I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  Hollywood codified World War II’s lonely wife in musical terms in The Gang’s All Here (1943), a colorful, extravagant, and somewhat insane escapist entertainment directed by Busby Berkeley. If all the movies from the era crumbled into dust and there was nothing left but Alice Faye singing “No Love, No Nothin’ ” in glorious Technicolor, the war wife’s feelings would still be clear to cultural historians. Faye wears a simple peasant blouse and skirt. She stands in a tiny little apartment with gray walls. She hugs a framed photo of her uniformed loved one. And she irons. While she irons, she sings: “No love, no nothin’, / Until my baby comes home … / No fun with no one … / I’m gettin’ plenty of sleep.” There was a reason Alice Faye was a movie star. She couldn’t act much, couldn’t dance much, and she seemed passive, even immobilized in the frame. But she could put over a song like no one else, and her big blue eyes held honest pain and deep hurt. When she told Americans, “I’ll wait for him until the cows come home,” she didn’t just tug on heartstrings; she ripped out guts, and furthermore made anyone who was cheating feel as guilty as hell. She was the lonely war wife musically personified, and her lonely-wife image had emotional power.

  Not all war wives were depicted as lonely or unable to cope. They—both young and old—were also used to tell stories that “democratized” the home front and helped teach audiences they needed to pull themselves together as equals in the fight. Over 21 (1945) was a successful Broadway play written by Ruth Gordon turned into a screenplay by Sidney Buchman, and it was a perfect starring vehicle for Irene Dunne. It’s very sophisticated and witty and brittle, except that underneath it touched on serious issues. Its married couple, Dunne and Alexander Knox, are not ordinary people living in a small town and trying to figure out how to make things work now that the war has come along to shatter their status quo. They are smart-ass and highly successful—an escapist version of marriage that ordinary couples had often enjoyed watching in 1930s movies. But Over 21 democratizes Dunne and Knox and brings them down to the same level as Mr. and Mrs. John Doe of Smallville, USA. Knox is a famous newspaper editor who (“on a schoolboy whim”) enlists in the army. (He does this while his wife is out in Hollywood adapting her latest novel to the screen.) Since it’s wartime, and everyone must do his bit, Dunne is thrilled by his gesture. (“Angel!” … “Darling!” … “I’ll go with you!”) She loves what he’s done, telling her own editor that taking care of her husband (“the most important man I know”) is “a full-time job.” Just like that, she’s off to Officer Candidate School in Tetley Field, Florida, to live in one of a series of tiny bungalows known as Palmetto Court. She arrives in a taxi—all hat and jewelry and luggage and clever quips. Dunne and Knox are a sort of Broadway version of Clare Boothe and Henry Luce, so when she shows up, all the other wives at Palmetto immediately know who she is. (Movies loved the idea that a book author would be recognizably famous out in the boonies.)

  The situation that the famous couple face tells audiences they must all work together, living at the same level, so America can win the war. “Living at the same level” is literal. One of the most important units in any film about marriage is the home. Movie marriages are measured by furniture—and the size of the kitchen. A husband works to make the best and the biggest possible, and the wife suffers when the worst and the smallest are her lot. When Irene Dunne hops out of her taxi, she faces a great symbolic marker of just what a successful, happily married wife and husband are going to sacrifice for the war effort: she sees where she’s going to be living—a bungalow in a cheap motor court. She will downsize for her country.

