There’s an episode in which Samantha throws a dinner to impress a client who then makes a pass at her. When he doesn’t stop, she turns him into a dog. When Darrin yells at her, Samantha locks them both out of the house. The next day, the client does it again, but this time Darrin punches him and quits. The client apologizes and asks Darrin to come back. In the next episode, Samantha comes up with a good idea for a campaign, but Darrin is jealous and accuses her of using witchcraft. Then he accuses her of using witchcraft to do housework, too. He pitches his own bad idea to the client, doesn’t get the account, and Samantha leaves him. In the end, he pitches the bad idea to Larry, who loves it, and rushes home to make up with Samantha. Later, he returns to work, pitches Samantha’s idea to the client, and wins him back, and it’s revealed that the whole thing was Samantha’s plan all along—because she’s crafty like that. In another episode, Samantha tells Endora she wishes Darrin would forget about business now and then, and Endora makes a bowl of popcorn appear. As soon as Darrin eats some, he announces he’s taking the day off. Then the milkman has some and decides to join Darrin. Angry, Larry comes over to see what’s happening, eats some popcorn, and joins Darrin and the milkman in a poker game. Then the client comes over to fire the agency, has some popcorn, and instantly loses interest in all business. Then a policeman comes—you get the picture.
I loved I Dream of Jeannie, but Jeannie’s situation depressed me. Compared to the smart, capable, rational, ladylike, elegant, and highly respected Samantha, Jeannie was unpredictable, jealous, emotionally reactive, and openly sexual. She was Tonya Harding to Samantha’s Nancy Kerrigan. Unfamiliar with the social codes Samantha knew by heart and followed to the letter, Jeannie was ostensibly shaped in a more benighted time with regard to women’s roles. Here was a magical character who had all the freedom and power in the world, who could literally spirit herself around in time and space, but who still called a man “master.” Nelson was always showing her ways in which she was more “free” in the modern world, and yet at the same time it was clear that Major Nelson was constantly terrified that she would commit some horrible social gaffe that would hurt his reputation or even ruin his career. It’s obvious that freedom was a “choice” exercised at Jeannie’s own peril. Major Nelson was always trying to coax Jeannie back in the bottle. Darrin was always trying to disempower Samantha.
My takeaways: (1) women who wield power openly are bad for business and wreck civilization; (2) women secretly control the world through magic, trickery, and witchcraft, and should therefore be controlled lest they ruin business and destroy civilization; (3) women who police and diminish themselves are good witches, and (old) women who say fuck it to all that and assert their power and authority are evil (I counted at least twenty such story lines in the first few seasons and then stopped counting); and (4) women should never get married.
The end, though. How we yearn for the happy ending. I always did. I remember being in college and feeling bereft one day, I’m not sure why. We’d moved so often. My parents always seemed on the verge of splitting up. Winter in Evanston, Illinois, was long and brutal. I was hungover. I saw some friends of mine, one of those couples who are attached at the hip, who seemed to carry an aura of home with them everywhere they went. I have no idea why I thought this. I’d heard him talk on the phone with a random girl he’d met in an elevator in Chicago. But there’s something so irresistibly final about the idea of the happy ending that we settle for just an OK ending, or convince ourselves that “happiness” is something other than an emotion, and emotions are fleeting. The critic Frank Kermode said that fiction is inherently apocalyptic, because it forces readers and writers to move toward an imagined ending. The end creates “a satisfying consonance” with the beginning and the middle, and arranges time into a nice pattern. But time doesn’t end, so the pattern keeps having to readjust. We understand that literary fictions are “consciously false,” he said (the world doesn’t end), but we don’t care. We find this particular falseness comforting, because it beats open-endedness, not-knowing. If the end fails to materialize, the apocalyptic yearning remains. In other words, Kermode said, “the end is immanent, rather than imminent.”23 In The Stepford Wives and Can This Marriage Be Saved?, the end was immanent. In my favorite sitcoms about marriage, by contrast, similar themes were played for laughs. TV shows don’t yearn for the end—on the contrary, they yearn for the never-ending now, for immortality or its TV equivalent, syndication. They home in on the moment-to-moment minutiae of an eternal present. They’re not compelled toward a satisfying conclusion; stasis is far more economically favorable. No wonder TV was practically built on the comedy of marriage and family life. With its absurdist recursions and thwarted desires, marriage and family life is the ideal subject for comedy. Depending on how you frame it, it can be a clown show, or a horror show, or a static vision of a deadened, heavenly afterlife: a static dream of June Cleaver perfection with no beginning, no end, no age, no death, no upsetting turns of events that couldn’t be resolved in an episode. TV—at least the TV of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, which I enjoyed all at once as a child through the ahistorical magic of reruns—was predicated on the same idea on which getting married and living happily ever after were predicated: on nothing changing, on an eternal, reassuring return to the status quo, on the heroine’s circular journey to nowhere.
