I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  When one looks at the history of the American motion picture, one identifies a great many dominating female characters. Obviously, making a movie built around a great female movie star required that her character get out and do something to generate plot complications. Movies about marriages, if they were to feature two major Hollywood players, needed significant actions for both characters. Thus, “incompatibility” often meant a couple in competition with each other in some fashion: opposites in a law case in Adam’s Rib (1949), a sheepherder and a rancher in The Westerner (1940); on different sides of a feud in Roseanna McCoy (1949); and many other variations.

  Hollywood moguls really understood competition. They lived it daily. Thus, many movies about professional couples suggest that happiness and marital longevity are rare when both partners work outside the home. Whenever the movies present a couple who are working together, the result is usually going to be competition, resentment, and other people hovering around waiting to hop into bed with one of the leads.

  Show business was a perfect setting in which to pair two stars in an “incompatibility” conflict that could stress the power dynamics between two professionals. Musicals were particularly useful, because they were an easy way to make the woman an equal to the man. Given the glamour-girl musical stars of the studio era—Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, et al.—it was believable that the woman could even triumph over the man, outsucceed him, as it were.

  Many films of marital competition and discord are set in a show-business format. The granddaddy of the form is The Dance of Life (1929), also known as Burlesque and starring Hal Skelly and Nancy Carroll. There’s also You’re My Everything (1949), as well as Love Me or Leave Me (1955), A Star Is Born (all three versions, 1937, 1954, and 1976), April Showers (1948), When My Baby Smiles at Me (1948), Kiss Me, Kate (1953), Orchestra Wives (1942), I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951), The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), Everything I Have Is Yours (1952), and Blue Skies (1946), among others.36 Musicals often put all the negative issues of marriage forward—competition, money, control, the struggle to get ahead, adultery—and then disguised them through musical numbers and the glamour of show business. The couple starts out poor and happy, uniting perfectly in song and dance. The big chance comes—but only one of them is called. The other must sacrifice. Fame goes to the head of the one who has it, or the mate’s success destroys the one who doesn’t. And walking around everywhere is temptation: unclad other women and rich sugar daddies, all of whom want the partner.37

  The Barkleys of Broadway is about Josh and Dinah Barkley (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers). As always, when Astaire and Rogers dance, it’s easy to see they are perfectly wed: rapturously interpreting “The Way You Look Tonight,” they’re in sync, the living embodiment of the concept of harmony. When they aren’t dancing, however, they bicker. This, Hollywood tells us, is marriage: heaven and hell. The heaven can be real on the dance floor if you’re Astaire and Rogers. Otherwise, you’ve just got to go out to the movies—yet again, the solution to be offered for a reasonable price.

  Astaire is the dominant member of the Barkley team. As such, he is both mentor and parent figure to his wife in their working world. The problem is that he carries this superiority over into their private life. The question arises: could she ever have been a success without him as her Svengali? The issue hovers over their dance partnership and also over their marriage. To answer for herself, Rogers leaves Astaire and goes off with a pretentious French director to play Sarah Bernhardt in legitimate theater, where she allegedly has a great triumph.38 It seems as if she can be a success without Astaire—but, the film shows the audience, not really. Behind the scenes, she cannot work with the French director, so Astaire hides in the theater to watch rehearsals, then imitates the Frenchie over the telephone, calling her at night and giving her instructions in secret. Astaire gives Rogers her success as a theater actress, just as he gave her a musical success. The job of the audience is to endorse the physical union of Astaire and Rogers as dancers and ask no further questions. (Sarah Bernhardt indeed. Could she tap-dance?)

  A movie such as The Barkleys of Broadway is subliminally about the wife’s role in a marriage. No matter how much music there is, or how many feathers Rogers puts on, the movie cannot disguise the fact that the plot suggests that a wife and a husband should not break up a working partnership. To accomplish this, the wife must understand her proper role. The subtext of such a movie was clear: to be compatible in marriage, a wife should not compete.