  For one movie second, as Dunne exits her taxi, she is poised between prewar movies (her clothes and her luggage) and war movies (the bungalow court). Palmetto Court will become her barracks. The other women will be her fellow soldiers. And the incompetent handyman will be her form of the demanding top sergeant, an individual who just doesn’t understand her problems and certainly doesn’t cater to her personal needs. As Dunne moves forward from her taxi, she literally moves into World War II—and into her bungalow, the symbol of sacrifice. For instance, the bungalow doesn’t have a sink in the kitchen, and there’s no shower—but there are moths. The refrigerator bangs all night, and to turn the lights on or off, she has to go outside (in her negligee). And that doesn’t include the comic window, which was apparently designed by one of the Ritz Brothers, because it operates as a punch line. It opens only when someone stamps a foot, but closes loudly whenever it feels like it. (As Dunne, ever a cheerful wisecracker, puts it when she learns about the window: “Where’s the place where your skirt blows up?”) Over 21 is about a married couple at war. Both are being asked to cope with unfamiliar tasks in an alien world. In order to be together, because they love each other and because they are a married couple, they do it.9

  The movie works out its main dilemma, which is Knox’s difficulty in competing with younger men in training school. (“Over twenty-one, you don’t absorb any more … you simply don’t absorb a thing.”) But the main point is the need for a democratic attitude, the need for sacrifice from both the rich and famous and the everyday people in the audience. Dunne says, “I want to be like all those other gals with their fellas.” Her character undergoes a wartime learning experience. She bonds with other women, creating female camaraderie. Most importantly, she fills in for her husband, taking on his former job. Unbeknownst to him, she writes a series of superb editorials over his byline. (Never mind that the big one, “The World and Apple Pie,” was obviously written by a woman.) Over 21 says a woman can take a man’s place … women can work together as friends … no one should be richer than anyone else … and women are needed for important jobs on the home front. The story becomes a subliminal metaphor for a married couple’s job during World War II: support each other, replace each other, do whatever is necessary, and accept equality with others who aren’t part of your social set.10 Their tasks as a married couple lie outside their relationship, in a bigger situation.

  World War II changed things for wives in marriage. Famous Over 21 playwright Irene Dunne learns to mow the lawn (in high heels and upsweep) while her publisher (Charles Coburn) and her army husband (Alexander Knox) look on … (Photo Credit 2.96)

  … while former sorority girl Jeanne Crain (with book) has to learn she doesn’t know how to do anything useful, unlike the other war wives in In the Meantime, Darling. (Photo Credit 2.97)

  Following a husband to camp to learn democracy was also the theme of In the Meantime, Darling (1944), about a young couple played by Jeanne Crain and Frank Latimore. Audiences meet Crain, the prospective bride, as she travels to an army camp on a crowded train with her wealthy parents. Mom is leery: “Why not wait till after the war?” (“War … the great leveler,” intones Eugene Pallette, her father.) But Crain isn’t having any. She’s starry-eyed, and she and her groom are obviously madly in love. Despite her parents’ misgivings, the couple wed in a general store under a leaking ceiling in a rushed ceremony performed by a justice of the peace. They then go to the hideous rooming house where Crain will reside with other war brides, waiting for her husband to get a few free hours or perhaps a weekend pass until he ships out. (Mom sizes up the place at once: “No elevator.”)

  The purpose of In the Meantime, Darling (other than dubious entertainment) is again to show Americans the need to pull together across class lines. Everyone must find a way to contribute. Jeanne Crain is a naïve and coddled young beauty who comes to live among women who have always worked. She represents wealth and privilege, and she must learn. She is the audience surrogate. Step by step, with a somewhat jaunty, even cheerleading attitude, the film teaches her (and thus the audience) how to change and make sacrifices. At first, Crain doesn’t know the rules. She comes down for breakfast at noon; she mistakes the colonel’s wife for the cook; she gives orders about rearranging the furniture more to her liking; and she commandeers the only bathroom, taking someone else’s scheduled time. Since none of this will do, she’s quickly shaped u
p, a clever way of regimenting women the same way men are being regimented in an army camp. Crain is required to contribute to the household of women in some way, but she has no skills. (“She’s a college grad,” someone explains.) Since she can’t do anything, the group decides to find her “something simple to start with.” When she messes up even the simplest tasks, a housemate speaks the movie’s basic lesson out loud: “That girl had better leave her throne and learn to mingle with the common people.”11

  The democratization of Jeanne Crain is a success. She learns to garden and clean, how to share, and how to put herself second. She comes to realize that romantic dreams aren’t enough to make a marriage really work, ultimately admitting, “I’m just beginning to learn how much I didn’t learn in college.” By living with other women and discovering what she can do, Crain becomes useful, something required for everyone on the home front. Hollywood endorsed this message, and was adept at turning it into plots by using marriage as the metaphor.