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The Bronze Statue of the Virgin Slut Ice Queen Bitch Goddess
To be worshiped is not freedom.
—Shulamith Firestone
Katharine Hepburn was a tall, lean, electric thirty-three-year-old when she played white-robed goddess, Main Line socialite, and divorcée Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story. I was ten or eleven when I saw her in it for the first time; a short, vaguely potato-shaped fourth- or fifth-grader, likely encased in gauchos and fancy kneesocks. I remember standing in front of the television in the family room on a Saturday afternoon, rooted in place like a tree, feeling thunderstruck. I felt how I imagined Omar Sharif must have felt near the end of Dr. Zhivago, glancing out the window of a crowded streetcar and suddenly clapping eyes on his long-ago-lost love, Julie Christie, on the sidewalk below. He banged on the window, but she didn’t hear him. He tried to get off, but the crowd was oblivious. By the time he broke free, it was too late. He collapsed on the street and died of a coronary. Julie Christie never even knew he was there. My mom took me to see Dr. Zhivago one night when I was about eight, shortly before we moved to Madrid. We’d meant to see Herbie Rides Again, but it was sold out. Dr. Zhivago was being rereleased and was playing at the same multiplex. This was before there was Betamax, then VHS, then DVD, and then streaming. In theaters was how I got to see all my mom’s childhood favorites—biblical epics with casts of thousands, Technicolor musicals, and Walt Disney’s Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty. I loved them all, but this Dr. Zhivago, with its epic snowy vistas, its fluttering fur hats, and its random, ruthless vicissitudes of history, politics, and circumstantial, wrong-place, wrong-time, roll-of-the-dice, cataclysmic bad luck pretty much killed me dead.
The Philadelphia Story opens with Tracy (draped in white, of course) imperiously kicking her husband, C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant), out of the house—her father’s house, we later learn—and then breaking his golf club over her knee, just to be extra clear. This is the gesture that crosses the line: it’s one thing to stand up to your layabout society drunk of a husband, but it’s another to say the hell with everything he stands for. Dexter makes this clear by marching back up the steps and pushing Tracy in the face. Tracy topples over backward, like a statue falling off a pedestal. I had mixed feelings about this scene. I recognized Tracy as the sassy heroine and Dexter as the rakish hero, which meant I understood that I was being made to understand that she was asking for it, that she had coming to her whatever she had coming. The “natural” order of things was about to be imposed.
I forgot this almost immediately, however, because in the next scene (two y
ears later), Tracy is fully recovered and fluttering around the house on the eve of her second wedding. Having banished her father, Seth, from her wedding for publicly humiliating her mother by flaunting his affair with a dancer in New York, she has temporarily taken over the Lords’ house and turned it into a giddy matriarchy. Tracy struts around, surveying the land, checking out her ludicrous wedding gifts, dashing off a few sardonic thank-you notes, and generally looking very pleased with herself. Never before had I seen a movie bride look so relaxed, or care less about the flowers or place settings, or express so few dress- or cake-related concerns. She spends the day before her wedding horseback riding, swimming, reading, playing jokes on her pervy uncle, and talking about her hopes and dreams for a life of adventure. She does go on, somewhat unconvincingly, about her fine, upstanding, self-made, man-of-the-people fiancé, George, to her mother, Margaret, and her little sister, Dinah (like Alice’s cat!). But even before setting eyes on George, as Dinah seemed to know, I knew that Tracy would never stay with him. Dexter was charming in a suavely manipulative, narcissistic, emotionally abusive way. But George was a stuffy, middle-class striver with presidential aspirations. All he really wanted was power and access, and Tracy was his trophy and his ticket. And while she extolled his virtues to her mother and sister, she knew he was a fake. The first thing she did when she saw him by the stables was knock him down in the dirt. “You look like something out of a shop window,” she says, rubbing the dirt into his pristine riding pants. And he complains the clothes were new.
