Bachelor Girl

by Betsy Israel

  • Meet Millie. Secretary Millie Bronson lives with her widowed mother, whose job in life is finding Millie a suitable husband. Millie has a boyfriend, Johnny, who is the boss’s son. But knowing what comes of such class-crossing arrangements, Mom is ever on the lookout, and so is the requisite house beatnik, Alfred Prinzmetal, an artist who does nothing but comment, often to Millie, whom he has deemed worthy of his erudition. This was one of the first shows to establish a principle that would long exist on TV if rarely in life: Everyone loves the single girl. She is the adorable needy human equivalent of a stray pet others want to domesticate.

  In fifties films, the single woman turns up most often as a recognizable spinster (Kim Novak in Picnic; The Rainmaker with Katharine Hepburn) or as the exceptional quirky character, in the upper-class division Katharine Hepburn (Desk Set; Pat and Mike), and in the working-class, Judy Holliday. In It Should Happen to You, she’s a girl—a “goil”—who becomes famous by advertising herself on a billboard; in Bells Are Ringing, she works for an answering service, playing a special part for all her clients.

  But rarely is the spinster, the shy single sister, the center of the action. As in literature, the spinster serves to better set off the lustrous qualities of the married, engaged, or just physically beautiful star. Either that, or she’s a witch (Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle) or a monstrous bitch (Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar or just about anything else).

  If a film had a single woman at the center, then the central question concerned sex and, specifically, whether or not she had any before marriage. One of the most popular films of the late fifties, Marjorie Morningstar, was based on a lengthy Herman Wouk novel set in the 1930s that told in excruciatingly minute detail the whole story of an aspiring actress from a traditional Jewish family that migrated “up” from the Bronx to Manhattan. Marjorie, part princess, part bohemian, struggles with everything—her mother’s prudish interference in her career and snobbish views of boyfriends; the embarrassment and love she feels for her lower-class Jewish relatives; and then the boyfriends themselves, who are so numerous and detailed they need their own book.

  But the movie reduces all conflicts to sex. And so it is centered on the novel’s key story—the epic tale of Marjorie and songwriter/intellectual poseur Noel Airman. The film, starring Gene Kelly and Natalie Wood, streamlines the years-long affair—separations, rapprochements, Noel’s impossible drunkenness and cruelty—and in the end marries Marjorie off to the wrong person, which is to miss the whole point. But who cares? It tortures with that core question: Does Marjorie ever break free of her strict Jewish upbringing and sleep with Noel?

  In Franny and Zooey, the J. D. Salinger novella, the entire narrative is propelled by Franny Glass’s faint in a restaurant and long, depressed recovery on the living room couch. She claims to have had a religious experience (a common enough occurrence in the Glass family), though young female readers were desperate to know if she was pregnant.

  I think it’s been fairly well established that she was. And in the book, yes, Marjorie slept with Noel after months of tortuous concerns about frigidity. In the film, though, as in any fifties film, it’s hard to say. Any discussion of sex, any hint of two people possibly having had sex, was so oblique that the only way to really know was to go back to Peyton Place and From Here to Eternity and read them again. For many young women of the time, that constituted “close” reading.

  Sex, and life generally, was even more tortured for the fifties widow. Jane Wyman plays a blind widow who must somehow “go out and meet new people” in Magnificent Obsession, then moves on to playing a lonely widow in All That Heaven Allows. She is only in her forties, but her two grown children believe that Mother must now stay at home, mourning her loss. She tries, then slowly does the unexpected: falls in love with her young gardener, Rock Hudson, who takes her out driving and—very unusual for someone of her social standing—to lobster parties at the beach shacks of bohemian friends. She returns home to lectures on how she is maladjusted and possibly insane. In consultation with members of the family’s country club, the children arrange a match for Mother with a respectable doctor. When she turns them down, they drive the gardener away in retaliation and disgust. Then, to make it up to her—to give her something warm and new in her life—they present her with her first TV. That will keep the old girl company! She sits there staring at it, unable to turn it on, her reflection staring back, a lone face trapped in a box. But then she’s up! Breaking with all form, tradition, her entire life, she races out to find her gardener before it is too late.

