Streatfeild takes the girls’ vocations totally seriously; this seriousness is part of the book’s charm, and its strength. The sisters are loyal and selfless. Even Posy, who can be a brat and is always in disgrace for putting her ambitions first, is funny and sweet. And she’s only ever tough because she’s following her talent; she doesn’t have an ego about it, really. She just knows she has to dance, and so she does.
From Ballet Shoes, I learned how stage fright feels in the pit of the stomach (‘very queer – like when you miss a step on the moving staircase and think you are going to fall to the bottom’), and that it’s normal to cry after the show is over. I learned that being grand will get you nowhere: when Pauline puts on airs, her understudy is sent on in her place. I learned that you’re only as successful as your latest show. I learned that stage flying is really being wheeled about on wires, and to beware of modern costume design – cast as fairies, Pauline and Petrova hope for frills and wings and glitter but get nasty yellow skintight all-over leotards instead. I learned that attitude is as important as talent: Petrova works hard and becomes technically proficient but while she never complains about it, she is bored, and it shows. And that hard work is crucial – the girls slog away to get where they get. I hated John Keats saying ‘if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’ (sorry, Keats). Ballet Shoes taught me I’d have to work hard.
And – the biggest lesson of all – although theatre is probably the most passionate, hopeful and consistently romanticised art form there is, if I was going to become a playwright I would have to become pragmatic. Pauline is going up for the same roles as Winifred, who is more talented and clever but doesn’t have Pauline’s beauty or her sweet, unworried nature. Winifred is desperate to earn money, to help her sick father and her impoverished family, but her anxiety shows on her face, and her clothes are dowdy, and she wears them like a frump, and so while Pauline gets to star, Winifred is doomed to be the understudy. Streatfeild knew about the compromises and hardships of theatre because she’d spent ten years as a jobbing actress before, sick of touring, she holed up in a London hostel and sat down to write a book on her father’s typewriter. But that book was not Ballet Shoes; it was The Whicharts.
It’s a very odd novel to read if you know Ballet Shoes. It feels like an edgy, grown-up version of Ballet Shoes, but in fact it’s the other way around. The Whicharts was Streatfeild’s first hit. Seven years later, and a confirmed success, she was surprised to be asked to write a children’s book. But like Louisa May Alcott before her, she wasn’t one to turn down a commission, so she set out to rehash The Whicharts into Ballet Shoes. She gave herself three months, most of which must have been taken up with excising all the sex and swearing. She had to cut the storyline about the Whicharts being three illegitimate daughters of the same philandering brigadier, and she couldn’t let them be brought up by his first, neglected mistress. But she kept the idea of two girls loving theatre and one hating it, and Tania (the original Petrova) pursuing her dream to fly planes is a rare burst of optimism in this dark, dark book. Because The Whicharts is not starry-eyed about theatre; it is cynical and pessimistic. Maimie slips from legitimate theatre into becoming a venal chorus girl, only in it for the men and the money. Daisy loves dancing as much as Posy but when she is offered a comfortable home in the suburbs, she gives up her ambitions – and why shouldn’t she, when her older sister has shown her just how tawdry and sordid theatre can be?
Reading The Whicharts does tarnish Ballet Shoes: it makes it feel a bit sanitised and marshmallowy. But it doesn’t stop me loving it. Not at all. Although Ballet Shoes may have started as a bowdlerised version of the earlier book, I think that in those frenzied three months, when Streatfeild was lifting whole paragraphs from The Whicharts and cutting and pasting character names, something amazing happened: Ballet Shoes became the book The Whicharts should always have been. I think Streatfeild just started loving her heroines and let them take flight (literally, when it came to Petrova); and that she got over her bitterness about theatre and remembered why she’d loved it in the first place, why it had seemed so alluring, such an escape from her stifled childhood as a vicar’s daughter. It strikes me now that in Ballet Shoes Streatfeild wrote a version of the kind of relationship she might have liked – she never found love, but the two lady doctors who board at the Fossils’ and later move to a charming flat in Bloomsbury could well have been her image of an ideal relationship. And although she was surprised Ballet Shoes was such a hit, she embraced it, writing more children’s books and becoming a real cheerleader for children’s fiction. She may have retired from the stage but she never stopped being a trouper.
