Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [102]
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