Before watching The Philadelphia Story, it had never occurred to me that femininity and femaleness were not one and the same thing. I’d dutifully absorbed the lessons embedded in movies, TV shows, ads, magazines, commercials, and cartoons. The frillier, flightier, wilier, sweeter, gentler, kinder, bitchier, more nurturing, scarier, more insecure, and more insincere a character was, the more of a “girl” she was. I’d learned to rank female characters by prettiness. (“Who do you think is prettier, Irene or Minnie?” Kira asked me one Saturday morning while watching Hello, Dolly!—another symbolic heirloom, now on Amazon Prime, passed on from my mother to me to her.) Little girls like to claim their heroines’ beauty as their own. It’s like picking a team, though it’s unclear what’s being won. The Philadelphia Story marked the first time I remember encountering the idea that this ephemeral but familiar thing I’d recognized all my life as the feminine ideal might be not just distinct from but also possibly oppressive to women. It came as a shock. Here was Tracy, a heroine—a bride, no less—and she was different. She was experienced. She had learned from her youthful mistakes and was making deliberate choices. She had agency. She had a horse. (Not that this was germane, but I really loved horses.) She was comfortable in her own skin, secure, and she believed in herself. She radiated confidence of a kind I’d never seen before in a movie heroine. It wasn’t the kind of confidence you usually saw in movie stars. It wasn’t just that she was secure in her sexiness. On the contrary, she didn’t seem to think about her sexiness at all. What made her attractive was that she acted like a person, not a girl. I did think it was strange to be encountering this for the first time in 1980, given that The Philadelphia Story was released in 1940. By the time I saw it, Hepburn had been described as “modern” for about five decades. After her film debut, in 1932, magazines called her “a new kind of star!” and “more modern than tomorrow!”1 Which I guess she turned out to be, because Tracy’s autonomy and independence were just the setup for setting her straight. It was the preface to her sudden adventure in the Wonderland of representation. The movie was a gauntlet. Tracy was put through the wringer. By the time her father, her ex-husband, her future husband, and the tabloid reporter were through telling her who she was and what she wasn’t, she didn’t know which way was up. This was part of what stunned me, I suppose. What kind of rabbit hole had we fallen into? How would we ever get out?
There are shades of Alice in The Philadelphia Story. When Dexter shows up unexpectedly, tabloid media in tow, Tracy steps unexpectedly through the looking glass. The movie is an allegory about Katharine Hepburn’s experiences in Hollywood, but more abstractly it’s about what it’s like to be an independent woman pressured to conform to the culture’s idea of woman. It’s about Hepburn the person and Hepburn the star persona, and how (the fictional construct of) the latter came close to ruining the real life of the former until she realized that she couldn’t be just herself, she had to be the version of herself that audiences were comfortable with, which had more to do with what passed for femininity at the time than anything else. At the start of the movie, Tracy leaves Dexter, but the structures stay the same. She returns to Seth’s house and remains in a fairy-tale walled garden. As she is about to remarry, Dexter suddenly returns, ostensibly to save the day. He tells them all that he has made a deal with Spy magazine. In exchange for killing a story on Seth Lord’s juicy, scandalous affair, he has agreed to sneak in a couple of tabloid journalists—a reporter named Mike (James Stewart) and a photographer named Liz (Ruth Hussey)—for an exclusive inside look at the society wedding of the year. Tracy is furious, but she goes along with it for her mother’s sake.