  The changes in moviegoing audiences regarding charming musicals that easily reconcile a competitive incompatibility are illustrated by a latter-day example, Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977). The story reflects a different perspective on the female role. Liza Minnelli is not only free to compete, but also to win the competition with her husband, played by Robert De Niro, and also to become an international superstar, single mom, and independent force. To bolster the realism, De Niro is not left behind in the gutter—or dead in a convenient war or automobile accident. Good musician that he is, he becomes the owner of a successful nightclub and is well remembered for his one great hit record. He isn’t poor, or a nobody, but he’s not, let’s face it, Liza Minnelli in her 1970s prime.

  In New York, New York, De Niro represents all the reasons women could be frustrated with marriage. He’s unfaithful, unreliable, angry, and abusive, jealous of his wife’s success, and unable to make his own career work at her level. Furthermore, he’s outrageously self-focused and uncaring. At his wife’s bedside in the hospital just after she’s given birth, he breaks down and cries over their impending separation. He wipes his eyes and blows his nose on her bedsheets, explaining that he can’t use his pocket handkerchief because “it’s the only one I have.” (This scene might just be the one to illustrate why women divorce their husbands.) Writing in the New York Times, critic Stephanie Zacharek said the characters in New York, New York “know the real meaning of singin’ in the rain.”

  The marriage presented in New York, New York ends in divorce and never retracts that status. The story is not told in flashbacks. It presents a couple with different agendas, levels of ability to succeed, and an inability to adjust to each other. In the end, although the opportunity to reconcile presents itself to them, both avoid the trap. A movie married couple has learned a lesson, and the era of the 1970s doesn’t require reconciliation for a happy ending. De Niro and Minnelli are the new version of Josh and Dinah Barkley.

  Musicals about married couples who struggle have one issue that separates them from other marriage movies: they’re telling stories that are essentially excuses for musical numbers.39 Because of the inherent joy and optimism usually attached to performance, most of these stories, unlike New York, New York, can hit bottom but bounce back in time for a happy finale that erases all discord. Everyone can shuffle off to Buffalo. Most musicals end with a big wow number, often the performance of the title song, with both male and female leads involved. This concludes a story with a strong sense of union, or a simple erasure of conflict.

  It was also possible for a musical number to be used for an ironic statement or subtle comment on marriage. In The Great Ziegfeld, for instance, Ziegfeld married the French chanteuse Anna Held (Luise Rainer, in an Oscar-winning role). On the date of their first anniversary, she is seen onstage, happily performing the song: “It’s delightful to be married, to be-be-be-be married, / With a house, a man, a family, / When you laugh and play the livelong day, / That’s the life for me.” Radiant, at the top of her game, Held returns to her dressing room to find her anniversary gifts: a roomful of lavish floral displays, a loving note, a diamond necklace with matching bracelet. Holding her sparklers up to the light, she exults, “All the flowers in the world and the stars from the heavens, too!” She rushes upstairs to the chorus girls’ dressing room to share her good fortune, but one of those girls is the beautiful blonde who will soon replace her and have her own flowers and diamonds. With the great efficiency of 1930s movies, wi
thin brief minutes a newspaper headline appears on screen: ANNA HELD LEAVES ZIEGFELD. The audience is then shown the title character (William Powell), alone in his lavish apartment, picking out a tune on his piano: “Oh, it’s delightful to be married … ” The former marital joy and affirmation is sadly undercut by the ironic use of the tune. Instead of being a celebration, the song becomes an ominous warning about the longevity of happiness in marriage. Another ironic juxtaposition, without a song, is the scene in which Rainer, with tears streaming down her face, congratulates Powell on the telephone about his new marriage. Assuring him that she herself is “so happy, so excited about my new play,” she also pretends great happiness for him. After she hangs up, she breaks down and sobs, saying she only divorced him because she thought it would bring him back. Joy and misery over marriage are again played as the true picture of what happens.