  Of course the most famous single-girl film franchise of the era belonged to Doris Day, as she played a series of working girls with nice apartments, wise-cracking maids, and careers in demanding but still feminine areas, usually interior decorating. She was always well dressed, articulate, and unusually happy with herself. Until someone started teasing her about her love life. Usually this came down to the question of whether she was a virgin. It’s clear that the accusation bothers her—she probably was a virgin—but it’s not something that, until now, she’s felt badly about. To achieve the kinds of things she has achieved, she’s had to live a disciplined life, looking after herself, part of which meant keeping in mind society’s vicious sexual double standard. For the time period, this attitude seems less prudish and warping than it does practical. (For of course if she had not been a virgin, she’d have had hell to pay for that, as well.)

  Unfortunately the issue would in short time make a joke of Doris Day. As comedies began their descent into so-called sophisticated sex romps, the Day/virginity factor became a repetitive gag. (As one producer famously quipped, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”) She came to seem righteously wholesome. Dull. A too-chatty full-figured gal snobbish critic Dwight MacDonald once described as “bovine.”

  But the best of the Day characters were stalwart about sex for a reason. They understood how easily it could be misinterpreted and used against a single woman. In Minor Characters, a 1983 memoir of 1950s Manhattan, Joyce Johnson wrote: “The crime of sex was like guilt by association—not visible to the eye of the outsider, but an act that could be easily conjectured. Consequences could make it manifest…. In the 1950s, sex—if you achieved it—was a serious and anxious act.”

  CROSS YOUR LEGS. DO NOT UNCROSS UNTIL WED

  By 1957, sex seemed to be everywhere—in magazines, novels, in the movies—and if you were single and living in the city, there was a sense that it might soon arrive in your very own apartment. The Saturday Evening Post was not alone in declaring, “There are new considerations a girl living alone must take into account.”

  In all the many etiquette guides, sex had been little more than a shadow presence, an issue alluded to but not directly addressed. Most of these how-to-live guides covered general comportment—how a woman should walk down or cross the street without seeming too “available”; how she should remove an apartment key from her purse, and how, if there was no doorman, one stood there seeming respectable while opening a door, on a city street, all alone. One could further study how to walk down the apartment hallway when putting out garbage; how to stand or sit while talking on the phone, including, in one book, some pointers on gracefully twirling the cord.

  Sex, however, rated few paragraphs. Because allegedly there was no sex. Guides were there to help young women better avoid even the hint. A small sampling of postdate evasions from two books, circa 1953:

  —(To be said just before reaching home, while yawning). “Gee, I wish I didn’t have to get up so early—six A.M.! (checks watch) How did it get to be so late? I wish I could ask you up, but perhaps another time. I’ve had such a nice evening. Goodnight.” (Girl then very quickly races up steps to house or out of taxi cab. She waves.)

  —(To be said as she opens her apartment door and sees a suitcase, a prop she planted earlier). “Oh my, look! Ssshhh! She’s here! My roommate! She’s a stew! She just flew in from Japan. Oh, dear. I’m so sorry. We’ll have to take a rai
n check on that nightcap, I think.”

  —(To be said if the man was already inside, drinking that nightcap). “Well, I do have to get up awfully early.” If that didn’t work, “I wish I could offer a refill, but (blinks, squints) I’m getting a migraine.” In desperation: “My mother is here from Cincinnati. She’ll be back any minute and so…” Sometimes a roommate might magically appear, or a neighbor who needed (female) help with “a very personal and very upsetting emergency!”

  But it got harder to delete sex as a presence in one’s living room and, generally speaking, in one’s life. As one twenty-five-year-old told a Sunday newspaper supplement in 1957:

  I was involved in a… conversation with an unfamiliar young man… and I mentioned that I’d just moved out of my parents’ home into an apartment of my own in Greenwich Village. The young man’s ears perked up, his eyes took on a new gleam, his smile grew enterprising and his manner insinuating. “Oh-h-h, so you live alone, do you? And in the Village!?” I realized I’d apparently taken not a new address, but a new address that gave me a whole new character…. I could just see him at my place. We mix up some drinks and… so much for the conversation. You can imagine the rest.

