The Women (1939)
When the film The Women was released in 1939, the play on which it was based was one of the most commercially successful and talked-about theatrical productions of its time. This triumph was not foreordained, despite the many talents of its author, Clare Boothe Luce.
Some things, from swimming to surfing to flirting, came easily to the vivacious Luce. Her meteoric ascent in the world of New York magazine publishing included her being appointed managing editor of Vanity Fair at the age of 29. She showed an equally remarkable ascent in New York high society, with a marriage at the age of 20 to the enormously wealthy George Tuttle Brokaw and, after their divorce in 1929, to the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune, Henry Luce.
Nevertheless, her previous play, the 1935 Abide With Me, was met with audience boos and reviewers’ daggers. Undissuaded, she returned to playwriting the following year and over three days produced the draft of a new play.[1]
This was an acid farce about a circle of rich, backstabbing women gathered around society matron Mary Haines, whose husband Stephen is having an affair with a feisty golddigger. Mary’s friends, out of envy and idleness rather than any sympathy, expose Mary’s humiliation and cajole her into divorcing her husband. Along the way, we get multiple other infidelities, divorces, and savage deconstructions of marriage and motherhood. These are witnessed and commented upon by dozens of other female characters—the play has over 40 speaking roles—the maids, manicurists, shopgirls, fashion models, and sundry other laborers in an elaborate industry of modern femininity.
Theater geniuses George Kaufman and Moss Hart helped Luce iron out a wrinkle or two, liking the play so much they both had invested in it. So in 1936 The Women, Broadway’s first all-female production, opened to audience gasps and laughter, and critics’ reviews that, even when cool toward the frequent repulsiveness of the play’s characters, recognized a hit. Within a few months the play had taken in over a quarter of a million dollars.[2]
MGM aquired film rights and first gave the screenplay assignment to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who took several stabs at it before it was reassigned to Jane Murfin and Anita Loos. Murfin and Loos kept much of Luce’s dialogue, but MGM’s love of scale expanded the number of speaking roles to over 120, while letting viewers feast on an all-star cast.
Norma Shearer plays Mary, Joan Crawford her predatory rival, and Rosalind Russell is Mary’s frenemy Sylvia. George Cukor, already known as a “women’s director” and recently fired from the production of Gone With The Wind in part because of what Clark Gable thought was his overattention to the women’s dresses and hairstyling, keeps the sprawling operation relatively crisp.[3]
Luce’s play opens with a bridge game in a Manhattan apartment. By contrast, the first major scene in the film is a frenetic tour through a labyrinthine beauty spa designed by the legendary art director Cedric Gibbons. The camera whirls us through room after room with mud-baths, masseuses, exercise rooms, hairstylists, skin-tightening clinics, and professional dogsitters, catering to a relentlessly frivolous class of monied women and their aspiring fellow-travelers.
As is often noted, the all-female spaces of The Women tend to portray an enormous expenditure of wealth and energy for the purpose of attracting and holding on to men. Even when, in the second half of the film, we leave New York for Nevada, the rustic space of Reno still functions as a regional office of this massive male-centered conglomerate.
From the 1930s to now, playgoers and filmviewers have wrestled with the meaning of an all-female production that, rather than showing us sisterhood and women’s solidarity, gives us backbiting and pettiness. “That was a bitchy play she wrote about women,” Gertrude Stein told a friend. “But I liked it, at least I liked it a little.” Clifton Fadiman quipped: “The Women is the most convincing argument for homosexuality I have ever encountered.”[4]
Certainly, many of the principal characters, and some of the most delightful ones to watch, perform a high ridiculousness that is simultaneously cruel and self-defeating. At least one feminist critic has argued that Luce, writing in the 1930s, was necessarily unconscious of the extent to which patriarchal social arrangements subordinate women to men, and that The Women therefore offers the pathos of an oppression everywhere apparent and never critiqued.[5]
This sort of reading makes questionable assumptions about our level of moral sophistication and self-awareness as compared with our grandparents, and seems to posit a correct representation of women from which the play and film fall short. Still, the cynicism, unhappiness, and misogyny on display in Luce’s creation and its film adaptation are as real as their anarchic sparkle, and it is worth thinking about these features seriously, not so much in terms of how they might be edited to accord with present-day attitudes, but how they work in the context of their author’s life, on the one hand, and her comic vision, on the other.