  Throughout the war, actresses portrayed married women on the home front in many strong and significant ways, including Greer Garson as the British Mrs. Miniver facing death and danger; Phyllis Thaxter as a young wife left behind when her husband flies the Doolittle Raid in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944); or even Rita Hayworth as a bride who has to marry Lee Bowman by proxy in the Technicolor musical Tonight and Every Night (1945). These movies were not specifically marriage movies, but they worked off a useful concept that found great acceptance and a sense of authenticity: the lonely wife, or more broadly, the woman who has to face reality standing on her own two feet.

  World War II marriage movies clearly endorse sisterhood as an alternative to marriage.12 In Music for Millions (1944), a group of female musicians band together to help a cellist (June Allyson) who is married and pregnant. The members of the orchestra (led by José Iturbi, playing, as always, himself) are almost all women, because “that’s the condition we’re in,” says Jimmy Durante. All the men, including Allyson’s husband, have gone to war. The musicians live in a rooming house together, sharing everything, including Allyson’s pregnancy. She even reads her letters from her husband aloud to them, and engages their help in caring for her little sister (Margaret O’Brien). When it’s all too much for Allyson and she breaks down and weeps, saying, “I’m just a coward,” she is reassured by Iturbi with the mantra of the times: “No. You are a woman. A wife. A mother”—and thus, by implication, not only important, but essential for the war effort.

  In Tender Comrade (1943), Ginger Rogers joins up with other women who work in a defense plant to rent a house in which they can live while they await the return of their men. The women are again being asked to do something similar to what their men are being asked to do: bunk together in a barracks-like situation while they work all day (and/or all night) on behalf of the war effort.13 The women, like their husbands, sacrifice home, comfort, and leisure time to give all they’ve got for defense. The marriage movie was the most useful story form for such efforts, because it linked not only the husband and wife on film, but also the husband and wife in the audience. Such plots had the highest degree of audience emotional response, and thus the highest box-office-return potential.

  Tender Comrade is one of the most representative of the war films about the married woman left behind. It serves two masters: it tells in flashbacks the story of the marriage between Rogers and Robert Ryan, and it tells in present tense the story of women left alone to work in war plants while their husbands serve. It first establishes the prewar model of the marriage movie with a couple and their problems, and then overtly reconstitutes their story in the new “situation.” If the marriage section were shown on its own, the marriage would not be a picture of happiness. Rogers and Ryan quarrel, shout at each other, and disagree. Rogers is bored and unhappy, because she works hard all day cooking and cleaning and Ryan ignores her when he returns home. She threatens him by saying she’ll go out and get a job—the era’s ultimate rejection of male domination. Because it’s wartime, however, this dreary picture (actually the portrait of a bad marriage) is tarted up with a wink-wink attitude that says, “We all know they really adore one another.” When the war breaks out and Ryan must leave, all these earlier issues are swept away as trivial. Of course he will now pledge his love, need Rogers, pay attention to her, and of course she will go out and get a job with his approval—in a war plant. Tender Comrade uses marriage to teach in an obvious manner, but teach it does. Furthermore, it will pull no punches about the sacrifice. Ryan is killed in action, leaving Rogers alone with a baby to raise.

  Like Over 21 and In the Meantime, Darling, Tender Comrade also presents women banding together, forming a commune of sorts.14 These patriotic sororities were linked closely to what was actually happening offscreen. There was an acute housing shortage during the war, and women did rent houses, or bungalows, or hotel or boardinghouse rooms, and share expenses, friendship, and tragedies. World War II was one of the few times—if not the only time—women were seen in numerous films as if they, too, were men, regimented into barracks life and serving side by side.

