The natural substitute for speech
Now suppose you are a young woman who does not want to be the girl standing over by the record machine as the boys look on her with lust. And yet you do want love and even marriage. How do you do it?
In a sense the girl by the record machine has it easy. She only has to make herself obviously available. But there is a price for that. When she puts herself on display she leaves herself open to judgment. The men look at her and they look away. Why did he look away? Was it merely because she made eye contact and he is timid or did he look at her and find her wanting? Is he even now thinking some disparaging thought that he will go repeat to a friend and they will both look at her and laugh?
And she knows all about other girls too. They can seem to be kind but she has also seen them make judgments and remarks and she knows how cruel they can be.
Is it really worth all that just to get a little sexual attention? And even when she gets the attention she can never really be sure the man thinks well of her. She is well aware of the contemptuous way some men sometimes speak of women who successfully attract their attention.
So some women reject all that .... All that what? What shall we call it? Human frailty?
I'm not talking about actual sex here although it may appear to be the case. What I am talking about is that transition from speech to intimacy. It can lead to sex, of course, and there is a whole literature about it. Most of that literature is meant to make the transition seem possible and there is a sense in which it is because it happens all the time. But when you can't get there it can seem impossible. And when it seems impossible for us, those people around us who do manage it can be awfully intimidating. Or they can all seem crass.
And there is the sense that there is an ideal that is sacrificed if one does get too crass.
Three daughters
We see a woman in a different light when we think of her as someone's daughter. We treat her differently and think of her differently. We can't so thoughtlessly enjoy or mock that girl over there flashing it around in a really obvious way if we care about her and her future.
There are three real-life daughters behind Tracy Samantha Lord. Here is the first one.
The real Hope Scott was very much what Katharine Hepburn appears to be. She stood ramrod straight even in her 90s and she was a size eight all her life. (That, by the way, is in the old sizes. Women's sizes, like college grades, have gotten a lot easier to attain over the years. Hope Scott's size 8 would be size 2 in most contemporary women's clothing.)
There is a famous story worth repeating about her. At a dinner party, one of the servants approached her to tell her that the butler had committed suicide. Hope Scott hid her emotions, made sure her guests were all comfortable, excused herself and dealt with it.
And then there is this gem from her obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
The second daughter is Katherine Hepburn. She was of an old family but came from poor cousins (although still better off than most of the rest of us). Barry spent time with her family and he modeled much of the language and the family interactions on what he saw there.
And that is important because that language, that magnificent language, is all Katharine Hepburn's. This is the movie that made her and it is important to note that she was never much of an actress but rather a star. She played a type that the rest of us all found attractive and that type was very close to what she really was like. At the risk of being tarred and feathered by her fans, Dorothy Parker was right, Hepburn had a very limited range and she got famous because she found the type she was good at playing and audiences liked that type (and we still like it).
First the good of that. Listen to that language and the way she speaks it. There is a joke in The Music Man about singing being "just sustained talking". Katharine Hepburn's speaking voice is like very subtle singing. Listen to any interview she ever gave and you can hear it. And she really did speak in that beautiful, refined way she does in the movie.
Speech is a crucial part of distinction in a woman. It has been said that you can tell a man is not a gentleman in a flash because he lacks certain qualities. He may have these qualities and not be a gentleman but if he doesn't have them he isn't no matter what else he is and does. For women, one of these markers is language. If she cannot speak clearly and elegantly, she doesn't have it.
The negative aspect is is this: unlike Hope Scott, Hepburn never made a a loving relationship work. Her life is a succession of failures and tawdry affairs like her famous one with Spencer Tracy. One of these is worth lingering on because it relates to The Philadelphia Story. Howard Hughes bought the rights to The Philadelphia Story for Hepburn. He did all sorts of extravagant things for her. Most biographies cover this off by saying that he was her boyfriend.
That's sort of true but Hughes had a series of relationships with Hollywood starlets just like the one he had with Hepburn. He was very generous to all of them and they in turn ... well, as the old joke goes, "We have already determined what you are, now we are trying to determine the degree. Keep that image in your heads because I will return to it a little further down.
The third daughter is Philip Barry's own who died at one year. People who have more patience than me and have read all his plays report that almost all of them have an idealized daughter in them.
Edith Wharton
The master of portraying society women such as Katharine Hepburn and Hope Scott was Edith Wharton and there are some interesting similarities between Hepburn and Wharton's heroines Lily Bart and Anna Leath.
Lily finds herself in a position very much like what Hepburn was in. She is of society and she is beautiful and intelligent but she does not have the financial means to cut the sort of figure she feels entitled to. Hollywood stardom not being available yet, Lily wagers everything on being able to make an advantageous marriage.