The play’s profound ambivalence regarding the condition of being a woman is voiced most clearly by Mary’s young daughter (also named Mary), in a scene absent from the film. Teased by her brother for her body’s early development, Little Mary refuses her mother’s consolation, saying she doesn’t want to be a girl. “I hate girls!” she tells her mother. “They’re so silly, and they tattle.”
Today, Little Mary would probably be put on puberty blockers and prepared for surgical reassignment to her “real” gender, but in the play Mary attempts to allay her daughter’s ambivalence about her sex, pointing out that today “ladies do all the things men do.” Little Mary isn’t convinced, however. Her mother, after all, doesn’t work and has servants who do everything. Besides, says the daughter, “even when the ladies do do things, they stop it when they get the lovey-dovies. . . . Ladies always end up so silly.”
Attachment to a man, Little Mary deduces, is both the goal women seek and the thing that brings to an end their ability to act independently in the world. Her mother’s trump card is motherhood, the “one thing a woman can do, no man can do.” “But,” little Mary responds, “is that any fun, Mother dear?” and “I bet you anything you like, Daddy has more fun than you!”[6]
Other important mother-daughter exchanges in both play and film are between the elder Mary and her own mother. The latter, Mrs. Morehead, attempts to dissuade her daughter from confronting her husband over his infidelity. “Stephen is a man,” she says, and will soon grow tired of his mistress. Mrs. Morehead also argues against getting a divorce. “A child needs both its parents in one home,” she tells Mary.
Mrs. Morehead questions the superiority of modernized divorce laws: “Fifty years ago, when women couldn’t get divorces, they made the best of situations like this,” she says. “And sometimes, out of situations like this, they made very good things indeed!” Mary argues: “But this is today! Stephen and I are equals!” Indeed, it is precisely because modern marriage is supposed to be a product of love and choice that its betrayal is so personally hurtful, a wounding of the self rather than an affront to society.
The most memorable advice Mrs. Morehead offers her daughter, however, concerns her so-called friends. “Don’t confide in your girlfriends,” she tells Mary. “If you let them advise you, they’ll see to it, in the name of friendship, that you lose your husband and your home. I’m an old woman, dear, and I know my sex.” In this view, one chooses a husband and family, or female friendship. The first must be carefully protected against the second, and it is only when Mary comes to accept this that she is able to throw down her rivals and reclaim her husband.[7]
In assessing this sort of maternal counsel, one must take into account Luce’s own family background. Luce’s parents were never married; she and her brother were born out of wedlock. Her father was a charismatic musical genius who towed the family from one city to the next—New York, Memphis, Nashville, Chicago—before abandoning them. Luce’s mother Ann, on the other hand, was single-minded in her determination to propel her children into high society, which meant lying about her marital history, living as the kept woman of several different wealthy men who also helped pay for her daughter’s elite schooling, and teaching her daughter to strangle any scruples that might stand in the way of her marrying a millionaire.
One evident result of this upbringing was Luce’s first marriage, to an alcoholic millionaire twice her age. Another likely result was her willingness to sleep with men as a means of career advancement and the many affairs she conducted with prominent married men. A third was the impression the younger Luce gave to some intimates of being a glittering yet hollow shell.
Certainly, the prominence of divorce as a theme in The Women was drawn from Luce’s experience and that of those around her, from her father’s divorce from his first wife after he took up with Luce’s mother, to Henry Luce’s divorce so that he could marry Clare, to her own divorce from her first husband.
Clare, like many women she knew, had done time in Reno. In 1931, she wrote an atmospheric piece on Reno for Vanity Fair under the pen name “Julian Jerome.” It conjures the desert city’s “cheap cars, moving picture palaces, filling stations”; its “strange mixture of types” from “cowboys in the drug stores drinking ice cream sodas” to “movie stars on an Egyptian location,” to her own set of divorce tourists: “smart Eastern women from the Riverside Hotel in well-cut Long Island riding togs or rich furs, tripping along in high French heels.” She describes how, on the bridge spanning Reno’s river, “newly made divorcées stand when their three months’ pilgrimage is over.” They “pull off their wedding rings and toss them into the Truckee, where they glitter, flash like flecks of sunshine, and are lost in the eddying rapids.”[8]
Yet The Women is not a mere refraction of personal experience nor a failure to identify power relations correctly. To get at what Luce is thinking, we have to take seriously a sharp little put-down early on in both play and film that comes from the character of Nancy, a novelist and self-described “old maid.” Rather more admirable than Mary’s other friends, Nancy chides the gossipy women for their evident envy of Mary who, says Nancy in the film, is “contented. Contented to be what she is.”