I still feel completely pure about Ballet Shoes. It’s a book I’d give my daughter if I had one. All the best women love Ballet Shoes – Nora Ephron obviously did, because when she wants us to root for Meg Ryan’s character, Kathleen, in You’ve Got Mail, she has her say how much she loves Ballet Shoes. Because of Ballet Shoes, I’ve done my best to be a practical dreamer, as theatre demands I must. I’ve found a use for my love of pretending (still going strong, ever since Sara Crewe). And through Pauline’s discovery that acting is not about mimicry but about ‘feeling a part’, I learned the most important thing I know about writing heroines: that they don’t live on the stage, or on the page, unless the writer cares enough to breathe life into them. (All right, the same goes for heroes.)
In my final term at Cambridge, as I was deciding I was really going to try to be a playwright, I was still searching for a heroine who would take me by the hand and show me how. The eponymous heroine of Herman Wouk’s 1955 novel Marjorie Morningstar seemed to be The One. She is a naïve, neurotic Jewish girl who escapes her cosseted childhood in the suburbs to follow her dream of working in theatre. She’s American, not British, and an actress, not a playwright; she’s coming of age in the 1930s not the 1990s, but let’s not quibble: she is me.
She begins the novel as Marjorie Morgenstern, the pretty, spoilt daughter of a feather-importer. He and his wife met through a matchmaker, the old way, but things are different now. They hope their daughter will marry someone rich and suitable. (And Jewish, obviously, of course Jewish.) But on page five, Marjorie decides she wants to do something else with her life: she’s going to be an actress, and her stage name will be Marjorie Morningstar.
Soon, she’s ditched her decent-but-dull Bronx boyfriend and is hanging out with theatre-mad Marsha, learning her craft and falling for the gorgeous cad Noel Airman, a talented composer who warns ‘I eat little girls like you’. (If the story of a naïve Jewish girl falling in love with a handsome man on a summer camp entertainment team seems familiar, it’s because it’s also the plot of Dirty Dancing.)
Noel says Marjorie’s a ‘Shirley’, a Nice Jewish Girl who claims she’s ambitious when really she wants the suburban dream of a diamond sparkler, nice house, children and a fur coat. She says he’s a ‘Sidney’, a Nice Jewish Boy who promises adventure but ends up working for his father. But as their on–off relationship blooms and withers (and blooms and withers, and blooms and withers again), she also learns about theatre.
Marjorie taught me that it’s wise to learn about everything – lighting, sound, set-building – because you never know what you’ll need, and theatre is as much a craft as it is an art. She taught me that the best way to learn is to watch rehearsals. And that theatre is full of sharks. And that it involves a lot of compromise, but also the knack of knowing when a compromise is a compromise too far.
But in the last nine pages of the book, there’s no nice way of putting it: Wouk betrays her. We’ve suffered with her and dreamed with her and suddenly she gives up theatre and Noel and marries a nebbishy lawyer and moves to the suburbs.
I hated that ending. I made up my own. In my version, Marjorie becomes a star and marries Noel – a man so charismatic that even Marjorie’s conventional, suspicious mother melts when she sees him in a toreador costume. A man with an infectious laugh, a man w
ho knows how to enjoy life, and likes other people to enjoy it with him. The 1958 film, with Natalie Wood playing Marjorie to Gene Kelly’s sexy, charming Noel, rewrites Wouk’s ending and gives Marjorie a romance with another talented, successful Jewish writer who loves her, the unfairly named Wally Wronken. Usually I resent Hollywood happy endings but this one feels like justice. And until now, I’ve been able to read Marjorie Morningstar and just ignore the inexplicable ending.
But now, I’m devastated to say that from its opening pages Marjorie Morningstar feels irredeemably snide. It’s not quite satire but it’s unkind writing. And I don’t like unkind writing. And Wouk’s agenda is clear from the start. I don’t think he’s really a storyteller; he’s a moralist. So his novel hammers home his reactionary message that you can never find your own way.
