“There’s a word for you ladies…but it isn’t used in polite society outside a kennel.”
—Joan Crawford, The Women

Winter finally showed up in northern California this week. When the rain started I was on my motorbike 40 miles from San Francisco with a busted visor and no waterproof gear. Drops stung my face hard enough to draw blood from my lips, and by the time I got home I had to be thawed out in the bath like a Christmas morning turkey after a drunken Christmas Eve.

After that I was only fit for a Sunday Matinee: make milky coffee, snap a bar of Valrhona chocolate, draw the blinds, wrap up in my pet blanket, and watch a 1930s movie. (I know it isn’t nice to brag, but the modern spinster life is delightful.) I watched The Women, George Cukor’s 1939 version with Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, and 131 other actresses. MGM claimed that even the lapdogs who appeared were bitches.

As I learned all over again during a week of silent meditation, my attention is a misguided combination of fickle and compulsive, always trying land on written words. My laptop has become a test of commitment. If I love a movie, I can watch it through. If it flags at all, I start surfing Wikipedia and IMDB to read the background detail. (Once I get as far as Twitter and Slate, it’s over.)

I have more stomach for car chases than catfights, which bring back the trauma of Fifth Class lunchtime, and I made it only twenty minutes into the spats and bitchery before wanting to know more about Norma Shearer. How did such a squat, stiff, cross-eyed little thing ever get to star over Ros Russell and Joan Crawford?

She was disciplined, that’s how. When her father lost all his money, her mother moved her and her sister from their big house in Montreal to a verminous room in New York City so that the girls could become stars. Norma worked—exercising her eyes to fix that squint, studying dance and voice, hauling around to every audition in spite of the insults to her figure. She was turned down by the Ziegfield Follies for having short legs.

When she got to Hollywood, she kept working harder than the other actresses—retaking screen tests, practicing angles that disguised her defects, pushing for better material and better roles. She became MGM’s biggest silent star in the twenties, long before she persuaded the studio head and boy legend Irving Thalberg to marry her and crown her queen of the lot. And when the talkies came along, her fluid Canadian accent worked, unlike poor Clara Bow’s Brooklynese.

I felt better about The Women once I could root for Norma Shearer, who played racy, modern divorcees as well as this wronged, noble, and boring wife. Women’s roles were wobbling all over the place in the 20s and 30s, and she tried out several on behalf of the millions of young women who depended on Hollywood instruction to tell them how to live and what to wear.

The movie was released on the day that Hitler invaded Poland. I can imagine Brooklyn seamstresses and shop girls luxuriating in their Sunday off, forgetting daylight as they sink further into velvet seats and stare up at that endless beauty salon scene that opens the movie. They watch the rich ladies get manicured, massaged, and covered in creamy facepacks and cucumber eye pads. They study the suffering involved in electrode facials and calisthenics and store up information on how to act when you have money—how you stride in and demand a top-to-toe “makeover,” claiming to be bored to tears with your “look.”

A decade into the Dirty Thirties, nobody in my Brooklyn theater can go to the Elizabeth Arden salon on Fifth Avenue, unless they are the manicurists who paint rich ladies’ nails Jungle Red. But for a quarter, they can go to a matinee and gasp as the movie switches from black and white to Technicolor for a ten-minute fashion show that has nothing to do with the plot. Look at these modern women, switching from sportswear to cocktail dresses to ball gowns! Short, well-padded models twirl in Adrian’s avant-garde outfits as they pretend to see Paris, play tennis, and go on a cruise.

The fantasy is exotic, and also minutely specific. It shows exactly how these rich ladies put their lives and looks together, how they manage their servants and their men. It reminds me of British children’s books from the same era, which spent pages on loving descriptions of Nestle condensed milk, sausages, pink ham, and slabs of chocolate, so that half-starved readers could transport themselves to picnics and “midnight feasts” where no one had heard of ration cards.

The rules that underpin the glamour in this movie are simple and stark:

1. Get used to what you’ve got. You may rise from the perfume counter to vamp in a bubble bath, as Joan Crawford does. But you’ll never belong, and when the rich are done with you, you’ll be kicked right back to the department store.
2. Take comfort in the fact that rich ladies are miserable. They don’t have enough to do, so for sport they take each other down. And one by one, they get their comeuppance—
3. Because all husbands step out on their wives. A smart woman knows this, stays sweet and loyal, and waits out his weakness until he’s glad to get her back. And when a man chooses you over another, that’s victory. That’s triumph.

I feel your kinship, Brooklyn girls and women: sales clerks, mothers, typists, servants, elevator operators, seamstresses, factory girls. I could so easily have been one of you, attending George Cukor’s Sunday university to learn what I could and couldn’t do.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 4:52 pm and is filed under California, Movies\, People\. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.