SYLVIA. Which is what?
NANCY. A woman.
SYLVIA. And what are we?
NANCY. Females.[9]
It’s a nice little zinger, but might it not indicate a genuine conceptual distinction in the play between “women” and “females”? And what would that distinction be?
In the play, Nancy’s comment is a response not to Sylvia but to the pregnant Edith, the most fecund of the play’s characters and who has just returned from the bathroom after a bout of morning sickness. This is not to say that baby-making is the mark of the mere “female” in contrast to a supposedly childless “woman.” After all, Mary, the film’s “woman,” is a mother (and has two children in the play).[10] Yet the distinction between “women” and “females” does suggest uneasy reflection on the relation between the individual woman and the female who is defined by her role as a member of the dimorphic species.
This element is far more pronounced in the film which, from the start, draws comparisons between women and animals. The opening credit sequence matches each of the film’s principals with her totem animal—deer, cow, leopard, fox, etc. In the technicolor fashion show sequence inserted in the middle of the otherwise black and white film, we at one point see monkeys dressed in the identical clothes of the fashion models.
In the play, Edith makes the connection to animals when she tells her friend Peggy: “Listen, Peggy, I’m the only happy woman you know. Why? I don’t ask Phelps or any man to understand me. How could he? I’m a woman. . . . And I don’t try to understand them. They’re just animals. Who am I to quarrel with the way God made them?” And at the end of the play when Crystal gets her comeuppance, she tells the now ruthless Mary, somewhat admiringly: “You’re just a cat, like all the rest of us!” This parting shot is changed in the film to: “By the way, there’s a name for you ladies but it isn’t used in high society outside of a kennel.”[11]
So is the “female” the animal and the “woman” the human, and the drama a transcending of one or fall from the other? I don’t think so. Instead, I think Luce is aiming at a tragi-comic equilibrium between the two, between the individual in command of herself and the sexual, biological creature driven by impulse.
To accept both simultaneously and allow that there is often little way of separating them out, and that what happiness we have depends on a combination of the two—that is how the play and film understand the condition of being a woman. We recall that Nancy’s comment follows from her claim that Mary is content “to be what she is.” In the course of the drama this contentment is shattered and revealed to be based on a certain amount of self-deception, but it remains an attainable if always unstable ideal.
The relative independence of women of Mary’s class and the increasing gender equality in Luce’s time constitute enormous achievements. But they also increase the danger of a destructive misapprehension about our natures, a false consciousness that is not economic but biological. All the opportunities we witness at the start of the movie to train, slim, augment, shape, and rejuvenate the female body reflect an alienation from the ineluctable fact of our animality.
These are brought back in crude comic form in Lucy’s ruminations in Reno about her fiery, sometimes violent, yet dependable husband, but also when Sylvia descends fully into the animal, feral and infantile. Rosalind Russell is never more hilarious than when she completely loses all self-control in her catfight with Paulette Goddard’s Miriam Aarons, biting Goddard’s leg (apparently for real) and then smashing crockery and bawling.
The film offers somewhat more possibility for constructive female cooperation than does the play, and the one character who seems to support other women as women and without much in the way of ulterior motive is Miriam. This is interesting since the character’s name indicates that she is the one Jewish character in the film. The ravishing Goddard was herself Jewish on her father’s side.
Luce had a long history of close and complicated relationships with Jews. Her mother Ann’s longest and most serious romance with any man was with Joel Jacobs, a wealthy Keystone Tires executive. Jacobs was extremely devoted to Luce and her family, paying for Luce’s private schooling and European vacations. The teenaged Luce wrote of Jacobs in her diary: “Jew! Yes. But any white Christian who was ½ as fine as he would be considered a miracle.”
