursue. “I hate marriage,” he says, “it’s so unimportant.” He then promptly proposes and she accepts. They fight their way onward to the expected finale that unites them. He’s still arrogant and devoted to his career, and she’s still spoiled and devoted to hers, but they’re married, and marriage is the sacred goal of love. Never mind that he tricks her, puts her in a straitjacket, and then kisses her in the “romantic” conclusion. Like Sullavan and Boyer, Sullavan and Fonda are incompatible. The movie is so good at defining how inappropriate they are together, the lesson learned reverses the original purpose.