All Marjorie’s adventures are shadowed by Wouk’s gloom about them. He grimly describes her liberation from her traditional parents. When she eats a lobster it’s the end of the world. (And of course it doesn’t taste nice. How could it, when she is denying who she is and eating sin?) Wouk also seems to regard theatre, in its entirety, as sinful. He marshals dodgy actors to tell Marjorie that if she stays a virgin she will never have the emotional range she needs to be a good actor. She is told this so often that when she’s not getting the roles she wants, she considers having an affair, to see if it will help. The moral is clear: don’t put your daughter on the stage, or she’ll end up a slag.
Yet Marjorie is confident and kind. She wants to be an actress and a dutiful daughter. She holds on to her ideals, she works at her craft, she resists her bad critics. She enjoys the raffish Greenwich Village world Noel shows her, but she’s not dazzled by it. And he broadens her horizons. Yes, he can be caustic and rude, know-it-all, feckless and unstable, but they are in love. And he’s talented. At least he is at first. But then Wouk reneges on that too.
Marsha, Marjorie’s old theatre pal, has given up her dreams and is marrying a nice, Jewish man. But he’s old, and uninspiring, and at her wedding she sobs hysterically in her bedroom and, red-eyed and tragic in her rucked-up dress, rages at Marjorie: ‘I don’t have a Noel Airman in love with me. If I had I’d follow him like a dog.’ When Marjorie asks if she should agree to sleep with Noel, Marsha screams ‘YES, God damn you, YES! . . . Live your life, you poor boob.’ She advises Marjorie to stop worrying and see what Noel is really like, let him see what she’s really like, and maybe in the end she’ll get her Prince Charming. And if not, she’ll have the memories.
This makes sense to Marjorie (as it does to me) and she leaves the wedding to go to the dress rehearsal of Noel’s first Broadway show then back to his hotel for an all-night session of Chinese food, coffee and notes with the producers. She forces down a bite of pork, and feels so liberated that once the producers have gone, she goes to bed with Noel. (If only my prawn experience had been so catalysing.)
Wouk can’t decide what he’s writing here. One minute Marjorie’s detached and uninterested; the next minute trembling with desire. But then Wouk reasserts control of his text and his heroine. He sits morosely on the edge of the bed daring his readers to cheer in the face of his solemn, judgmental prose. Marjorie is, he says, ‘moving towards her first sex act . . . like an asteroid moving to collide with a comet’. The next line asks, absurdly, ‘What of her mother, her father?’ The actual sex is ‘rough and strange. She was powerless to stop it . . . she was very uncomfortable and unhappy. It became rougher and more awkward. It became horrible. There were shocks, ugly uncoverings, pain, incredible humiliation, shock, shock, and it was over.’
Why, though? If Wouk had been writing a scene where Marjorie had sex with one of her nice Jewish men on their wedding night, would it have involved roughness and shock and incredible humiliation? Noel isn’t the kind of man who would misjudge the situation so drastically that he wouldn’t be tender and gentle. And Marjorie wants him. She’s wanted him for years. But it doesn’t matter what the characters are like because Wouk isn’t letting them live. He’s pushing them around. And he fatally loses this reader by adding maliciously, ‘So it was that Marjorie qualified at last to portray true emotion on the stage.’ All right, Wouk, I get the message. A nice Jewish woman who tangles with theatre will inevitably shove pork down her throat and shag around. To underline the point, Wouk throws in an eclipse of the moon. As Marjorie loses her virginity, the sky is drained of light and the moon goes the colour of blood.
I can scarcely bring myself to report what happens after page 417. Noel’s musical dies on stage. (Of course. Wouk can’t let Noel be a success.) Noel leaves Marjorie. She pines and repents, and whenever she remembers her night with Noel, she feels shamed and tormented.
Then Wouk gives Marjorie another chance. Her parents are on side this time, and they encourage her to go to Paris and win Noel back. She goes to Paris. Noel proposes. In Montmartre! With champagne and candlelight and everything, and what does she do? She says no.