  Let’s go back to that man, circa 1953, having his nightcap and listening to excuses in the living room. Here’s how a 1958 guide updated the situation.

  From the moment he entered, he leapt to certain conclusions… the curtains are closed and there is alcohol out and on display. The girl has an obvious familiarity with mixing drinks. Note and note well: The way a woman handles… the liquor question is essential because men, except for an unusually sensitive minority, immediately assume that if a girl lives alone she is worldly and, especially if she drinks, she must certainly hope to use her freedom as fully as possible.

  Many advice columnists counseled meeting men elsewhere—blocks, entire districts, away from one’s apartment. One 1958 guide, Today’s Manners: Footloose and Fancy Free, was devoted to this idea, providing many specific suggestions on how to manage oneself while entertaining in public. For example, if a single woman invited friends out for dinner, she would designate an escort for herself, first “making it clear to the management that she was the host, that she would sign the check, but that ‘an escort’ would handle the actual transaction.” If there was no available escort, a man at the table could be “discreetly called upon to do the honors.”

  If the plans called for her to arrive at the appointed place alone, there were comparable instructions. According to Footloose and Fancy Free, “If a woman arranges to meet a man in a central spot, a hotel or a restaurant, for example… [and] she is the first to arrive… she should ask to be seated at a table. It is perfectly alright to order a cocktail or coffee while waiting… the man pays for it when he arrives.”

  But life was rarely that simple. Men came over. They often invited themselves or just showed up. And as much as no one wished to acknowledge the idea, men stayed over.

  “My kids have the idea that nobody before 1960 had recreational sex,” said Martha, a secretary turned travel agent, now sixty-four. “Oh, you tried harder in those days to push it back. You went to theater and made excuses after, tried not to have him see you home, or he came in and you tried to cut it off and it was so awkward…. Eventually, though, you’re twenty-three, you’re not married, and you’re human. As they say, do the math.”

  Part of the math involves a consideration of the unpublicized figures. Between 1944 and 1955 there was an 80 percent increase in the number of white babies put up for adoption and an unspecified but noted rise in what were known as “homes for wayward girls,” especially on the East Coast. While it’s impossible to calculate the number of illegal abortions performed, coroner’s and doctor’s reports indicate that between eight hundred and one thousand women died each year from these procedures.

  Other signs of sex in the culture were harder to miss. By the late fifties there was an increasingly visible sexual demimonde. As one New York Tribune columnist described it: “Movie stars who are idolized by millions jump in and out of bed on the front pages of daily newspapers. Celebrities and socialites return from trips to the Caribbean with ‘traveling companions.’ A celebrated romance finally culminates in a wedding and five months later a ‘premature’ 11-pound baby is born.” And less celebrated young women became the subjects of stories typically entitled (this from the Daily News): “Bachelor Girls: Their Lives and Loves.”

  The bachelor girls in question were usually models or Rockettes; starlets, including Tina Louise; debutantes; the serious young career women “who work in the budding communications field;” and sometimes shockingly “open” rising stars. Like “Queen of the Bachelor Girls” Kim Novak. In two columns, she was pictured with four different men, including one South American dictator and a “Negro” entertainer (Sammy Davis, Jr.). She was also pictured all alone, sitting back in a chair, eyes closed, her bare feet up so that a reader had to remark both at her casual mien and her flaming red pedicure.

  Bachelor girls like Kim, it was solemnly reported, “play by their own rules.”

  For example, good for three columns, they dated married men. “Sure, I mean, course we do,” one BG told an eager reporter. “If only for the convenience! They don’t stay. They don’t make a fuss. In some ways it’s the ideal date.” One “Swedish girl” interviewed for the husbands series told the News that “other girls laugh at me because I don’t understand why they would go with a husband. They can’t see that it is a problem.” The Americans defended themselves. They were not immoral but “regular” women “making the most of a difficult situation”—not meeting the right men, perhaps not yet ready to—and, as another put it, “We are not evil. We are tired of sitting home on the weekends…. What does it mean to be immoral? We are just living the lives we have and we happen not to have husbands…. I do not think that for this reason we are going to hell.”