Along the way, she makes the acquaintance of a wealthy man who offers to help her with money. She trusts him with her investments, surprisingly, he always make a "profit" for her. Unlike Hepburn and Hughes, Lily doesn't quite grasp that she is being embroiled in a transaction and she is rather jolted when confronted with the quid pro quo.
The ending of Lily Bart's story is tragic as opposed to Hepburn's, which is just sad, but there are a couple of themes that are important to her story that also appear in The Philadelphia Story. The first is the magical but weightless feeling that comes in the prelude to a kiss, or to not kissing.
That was a theme that haunted Wharton all her life. She returned to it later in what I think is her best novel, The Reef. A reef is a hidden obstacle below the surface and that whole book is about the hidden obstacles. In this case the heroine, Anna Leath constantly contrasts herself with other women whom she knows have successfully crossed the reef. She knows that crossing the reef is not necessarily a good thing and she knows of women who have endured scandal as a consequence but something in her feels like failure because she never does it. Rather painfully, she discovers that one of these women has had an affair with the man Anna wants to marry. Anna spends a lot of time wondering about what it is that other women have that enables them to do this thing so knowingly whereas she, Anna, always holds back on the brink.
The man she wants to marry describes the crucial moment when he and Anna's rival began their affair rather cynically:
Speech and acts can be substitutes for each other. It's odd, as André Fortin noted, that "I love you" is more loving than "I love you very much". Language keeps a distance and it keeps a very proper distance but too much language interspersed between saying it an living it is failure. And there are ways of talking that make things happen and there are ways that do not.
There is a magnificent moment at the end of the Reef where the two principals have been moving to greater and greater intimacy in some ways while also moving closer and closer to a break up. Anna is overcome by emotion at the door to Darrow's hotel room and he opens the door and brings her in. They have gotten their naturally but this is intimate territory where she, according to the manners of the day, should not be.
In my experience, most women know what to do when they get to sex or they can figure it out very quickly and they tend to know what they are doing when they are just talking. It is that transition from speech to kisses where all the insecurity and pain is. It's not easy for men either but it is a challenge of an altogether different order for women. For, no matter how much liberation and feminism we try to throw at the problem, the woman wants the man to cross the threshold to get her and he wants her to respond when he does. And her fear of failure coming up to that moment is daunting. It is daunting even when a woman is firmly decided that nothing is going to happen this time. The sense that she is not really a first class woman, a first class human being, if she cannot navigate these dangerous waters is always there and will never go away. To be a good girl means to live with that recurring test most of your life.
And that, I think, is the real magic of The Philadelphia Story. One of the things that makes the movie more profound than most romantic comedies is that it recognizes that this challenge never goes away for women. Seven years into marriage it is still just as present as it is the night of the first kiss. This is movie that reminds good girls that this reef can be crossed successfully and they are just the woman to do it.
I recommend the movie for Valentine's Day.
Now suppose you are a young woman who does not want to be the girl standing over by the record machine as the boys look on her with lust. And yet you do want love and even marriage. How do you do it?
In a sense the girl by the record machine has it easy. She only has to make herself obviously available. But there is a price for that. When she puts herself on display she leaves herself open to judgment. The men look at her and they look away. Why did he look away? Was it merely because she made eye contact and he is timid or did he look at her and find her wanting? Is he even now thinking some disparaging thought that he will go repeat to a friend and they will both look at her and laugh?
And she knows all about other girls too. They can seem to be kind but she has also seen them make judgments and remarks and she knows how cruel they can be.
Is it really worth all that just to get a little sexual attention? And even when she gets the attention she can never really be sure the man thinks well of her. She is well aware of the contemptuous way some men sometimes speak of women who successfully attract their attention.
So some women reject all that .... All that what? What shall we call it? Human frailty?
I'm not talking about actual sex here although it may appear to be the case. What I am talking about is that transition from speech to intimacy. It can lead to sex, of course, and there is a whole literature about it. Most of that literature is meant to make the transition seem possible and there is a sense in which it is because it happens all the time. But when you can't get there it can seem impossible. And when it seems impossible for us, those people around us who do manage it can be awfully intimidating. Or they can all seem crass.
And there is the sense that there is an ideal that is sacrificed if one does get too crass.
Three daughters
We see a woman in a different light when we think of her as someone's daughter. We treat her differently and think of her differently. We can't so thoughtlessly enjoy or mock that girl over there flashing it around in a really obvious way if we care about her and her future.
There are three real-life daughters behind Tracy Samantha Lord. Here is the first one.