  There is a subcategory to the competition issue in marriage movies in which a couple work together and do not run into problems. It’s a story in which one of the two partners, almost always the woman, consciously steps back out of the spotlight and becomes “the little woman behind the great man.”40 These films are almost always biographies, and the approach suggested this was the only way to achieve greatness if you’re married: one of you has to serve the other one. The “little woman” movies include The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Wilson (1944), Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940), and The Magnificent Yankee (1950), among others. Significantly, the “little woman” is strong, intelligent, and wise, but always played by an actress who is not of the top tier of stardom: Ruth Gordon, Ann Harding, Ruth Hussey, etc. The actress embodies the concept: she is not a star.

  There are also marriage movies in which real-life couples are depicted as equals, even though the man is far more famous. Such biopics about marriage include The President’s Lady (1953, about Rachel and Andrew Jackson), Eleanor and Franklin (the 1976 TV movie about the Roosevelts), and Cheaper by the Dozen (1950, about Frank Gilbreth Sr., a famous time-management expert, and his engineer wife, Lillian). In these cases the casting announces the equality: Susan Hayward and Charlton Heston as the Jacksons, Jane Alexander and Edward Herrmann as the Roosevelts, and Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy as the Gilbreths. The “equality” on film regarding these marriages is tempered by clever plotting. The President’s Lady is turned into a story of class, in which Heston must defend Hayward’s honor again and again. In the case of the Gilbreths, Loy works alongside her husband but also runs their home and cares for their children. She steps up into the spotlight and out into the world only because she must, after he dies, to feed her family and to carry on his work. And the Roosevelts are now almost equally revered: Eleanor’s lifelong service is known and respected by Americans, and she has become a person in her own right.

  But for the most part, “great man” movies suggest that there was only room for one boss, one star, one leader, in every couple. Otherwise, there will be destructive incompatibility. This philosophy finds its most extreme expression in movies where the husband is a clergyman. In movies, a religious marriage is the complete opposite of a show-biz or legal-profession marriage. A movie centered on religion openly tells viewers there must be no competition in marriage. The couple’s relationship is the background to a larger issue of affirmation of belief, and the marriage functions as proof that faith can keep them going. They are united toward a higher purpose, one that constantly asks them to deflect their own small and petty differences in service to a higher cause. These movies present audiences with role models that endorse sacrifice, lack of competition, and the acceptance of duty. For most audiences, this wasn’t a very entertaining idea, yet two examples of religious marriages grounded in biography were hugely successful: A Man Called Peter (1955), about Peter Marshall, a Scotsman who became the United States Senate chaplain, and One Foot in Heaven (1941), the story of clergyman William Spence, based on a book written by one of his sons, Hartzell. Both films present marriage as a sacrifice for the woman who chooses a man of the cloth, because she agrees to accept his own, larger, more purposeful sacrifice. She agrees not to compete. These are movies that clearly say there must be no competition between a man and a woman in marriage. In the book A Man Called Peter, Catherine Marshall wrote the story of her life as the wife of Peter Marshall, and it became a best seller. Her goal was to glorify her dead husband, but she ironically also gained glory for herself by stepping up to tell his story. By “standing by her man” after his death—that is, actually, seeming to stand behind her man, but really standing out in front of him—Mrs. Marshall became famous. Translated into a film, A Man Called Peter became a top box-office draw. Although Mrs. Marshall suffers a mysterious malaise and takes to her bed while her husband thrives, the marriage was not defined as a problematic one; the Marshalls’ story doesn’t have a fully developed negative subtext. It does, however, suggest that success came to Mrs. Marshall because she did not compete and because her goal was service to him after he was gone.