Luce’s mother was unwilling to marry Jacobs, fearing his Jewishness would hinder her and her daughter’s social prospects. Nevertheless, Ann Boothe and Jacobs continued their companionship even after Ann married someone else. The two even died together in a car accident that may have been an act of murder-suicide on the part of Ann, who drove her car with Jacobs as passenger into the path of a train.[12]
Luce herself was for many years the mistress of the world-famous Jewish financier Bernard (or “Barney”) Baruch; she always hoped he would leave his wife for her. And one of Luce’s closest female friends was the Jewish writer Laura Z. Hobson, whose bestselling novel about antisemitism was made into the Academy Award-winning film Gentleman’s Agreement.
Miriam in both play and film may be the closest thing we have to a good character who is not naïve. She is not one of the upper-class characters; she comes from the world of the theater, introduced in the play as “the musical comedy star.”[13] She is not a servant, like the maid and cook through whose commentary we learn of Mary’s split with her husband, or a worker like Lucy at the Reno ranch who offers homespun counterpoint to the refined neuroses of her wealthy guests. Yet like these lower-class characters, Miriam is able to offer wisdom that can only come from outside the world of the idle and status-obsessed rich.
Her social standing is slippery, in some ways parallel to the gold-digging Crystal who has, like Miriam, parleyed an affair with a man of means into an advantageous marriage: Crystal with Mary’s husband, Miriam with Sylvia’s. Yet having won their prizes, Crystal immediately moves on to the next conquest, tearing her new husband down in the process, while Miriam is working on trying to help her new husband beat his alcoholism.
Miriam is tough, telling Mary in the film: “I come from a world where a woman’s just gotta come out on top or it’s just too darn bad.” But this other “world” that Miriam comes from—signaling Jewish outsiderness, theatrical hustle, working class and immigrant roots—seems to spur her towards a compassion and effectiveness combined in no other character. Miriam gets along with the other society women without becoming one of them, and she is the closest thing to a real friend that Mary, or anyone, has by the end of the film.
Luce’s innovation is to give us a comedy of remarriage without the men, and very bitter comedy it is. She also gives us a powerful scene which, more poignantly than any other film of its time, shows the devastating impact of divorce on a child.
Little Mary, played by child actress Virginia Weidler, is ultimately responsible for reuniting her parents when she inadvertently reveals to Mary how miserable Stephen is with his second wife. But earlier in the film Little Mary, having been told that her parents are divorcing, puts on a brave face for her mother (despite her trembling lower lip). She then excuses herself to go to the bathroom.
As soon as she is alone, Little Mary clutches the wall and with soft hysterics begs frantically for her parents to “do something” to save her from her world’s disintegration. It is the only scene in this crowded film in which a character speaks, alone, with no one else to hear.
Sources:
Carlson, Susan L. “Comic Textures and Female Communities 1937 and 1977: Clare Boothe and Wendy Wasserstein.” Modern Drama (1984) 27, 4: 564-73.
Luce, Clare Boothe (under the pseudonym Julian Jerome). “Where Bonds Are Broken.” Vanity Fair (January 1931): 43, 74.
Luce, Clare Boothe. The Women. Revised edition. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1995.
McGilligan, Patrick. George Cukor: A Double Life. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992.
Morris, Sylvia Jukes. Rage For Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce. New York: Random House, 2014.
[1] All biographical information about Clare Boothe Luce is taken from Morris 2014.
[2] On the creation and production of The Women see Morris 2014, chapter 23.
[3] Morris 2014, chapter 29 and McGilligan 1992, 145-59.
[4] Quotations in Morris 2014, 346, 534n6.
[5] Carlson 1984.
[6] Luce 1995, 23.
[7] “Mary clearly demonstrates that success in Boothe's world is measured by one's ability to keep a man by fighting off other women” (Carlson 1984, 567).
[8] Luce 1931. Such a scene is not in The Women, but in the 1961 film The Misfits, the newly divorced Roslyn, played by Marilyn Monroe, considers discarding her ring according to Reno tradition as she crosses an overpass over the Truckee.
[9] Luce 1995, 8.
[10] Luce had one daughter with her first husband before learning that her fallopian tubes were damaged and she could have no more children. Her daughter was later killed in a car accident.
[11] Luce 1995, 85-86, 90. Indeed, the more one notices the odd ambiguity of Luce’s title, the more one suspects that she would have liked her play to be caled “The Bitches.”
[12] Morris 2014, qtd. 64. Morris 2014 is again the source for this information.
[13] Luce 1995, 28.