Children of Divorce (1927)
Children of Divorce serves up a Jazz Age love triangle in which the effects of an older generation’s marital irresponsibility and parental neglect play out tragically in their adult children. Frank Lloyd directed this silent film, reportedly with uncredited fix-up work by Josef von Sternberg.
The movie first introduces us to the children Jean, Kitty, and Ted—two girls and a boy from different families, whose commonality is their deep loneliness and anger as their wealthy parents forget about their children’s existence while pursuing divorces and new affairs.
Grown into young adults they are played, respectively, by the tall and graceful Esther Ralston, pert sexpot Clara Bow, and Gary Cooper in a breakout early performance. Cooper here has the sleek, wild beauty of a timber wolf.
Ralston’s Jean has been so traumatized by the years she was warehoused in a French convent school by her parents—years without even a visit from them—that she is determined never to risk the possibility of divorce herself. Even though she and Ted are deeply in love, she is hesitant to marry him. Ted is a wealthy young man caught up in the carefree idleness of his class and time. Jean, concerned, wants to be sure of his work ethic and responsibility.
Kitty, meanwhile, is pursued by Vico, a good-natured European aristocrat who possesses a title but no family fortune. Kitty’s mother, who by now has been divorced five times, has drummed it into Kitty’s head that she must use marriage as a means to wealth. In spite of her feelings for Vico, Kitty therefore rejects him and sets her sights on Ted.
Ted does his best to make a career as a civil engineer and so prove himself to Jean, but his friends, including Kitty, keep dragging him off to carouse. One morning he wakes up from a drunken bender to find Kitty in his apartment, cheerfully informing him that the two of them got married the previous night.
Naturally, Ted is horrified, though Kitty is pleased, seeing marriage to Ted as a stepping stone to wealth and status, just as her mother taught. With poor timing, a note from Jean arrives telling Ted that she is at last ready to marry him. Of course Ted wants to divorce Kitty and marry Jean. But, learning what has taken place, Jean will not countenance a divorce. She insists that Ted stay married to Kitty at all costs, thereby consigning them all to unhappiness.
Three years go by, and the three childhood friends, and Vico too, are reunited in Paris. Kitty and Ted have a daughter, yet their marriage is devoid of love. Ted, miserable, works all the time to distract himself from his unhappiness.
Kitty confesses that she is still in love with Vico, and would now willingly divorce Ted and marry him despite his lack of funds. “My church does not permit divorce,” Vico sadly tells her. Nor, out of respect for her, will Vico consider Kitty’s offer to live with him outside of matrimony.
Ted similarly confesses to Jean that he is still in love with her, and is determined to get a divorce and marry her. But Jean, seeing a photo of Kitty and her daughter, steels herself once again. “It’s too late to think of our own happiness,” she tells Ted. “Your baby must not be sacrificed to divorce—as we were.”
In fact, to ensure that she will never be a cause for the breakup of Ted and Kitty’s marriage, Jean agrees to marry Vico—a transactional arrangement, as he needs her wealth to rescue his family from debt, but one they discuss honestly, in respectful terms.
Reading the announcement of Jean’s impending wedding and realizing the unhappiness she has caused, Kitty is overcome with remorse. She commits suicide, first sending a note to Jean asking her forgiveness and asking her to raise her daughter. The film ends with Ted comforting a stricken Vico, and with Jean—who can now marry Ted—tenderly cradling Kitty’s and Ted’s daughter.
The film offers two competing messages about divorce. On the one hand, it shows how traumatic and warping divorce can be for children, certainly when it is connected with parents who disappear for years in order to pursue their own pleasure. Jean is too panicked at the idea of repeating her parents’ failed marriages to risk one with Ted, while Kitty is the flip side of this: all too eager to follow in her mother’s selfish footsteps and make (with the help of alcohol) an advantageous marriage no matter the cost to herself or her friends.
On the other hand, the film suggests that a too-rigid avoidance of divorce can itself have bad, even (in Kitty’s case) fatal consequences. Had Jean been willing for Ted to divorce Kitty at the start, they might have found happiness together without the long detour of the plot and Kitty’s suicide.
Similarly, if Vico’s unspecified religion recognized divorce, Kitty and Vico might have married, and Ted and Jean (with a clearer conscience) as well. There seems to be an implication of a desirable middle-ground regarding divorce, in which it ought to be a legitimate option for deeply unhappy marriages but not the casual choice it is for the parents of Jean, Kitty, and Ted.