I didn’t know it then, but decades later I learned that Katharine Hepburn was raised by progressive parents who believed in raising girls the same way as boys. Her mother, Kit, was a leading suffragist and an early champion for birth control, causes she took up after getting married and having children and wondering why that was all that was expected of her. Her father was a prominent urologist and an advocate for public education about sexually transmitted diseases. When Hepburn was a little girl, she cut her hair, played sports, and made everyone call her Jimmy. The family discussed things like bisexuality and prostitution at the dinner table. Hartford society was not amused, so Hepburn was taught to stand up for what she believed was right. Her mother regularly took her and her brother to Greenwich Village to visit her lesbian “aunts,” Kit’s old classmates from Bryn Mawr Mary “Aunty” Towle and Bertha Rembaugh. Towle was a women’s-rights activist and attorney. Her law partner, Rembaugh, was the first woman to run for municipal-court judge, one of the first reputable lawyers to defend prostitutes in night court, and one of the first single women to adopt a baby on her own. Hepburn went to meetings at the radical feminist Heterodoxy Club to hear Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman speak. She wanted to do what she wanted to do. And what she wanted to do was act and be famous. She was married once, briefly, to her college boyfriend and lifelong friend, a Philadelphia industrialist named Ludlow “Luddy” Ogden Smith. Her family adored him. They called him “the prince.” She convinced him to swap his middle and last names so that her name would not be Kate Smith, then divorced him to go back to Broadway. The family kept him on anyway, as a son.
Hepburn’s mistake was the same mistake so many other ambitious, idealistic, earnest, guileless women make. It’s the mistake of forgetting to “manage the optics,” of forgetting to conform to the existing narrative, of thinking that you can not only get what you want but get it on your own terms, that you can change the story. Strategic girls manage perception; idealistic girls go up against the narrative, because it’s at the root of the problem, and they get crushed every time. Throughout the 1930s, in her first decade of fame, Hepburn played unconventional, androgynous heroines: Jo March in Little Women, a home-wrecking aviator, a cross-dressing grifter, a deluded social climber, and a couple of madcap heiresses. Throughout the 1930s, Katharine Hepburn was framed by the press as a recognizable type: a threatening, refractory woman, heartless, stuck-up, bossy, entitled, and insufficiently grateful and humble. The tabloids confirmed what people suspected, what they were afraid of. Hers was a story they already knew. Stories decide what become of us; they remind us who’s boss. Celebrity gossip is never surprising. It’s familiar, reassuring, comforting—proof that nothing ever changes. That’s why we love it.
Audiences liked Hepburn less and less. It’s not just that Katharine Hepburn wouldn’t flutter her eyelashes or
shake her booty or wear a skirt. It’s that she insisted on playing people instead of dream girls. In his review of the movie Break of Hearts for the Spectator, Graham Greene expressed this: “Miss Hepburn always makes her young women quite horrifyingly lifelike with their girlish intuitions, their intensity, their ideals which destroy the edge of human pleasure.” Hepburn refused to sign autographs or answer fan mail or be nice to reporters, so Life magazine wrote, “People grew a little tired of Katharine facing the world, clear-eyed, forthright, arrogant and unafraid—in situations that merely called for relaxation.”2 Exhibitors put her on a list of actors they considered box-office poison. She desperately wanted the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, but David O. Selznick wouldn’t give it to her because he “couldn’t see Rhett Butler chasing [her] for ten years.” (Selznick never would have said what he said to her today, of course. He would have called her unfuckable in an e-mail.) He offered her one of the leads in Mother Carey’s Chickens instead.
Hepburn declined the part in Mother Carey’s Chickens. She bought out her contract at RKO and went back to the East Coast. She invited her friend the playwright Phillip Barry to spend a week with her at Fenwick, her parents’ Connecticut summer house, and to talk about the play he would write for her. It was to be about who she was, who people thought she was, what happened to her because of it, and what she needed to do to fix it. Barry observed as Luddy hung around the house taking pictures of Kate’s visiting boyfriends, like Howard Hughes and John Ford. Barry came up with the idea of a story about a socialite whose wedding gets turned into a tabloid story, thanks to her ex-husband, who uses the situation to win her back.
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