"When Phil told me he had written this new play, and that Katharine Hepburn would play me, I thought it was great fun, but I really didn't pay that much attention. I don't really think Tracy Lord was like me, except that she was very energetic and motivated."That is Helen Hope Montgomery Scott who was the model for Tracy Samantha Lord. As you can see from that quote there is one sense in which the play and movie both lie to us from the outset. Hope Montgomery Scott was not adverse to publicity and really had no trouble with the sort of attention Tracy Lord despises. The resentment of Spy/Fortune magazine and its proprietor Sidney Kidd/Henry Luce was entirely Philip Barry's, or "Phil" as Hope Scott calls him. And Cagey Connor didn't have to sneak in anywhere, he was invited.
The real Hope Scott was very much what Katharine Hepburn appears to be. She stood ramrod straight even in her 90s and she was a size eight all her life. (That, by the way, is in the old sizes. Women's sizes, like college grades, have gotten a lot easier to attain over the years. Hope Scott's size 8 would be size 2 in most contemporary women's clothing.)
There is a famous story worth repeating about her. At a dinner party, one of the servants approached her to tell her that the butler had committed suicide. Hope Scott hid her emotions, made sure her guests were all comfortable, excused herself and dealt with it.
And then there is this gem from her obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
"I've had the most wonderful life," Scott marveled in April 1994, shortly before her 90th birthday. She had lost some of her vision, though not because of age. "I hit myself in the eye with a champagne cork last year," she said with a laugh. "Can you believe it?"Unlike Tracy Lord, however, she had no real trouble with marriage. She dated a man a few times, they discovered they shared the same values and they married and remained married their entire lives. Edgar Scott died a mere four months after Hope did.
The second daughter is Katherine Hepburn. She was of an old family but came from poor cousins (although still better off than most of the rest of us). Barry spent time with her family and he modeled much of the language and the family interactions on what he saw there.
And that is important because that language, that magnificent language, is all Katharine Hepburn's. This is the movie that made her and it is important to note that she was never much of an actress but rather a star. She played a type that the rest of us all found attractive and that type was very close to what she really was like. At the risk of being tarred and feathered by her fans, Dorothy Parker was right, Hepburn had a very limited range and she got famous because she found the type she was good at playing and audiences liked that type (and we still like it).
First the good of that. Listen to that language and the way she speaks it. There is a joke in The Music Man about singing being "just sustained talking". Katharine Hepburn's speaking voice is like very subtle singing. Listen to any interview she ever gave and you can hear it. And she really did speak in that beautiful, refined way she does in the movie.
Speech is a crucial part of distinction in a woman. It has been said that you can tell a man is not a gentleman in a flash because he lacks certain qualities. He may have these qualities and not be a gentleman but if he doesn't have them he isn't no matter what else he is and does. For women, one of these markers is language. If she cannot speak clearly and elegantly, she doesn't have it.
The negative aspect is is this: unlike Hope Scott, Hepburn never made a a loving relationship work. Her life is a succession of failures and tawdry affairs like her famous one with Spencer Tracy. One of these is worth lingering on because it relates to The Philadelphia Story. Howard Hughes bought the rights to The Philadelphia Story for Hepburn. He did all sorts of extravagant things for her. Most biographies cover this off by saying that he was her boyfriend.
That's sort of true but Hughes had a series of relationships with Hollywood starlets just like the one he had with Hepburn. He was very generous to all of them and they in turn ... well, as the old joke goes, "We have already determined what you are, now we are trying to determine the degree. Keep that image in your heads because I will return to it a little further down.
The third daughter is Philip Barry's own who died at one year. People who have more patience than me and have read all his plays report that almost all of them have an idealized daughter in them.
Edith Wharton
The master of portraying society women such as Katharine Hepburn and Hope Scott was Edith Wharton and there are some interesting similarities between Hepburn and Wharton's heroines Lily Bart and Anna Leath.
Lily finds herself in a position very much like what Hepburn was in. She is of society and she is beautiful and intelligent but she does not have the financial means to cut the sort of figure she feels entitled to. Hollywood stardom not being available yet, Lily wagers everything on being able to make an advantageous marriage.
Along the way, she makes the acquaintance of a wealthy man who offers to help her with money. She trusts him with her investments, surprisingly, he always make a "profit" for her. Unlike Hepburn and Hughes, Lily doesn't quite grasp that she is being embroiled in a transaction and she is rather jolted when confronted with the quid pro quo.
The ending of Lily Bart's story is tragic as opposed to Hepburn's, which is just sad, but there are a couple of themes that are important to her story that also appear in The Philadelphia Story. The first is the magical but weightless feeling that comes in the prelude to a kiss, or to not kissing.