The movie is based on a 1927 novel of the same title by Owen Johnson. Johnson was the author of a series of popular novels, including the 1912 generational byword Stover at Yale, a book amusing today for its depiction of an early twentieth-century Yale and what will seem to us the most minor self-questioning by a WASP elite presented as earth-shatteringly momentous. (In the 1950 film The Happy Years, Dean Stockwell plays the title character of Dink Stover during his prep school years.)
Johnson’s Children of Divorce involves more melodramatic plot twists, cruelty, and jazz age decadence than the film, which condenses the novel effectively into a four-character dynamic and 70 minute running time. The novel is also more elaborate in its meditations on the uncertain nature and fate of marriage in the modern world.
A New York Times review of Johnson’s novel states that “it is not at all surprising to find many of our novelists turning to” matters of divorce since “in these United States at least, the divorce rate is threatening to outstrip the marriage rate.” We still haven’t quite gotten to that point, but there is no question that a rapidly accelerating divorce rate was felt as a pressing topic of the time, and is an explicit concern of Johnson’s novel.
The consequences of modern social dissolution are sounded from the novel’s start, which gives us Jean and Kitty in their young womanhood, part of a jaded set of wealthy party girls, cut adrift from stable families and stable values. Jean’s mother, who, as in the film, thoughtlessly abandoned her for years in a convent school, continues to take on lovers and feels sexually competitive with her own daughter. Jean tries to resist the decadence around her, while Kitty, who “lived with her grandmother (with occasional visits to her father and his new family transplanted to the Riviera),” remarks casually that she expects to be married and divorced “two or three times at least.”
Unlike the film, the social instability portrayed in the novel is partly connected with the World War. Ted, whose name nods to the Rough Rider President, had pursued a series of energetic and manly endeavors, culminating in his enlistment in the Canadian army for the duration of the war. When Jean reminds the now idle Ted that he once swore he would go to work as an engineer, constructing bridges rather than living off his parents’s money, Ted tells her that, because of the war, he can’t yet settle down to a career: “There’s a certain let-down, you know, after four years over there. You can’t help it. You don’t want to do anything except relax, drift. You don’t want to think. You don’t want to plan out what’s coming. You want to let go, wallow in just living.”
For Jean, however, it is precisely a husband’s career that might bond a couple in a lasting and meaningful marriage:
Marriage that is just for mutual enjoyment hasn’t a chance to succeed in this modern life. Playing together ends by playing apart. You’ve got to have something bigger to bind you together. That something, Ted, is the life work of the man. It’s got to be something real, vital, something terribly worthwhile.
If Victorian values no longer obtain in the fashioning of marriage, then a sense of shared mission focused around the husband’s work may be a replacement.
Jean is meanwhile courted by the acerbic Victor Daggett, who presciently warns Jean that Kitty is motivated by envy and not to be trusted. In a more sociological vein, he warns too about Kitty’s “type,” and the world this type is making:
There are hundreds, thousands, like her . . . . It’s the type that will create the new society,—the society of multiple marriages. . . . I see to-day all along the line the individual in revolt against traditional restraint. Democracy began it. Modernism has continued it. The attack is now centering around the home.
What are for Jean personal and psychic worries over the state of modern marriage are for Daggett societal concerns. And yet, when Daggett proposes to Jean, essentially using Jean’s own argument that they might best avoid divorce by making their marriage a rational, purpose-driven endeavor centered on the husband’s work, this has the effect of showing Jean how emotionally empty such a conception of marriage feels and decides her for Ted. Too late since, as in the film, Ted, pining for Jean, has drunkenly married the conniving Kitty.
The novel’s anxious debates about whether a rational or a passionate conception of marriage is more likely to weather modernity’s dissolutions are elaborated on by a further character. Jean’s cousin Bettina has married an Irish nobleman and lives with him in Paris in a mixture of warm comity and respectful independence. Jean marvels at the evident happiness of Bettina’s marriage, and that Bettina did not marry for love or sentimental passion. The cousin explains:
We are married as a good sporting proposition. . . . Life is an interesting game and we fight it out as partners who respect each other and rely on each other. I went into it with my eyes open. It opened up to me an interesting life. He has never failed me in respect or in deference and he has quietly exacted the same from me. We have differed. But he has always treated me as one gentleman another. He is the best companion I could possibly desire. If I had to do it all over again, I should do it with enthusiasm.