  Surprisingly, the author of one 1959 story sided with them. Sort of. “Today in the midst of the rootless, unmarried groups that gravitate to a large city, a girl finds that it is often ‘square’ to be good. Besides, she herself isn’t quite sure anymore what is good and bad, and neither is anyone else…. there is not a dropping off of morality. Just a shift in emphasis.”

  Others disagreed entirely. In 1959, the Juvenile Aid Bureau, a social agency that had previously dealt largely with runaways, was charged with “easing the flow of incoming girls to New York City.” As one bureau official explained, “We spot a girl getting off a bus or a train and wandering the streets. We question her.” Under an obscure piece of municipal legislation called “the Girl Terms Act,” they could further “hold her until her family can be queried. If there is no family, or, as is often the case, the family does not want the juvenile back, and if the girl has no immediate relations in New York to claim her, we will send her back to the point of embarkation on her ticket.” In 1959 the JAB reported returning 350-plus suspicious-looking girls (that meant oddly dressed girls, slutty-looking girls; those too young and those not white).

  Everyone acknowledged that most of these girls would find their way back in. At best they’d get clerical jobs they’d quickly lose, becoming rootless “wandering types.” Or they’d become prostitutes and drug addicts. Worse, they might become bohemians.

  ON THE BEAT

  The Beat generation is one of those mythical twentieth-century constructs that we associate with a loose conglomerate of crazy brilliant men. Jack Kerouac and his male muse, Neal Cassady; Allen Ginsberg, of course, and William Burroughs—and all the lesser luminaries who floated into and out of their lives, novels, and poems from their days at Columbia University, circa 1945 through the 1960s. But floating around in the background, handing out invitations to poetry readings, discussing art and writing, were a lot of intriguing young women—Hettie Cohen Jones, Joyce Glassman Johnson, Elise Cowen, and poet Diane diPrima, among many uncelebrated others.

  These never quite became household names, but many of the onetime
Beat girls went on to become writers and artists, just like the men. And some turned out to be chroniclers. It’s these women who later wrote the best memoirs of Beat life in New York City and San Francisco. And as much as these stories and the memoirs—How I Became Hettie Jones; Minor Characters; Beat Girl—re-create the joy ride of Beat life, they are also historical documents of what it was to be young and single in the 1950s and to have blatantly ignored the rules. Many, like Joyce Johnson, began life as middle-class girls, from “decent” families who lived in Upper West Side apartments that had grand pianos, shelves filled with the “great” books, and well-kept furniture. In Minor Characters, her 1983 memoir, Johnson writes better than anyone, ever, about the female double life, the one that started for her at age thirteen, with furtive trips into the Village, and continued as she moved out of her parents’ house at twenty-one, radically taking her own place.

  “Everyone knew in the 1950s why a girl from a nice family left home,” she writes. “The meaning of her theft of herself from her parents was clear to all—as well as what she’d be up to in that room of her own… On 116th Street, the superintendent knew it…. He spread the word among neighbors that the Glassmans’ daughter was ‘bad.’ His imagination rendered me pregnant.”

  Actually, what she did was to live there (and in many other places), to hang around with important male artists who spoke mostly to each other, and to work. She supported her boyfriend, Jack Kerouac, when he was around, as well as anyone else currently in the Jack entourage. It’s what the girls did. Every morning, long before the men were up, with their hangovers and artistic visions, supportive Beat girls left the confines of the Village, took a train, and, as Johnson writes, “emerg[ed] into the daylight at Fiftieth Street [where] I’d feel I’d been swept up into an enormous secretarial army advancing inexorably upon Madison Avenue… as part of this army, I typed, read manuscripts, answered the phone, ate egg-salad sandwiches in the downstairs luncheonette (I’d learned very quickly how to locate the cheapest item on a menu).”