  The experiences depicted in these films (and in Life’s “Lonely Wife” article) were by no means the inventions of screenwriters. They are verified by Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham’s autobiography, in which she writes vividly and eloquently about her years as a wartime wife. In particular, she sketches her husband’s departure to service on the morning of July 27, 1942, with a poignant simplicity: “The dreadful moment of our parting came at the Greyhound bus terminal in downtown Washington, already a depressing place, but made more so by the sight of nervous recruits huddling together … I embraced him, turned, and fairly dove through the door of the terminal as he joined the group of jittery inductees. I happened to look down just as I fled, discovered that my slip was showing.” Her memory could easily be translated into a screenplay. It’s visual, detailed, and contains a wonderful subtext, including a moment for a significant cut to represent her helplessness and her loss: her slip sticking out underneath her dress.

  Graham’s autobiography included other experiences similar to those seen in Over 21, In the Meantime, Darling, Tender Comrade, and Since You Went Away. “After a short time at Fort Meade, Phil [her husband] was sent for basic training to Atlantic City, where I joined him and began my life as a camp follower. I found a room in a boarding house not far from the Boardwalk, where we shared a nightly two and a half hours. Much of the rest of the time I spent watching the men marching up and down the Boardwalk in the humid heat.” Graham and her husband end up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where the newly set‑up army camp has a population of 45,000, grafted onto a town that itself only has 15,000 people. Graham portrays the physical problems wives faced: overcrowding, housing shortages, rationing. She talks about the brief hours of togetherness any couple could expect, and confirms the lonely-wife scenario of how she and the other women coped. Graham enrolled in a typing-and-shorthand class, worked for the Red Cross, and joined a club for the wives of privates (the “Mrs. Private” club, which had the slogan “Happier Lives for Privates’ Wives”). She sought out the company of other wives to attend movies, church suppers, lectures, and various other social events designed to keep the women busy. Her wonderful book demonstrates how the marriage movies of World War II were grounded in honest experience. Today, these movies may seem treacly or even false, but they were all too real for women in the audience at the time.

  Films like Tender Comrade and In the Meantime, Darling that assembled married women as roommates, learning to support the war effort, were successful. Everyone endorsed the message, not realizing it actually represented big changes for women that would have to be dealt with later on: females embracing sisterhood, working outside the home, gaining independence, and becoming more flexible socially, intellectually, even morally. Wives such as the ones in Since You Went Away and Tender Comrade entered the workforce to work in war plants. They became “Rosie the Riveter,” a female icon generall
y presented as an unmarried woman.15 The lonely wife being democratized was also being redefined as a single woman who would live without depending on men. The marriage-without-the-husband movie was setting up the wife at home as a parallel hero to her husband overseas—an equal in service to her country. This would ultimately become a source of social change—and the marriage movie had played a role in making it happen.

  During the war, couples who barely knew each other married in haste, and some lived to regret it. This became a popular wartime marriage story line. (The issue was so much on people’s minds that Vaughn Monroe even had a hit song that asked, “Is it love or is it conscription?”) Marry-in-haste movies helped an audience understand the pressures of war on young couples. Time was always spent discussing why getting married without really knowing each other was a bad idea, followed by the sudden shift to why it was a good idea: love. True love would make it okay, just as the war justified it happening. Some films told only of the rapid courtship, such as The Clock (1945) with Judy Garland and Robert Walker. The film devotes its running time to their meeting and deciding to wed, and to the rush they must undergo to get their required documents so the ceremony can be performed before he ships out. The film talks out loud about whether this haste is good or not, but it endorses the concept that life must be lived. He may be killed overseas and is entitled to … what? Love, says the movie. (Sex, thinks the audience.) In order to remove any sense of smarm from the proceedings, Garland and Walker are presented as decent, wholesome, innocent, and really in love with each other.16