Again, Wouk is unclear. Sometimes Marjorie seems to be saying no because Noel is looking a bit older and more tired than he did. Sometimes it is because she’s met a man she likes on the ship to Paris. (I do not like this man. He’s a pill-popping skeeve who works in pharmaceuticals but claims he is secretly saving Jews from the Nazis.) Wouk also suggests that Marjorie has become bored by what Noel offers – travel, adventure, bohemianism, and that Lucy-ish idea of living as you play. According to Wouk, when Noel takes Marjorie to the hottest boîtes in Montmartre, she complains that the smoke makes her cough. They go for a walk and she says her feet are sore. They sing in the rain and she says her hat’s getting soggy and the curl is coming out of her hair. She doesn’t see any of the romance of Paris; none. And I don’t believe it. I think Marjorie would have been as excited by Montmartre as Lucy was by Santa Croce. It just shows, again, how little Wouk cares about his heroine.
Back in New York, she has another chance to marry Wally. He’s like a less sexy Noel – talented but he loves his mother – yet she runs away because she can’t face telling him she’s not a virgin. I don’t believe this either. Wally knows Marjorie’s been seeing Noel for years. And he’s an open-minded young man who works in the theatre. He wouldn’t mind, and Marjorie knows it. But Wouk minds. And his characters have stopped being alive and he’s just shlepping them from one page to another. So he finds Marjorie a nice Jewish lawyer and they get engaged. Mazel tov! But when she confesses she is not a virgin, the lawyer can’t cope. She runs away to a hotel, spends six days in bed with a high fever (the fever of sin, perhaps? Wouk doesn’t specify) and comes home twelve pounds lighter, like a medieval saint who has fasted away her crimes. Then the lawyer consents to take her ‘with her deformity, despite it. For that was what it amounted to in his eyes and in hers – a deformity: a deformity that could no longer be helped; a permanent crippling, like a crooked arm.’ Thanks, Wouk. Thanks a lot.
Of course, she has to give up theatre too. She has to be ashamed of her ambitions. She has to conform totally to her parents’ out-of-date ideals, and count herself lucky to have snagged a nice Jewish man who will forgive her for having had a life.
Cut to some fifteen years later and Wally, now famous, goes to see Marjorie. He is shocked to find her grey and dull, claiming to be content but knocking back highballs and waltzing tragically by herself.
I can’t ignore this ending any more. It doesn’t feel inexplicable; it’s where Wouk has been going all along. He didn’t want me to dream, after all: he wanted me to stop fantasising and grow up, and knuckle down to being a Nice Jewish Woman. I feel angrier than ever about the ending of his book now that I realise that he stacked the deck against Marjorie from the start. He could have made her a gifted actress who became a star, or a gifted actress who sank without trace. Both are good stories. Anyone who works in theatre has seen talented people fail as many times as they succeed; theatre is tough. But instead, he makes Marjorie a vain little Jewish girl who deludes herself into thinking she might become a star.
There�
��s another story Wouk could have told about Marjorie, the story in which she becomes a working actor, never gets a big break but enjoys her sustaining, challenging work in the theatre. This is the story Streatfeild might have told about Marjorie, the story of a work ethic, a dream and a determination to see life as an adventure. It was the story I wanted for myself – and in choosing to write plays, maybe I was also spiting Wouk and keeping Marjorie’s theatrical dreams alive. After Cambridge, I took my play to the Edinburgh Fringe, and there were no rhinestone hats, no snapdragons, but it was thrilling. On the night coach home to London, we swigged from a paperback-sized bottle of whisky, ate a block of Dairy Milk, sang all the songs from The Sound of Music, read aloud to each other from The Portable Dorothy Parker and finally got out a prop blanket (smeared in Angel Delight, but warm nevertheless), curled up in it and talked about the future. We didn’t expect it to be easy. We knew we’d have to work. But we were absolutely going to try to live as we played, and play as we lived.
8
THE DOLLS (FROM THE VALLEY)
FIRST, OF COURSE, I had to get a job. All my ideas about being a young woman at work came from Valley of the Dolls. Which was and wasn’t useful. But at least it was a book by and about women. After three years of English at Cambridge, being force-fed literary theory, I was almost convinced that literature was all coded messages about Marxism and the death of the self. I crawled out of the post-structuralist desert thirsty for heroines I could cry and laugh with. I was jaded. I craved trash.
How To Be A Heroine Page 14