  A Man Called Peter told the story of the United States Senate chaplain Peter Marshall and his wife, Catherine, as depicted by Richard Todd and Jean Peters. A huge hit, the movie stressed the duties of a wife whose husband was a clergyman. (Photo Credit 2.73)

  In One Foot in Heaven,41 the character of Mrs. Spence, played by Martha Scott, is seen throughout the film but never in a scene in which there are decisions made. When her husband (Fredric March) visits members of his congregation, he goes alone. When he hustles business at the marriage-license bureau, he goes alone. When he meets with prospective builders for his new church, investigates why his son has been expelled from school, accuses gossips of ruining his son’s young life, argues with a doctor about the definition of a soul—when anything resembling a give-and-take happens—Mrs. Spence is left out of the frame. When there’s a crisis for the oldest son, he admonishes the boy not to tell his mother. “It will only worry her.” She isn’t considered a partner but more of a servant or support system. There is no possibility of the wife being competitive. Thus we see a marriage that works, that endures, but in which the husband dominates.

  The respective roles for the couple—boss and servant—are established immediately in the film’s opening scene. Hope and William Spence are seen briefly before their marriage at the home of her parents in Stratford, Ontario. It is 1904, and the young couple plan to marry in the summer after he (“a brilliant student”) finishes medical school. He arrives unexpectedly to let her and her family know that “last night” he went by a church and heard Bishop Hartzell (a Methodist minister) speak at a revival meeting, and suddenly decided to become a minister (“I got the call”). Her parents are appalled, but Hope, without a moment’s hesitation, accepts his decision. When he asks, “Will you come with me?” she replies, “ ‘Whither thou goest …’ ”

  Their arrival in the small town of Laketon, Iowa, is a classic example of the bride-taken-away-from-her-world subplot. Scott is wearing a beautifully cut, fur-trimmed ensemble with matching hat and muff, flowers on her hat, lace at her throat. As they ride in a wagon through muddy streets, they are asked by their driver how they like “our little town.” Before she can speak, March answers for her: “Of course we like it, don’t we, dear?” This will pretty much be how it is for her through the next twenty years. As they try to settle into the monstrous, broken-down parsonage, March teaches her two primary lessons for being a minister’s wife. First, the parsonage belongs to the congregation; thus, their home will never really be theirs, and she must accept the ugly things with which they have decorated it. (As she puts it, “every ugliness in its place.”) She also needs to understand there will be no using her lovely wedding gifts or they will think she’s “stuck up,” and that would not be good for him. Secondly, she shouldn’t wear her pretty clothes, either, because it won’t do for her to outshine the ladies of the congregation.

  With these rules laid down, the story of his religious journey and ministry unfolds with the story of their mar
riage running a poor second—possibly even fifth. Mrs. Spence irons, cooks, cleans, scrimps, bears children, and follows the Methodist rule book, which says no fun and certainly no divorce. She grows gray and pale. When she wishes to name their third son William Spence Jr., the good reverend does not like juniors, and he wants the boy’s name to be “William Frazer Spence, called Frazer.” Because of this disagreement, the child is three months old before he is baptized. Mr. Spence finally promises his wife to accept the “junior,” but in church, when she brings the baby up, he loudly names him “William Frazer Spence.” There is a close‑up of her stunned and obviously hurt face; but back at the parsonage, she says and does nothing. She merely calls the child “Frazer” and moves on. Mrs. Spence speaks out directly only once. After one of their parsonages burns down, she expresses hope the new one will be livable. “You don’t know how it hurts me to bring up my children the way we’ve had to,” she says, “always on the move, never really being able to settle down anywhere … They’re entitled to a respectable, permanent home even if they are the minister’s family.” After her husband tells her, “Don’t get your hopes up,” the new place proves worse than ever.

  For the most part, March ignores Scott. Only once in the film does he really seem to see her or address her. Upset by the fact that their new home leaks, he says, “I’m seeing you as you are, Hope. A parson’s wife.” He describes how she accepts all hardship with serenity, and never has anything she herself wants. He determines he will build a new church, and thus get a new parsonage. The fact that this is only incidentally something for her and largely something for his own ego seems to escape him. Examined years after the film was released, the character of William Spence seems autocratic, ego-driven, and self-serving, highly manipulative and very demanding. (There’s one line with an ominous subtext. After struggling with a very selfish rich congregation, March musingly delivers a strange line: “Hope says I let it out at home later on her and the kids.”)