She had risen, and he stood facing her with his eyes on hers. The soft isolation of the falling day enveloped them: they seemed lifted into a finer air. All the the exquisite influences of the hour trembled in their veins, and drew them to each other as the loosened leaves were drawn to the earth.Woo woo! It doesn't happen though. And that brings us to the second thing. There is something in Lily that keeps getting in the way. it isn't just that she wants to marry for money and the man the above happens with is not rich enough. There is also an odd swelling resistance within her whenever she gets close to a kiss. She, like Hepburn, cannot quite close the deal with a man except in tawdry ways.
That was a theme that haunted Wharton all her life. She returned to it later in what I think is her best novel, The Reef. A reef is a hidden obstacle below the surface and that whole book is about the hidden obstacles. In this case the heroine, Anna Leath constantly contrasts herself with other women whom she knows have successfully crossed the reef. She knows that crossing the reef is not necessarily a good thing and she knows of women who have endured scandal as a consequence but something in her feels like failure because she never does it. Rather painfully, she discovers that one of these women has had an affair with the man Anna wants to marry. Anna spends a lot of time wondering about what it is that other women have that enables them to do this thing so knowingly whereas she, Anna, always holds back on the brink.
The man she wants to marry describes the crucial moment when he and Anna's rival began their affair rather cynically:
Perhaps it was because, when her light chatter about people failed, he found she had no other fund to draw on, or perhaps simply because of the sweetness of her laugh, or of the charm of the gesture with which, one day in the woods of Marly, she had tossed off her hat and tilted back her head at the call of a cuckoo; or because, whenever he looked at her unexpectedly, he found that she was looking at him and did not want him to know it; or perhaps, in varying degrees, because of all these things, that there had come a moment when no word seemed to fly high enough or dive deep enough to utter the sense of well-being each gave to the other, and the natural substitute for speech had been a kiss.The man, his name is Darrow, quite obviously doesn't not respect the woman, her name is Sophy Viner, but he obviously sees that she has a knack for making that transition. And what a clause that is: "the natural substitute for speech had been a kiss".
Speech and acts can be substitutes for each other. It's odd, as André Fortin noted, that "I love you" is more loving than "I love you very much". Language keeps a distance and it keeps a very proper distance but too much language interspersed between saying it an living it is failure. And there are ways of talking that make things happen and there are ways that do not.
There is a magnificent moment at the end of the Reef where the two principals have been moving to greater and greater intimacy in some ways while also moving closer and closer to a break up. Anna is overcome by emotion at the door to Darrow's hotel room and he opens the door and brings her in. They have gotten their naturally but this is intimate territory where she, according to the manners of the day, should not be.
The door shut behind her and she sat down on the lounge at the foot of the bed .... Every object about her seemed to contain a particle of himself: the whole air breathed of him, steeping her in his intimate presence.But this is broken with a recollection of the other woman:
Suddenly she thought: 'This is what Sophy Viner knew' ... and with torturing precision she pictured them alone in such a scene ... He had taken her to a hotel ...She is both repulsed and attracted. At the end, when she is resolved to leave, she still feels a sense of failure that nothing happens.
Darrow had come forward as she rose, and she perceived that he was waiting for her to bid him good night. It was clear that no other possibility had even brushed his mind; and the fact, for some dim reason, humiliated her. 'Why not ... why not?' something whispered in her, as though his tacit recognition of her pride, were a slight on other qualities she wanted him to feel in her.And here, I trust, I don't have to draw the parallel with Tracy's reaction on learning that Mike had not, in fact, taken advantage of her when she was drunk.
In my experience, most women know what to do when they get to sex or they can figure it out very quickly and they tend to know what they are doing when they are just talking. It is that transition from speech to kisses where all the insecurity and pain is. It's not easy for men either but it is a challenge of an altogether different order for women. For, no matter how much liberation and feminism we try to throw at the problem, the woman wants the man to cross the threshold to get her and he wants her to respond when he does. And her fear of failure coming up to that moment is daunting. It is daunting even when a woman is firmly decided that nothing is going to happen this time. The sense that she is not really a first class woman, a first class human being, if she cannot navigate these dangerous waters is always there and will never go away. To be a good girl means to live with that recurring test most of your life.
And that, I think, is the real magic of The Philadelphia Story. One of the things that makes the movie more profound than most romantic comedies is that it recognizes that this challenge never goes away for women. Seven years into marriage it is still just as present as it is the night of the first kiss. This is movie that reminds good girls that this reef can be crossed successfully and they are just the woman to do it.
I recommend the movie for Valentine's Day.
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