When Jean asks if she has not been tempted to follow the pull of her heart, Bettina responds that, while she has had feelings of love for other men at times, “I knew the value of my happiness,” and so had no trouble sacrificing the potential lover rather than her husband.
Bettina finds Jean “a little mid-Victorian,” and suggests that marital happiness is “to be found in the discipline and order of one’s existence, in the enjoyment of many contacts, in the things which appealed to the awakening curiosity of the mind,” while romantic passion as a guiding force is doomed to last only “a very few years.”
Jean moves closer to this point of view and, when her arrival in Paris is noted by aristocratic families seeking to marry their sons into American wealth in exchange for European titles, she contracts a marriage with the Prince Ludovic de Sfax, a loose parallel to the film’s Vico. Sfax must find a wife wealthy enough to rescue his family from its massive debts. Jean wants a home and children, and a position that will allow her to engage the wider world. Sfax and Jean meet each other as friends and can speak honestly about their separate motivations. They each admit they are in love with another, yet they both want children. Jean explains that she can countenance discreet infidelity on his part so long as it is not “during the years when my children are coming into the world.” Sfax agrees to these terms.
Things take a few more sensational turns before the novel reaches its conclusion. Johnson’s novel, which seems to have been written as serial melodrama, is hardly great literature. Yet it is precisely in this that the novel finds significance as a popular, soap opera expression of the same themes and concerns that animate great artistic achievements such as Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.
Indeed, Children of Divorce can be seen as a kind of continuation of Wharton’s novel, tracing what for her characters is a wistful loosening of Victorian values between the 1870s and the turn of the century to a third, postwar generation which reveals a more monstrous personal and societal chaos. The contradictions that Wharton holds in such exquisite moral and literary tension are offered up by Johnson in clear and separate pieces. (There are further connections with Wharton’s 1928 novel The Children, but I will save those for another time.)
Johnson has the dissolute parents’ generation express its own regrets and second thoughts. Ted’s divorced parents each counsel him to marry Jean and commit to her, and not follow their path of promiscuity. With belated scruples, his mother tells him: “when I was your age, I saw men only as my lovers; now I see them as my sons.”
The film allows Ted and Jean to marry at the end, and lets Kitty make atonement through suicide for her mercenary approach to marriage. By contrast, the novel’s Kitty remains a monster, openly contemptuous of anyone who takes marriage and divorce seriously, and happy to use her marriage to Ted—and their daughter—as a way to wound her former friend Jean. Drinking and partying even while pregnant, Kitty ultimately uses child custody as a way of obtaining Ted’s entire fortune in exchange for their daughter, and she moves on to her next dalliance. This seems to be the novel’s vision of the modern approach to marriage—at least for the upper-class world it describes.
Since Ted is now divorced, Jean at the novel’s end wants to leave her husband and marry her life’s love. But Sfax, like the film’s Vico, is for religious reasons unable to give a divorce, though he acknowledges Jean’s perfect justice in wanting to leave him.
Ted, echoing Vico in the film, is unwilling to saddle Jean with the stigma of living outside of wedlock and departs on a long archeological expedition. Jean falls ill, and Sfax devotedly tends her back to health. The novel ends with Jean and Sfax recommitted to each other, not out of love but as life-wounded friends who will stay married and presumably have a child together. The alternative to Kitty’s modern insouciance toward marriage is not “true love” but a tempered aspiration to friendship with a similarly world-wise spouse.
A final note about a relatively minor difference between novel and film. In the former, Jean and Kitty spend their childhood in an Italian convent school. In the film, though, the convent is located near what the title card says is “a divorce colony in Paris.” Paris in the 1920s was certainly a divorce destination for those Americans wealthy enough to transact their business there. (Nancy L. Green writes here about what Americans at the time called a “Paris divorce” and what the French called “les divorces américains.”)
An article in the July 30, 1922 edition of the New York Times reports that Paris has become “a European Reno,” with increasing numbers of well-off Americans getting their divorces from French courts. Such courts were said to be lenient with regard to divorce both on grounds and a relatively short 3-5 month period for the legal process to be finalized.
At the end of the article, however, a French lawyer explains that the number of Americans granted a divorce by French courts was at that time actually not “more than twenty in any one year.” The reason for the perception of Paris as a “divorce colony” is, he says, because the Americans who divorce there are “prominent rich persons” and so receive more attention in the American press. An important qualification, if of small consolation to the sad little girls in the film.