PLAYING IT SINGLE
On television during the mid-to late 1950s, single women showed up in the familiar guises. They were older widows saddened or made sarcastic by life; busybody aunts, maids, older sisters, teachers, or mistress-of-ceremonies types who sang and introduced guests or “gave testimonials,” meaning they held and caressed the sponsor’s product and spoke about it for up to a full five minutes. On commercials, single women were either invisible or ethereal, creatures disconnected from physical life. They never appeared in their apartments or houses or in their offices. We never saw their front steps, their kitchens, their cats. They were pictured only in fantasy scenarios—standing next to Chevrolets and gesturing, waving from magically flying Chevrolets, and dressed most often in evening gowns. The single woman had no place in a domestic scheme, unless she was a spinsterly grandmother or one of those ascendant female consumers, the teenager.
The single woman in 1950s television lived on the sitcom. Here, she almost always played a grown woman who behaved like a perky superannuated teenager. She lived at home, usually with a widowed parent, held a clerical job, and either matchmade crazily for everyone in the cast or became the subject of matchmaking by everyone in the cast. Consider three prime-time examples:
• My Little Margie. A precursor to Gidget, minus the surfing element and smirky cuteness. Margie, played by Gale Storm, whose name promised something slightly more dramatic, lives with her widowed father; although she is supposed to be twenty-one, she seems at times to be about twenty-seven and at others thirty-five. The plotlines can be reduced to two conflicts. First, Daddy can’t control his overgrown baby as much as he’d like, and, second, Margie can’t control Daddy. She doesn’t like his girlfriends and often tries deliberately to spoil his dates. Gidget with a Freudian undertow.
• Private Secretary. Here we meet single girl Susie McNamera, the top secretary to important talent agent Peter Sands. Naturally, Susie is in love with Peter but not fully aware of it as she organizes every facet of his existence, including the arrangement of his paper clips and assessing the merits, so sadly few, of his dates. Eventually, she realizes that she wants to marry Peter and plots with the receptionist to change her image. No one, including a resident expert at the Museum of TV and Radio, is too sure what happened next because the show went off the air suddenly.
• 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.)