Chapter Three
Going Hollywood: The Thirties

By the 1930s, she had managed to know almost nothing about the celebrity culture of Hollywood. “The party was pleasant,” she wrote to a friend in 1936, “ . . . a wonderful dyed & spangled young lady  . . . who did indifferent parodies of (to me) unknown actresses” (Lewis and Lewis 596).   Whoever this young woman might have been, her imitations of Jean Harlow or Mae West would not have caused a ripple in Wharton’s composure.  She spent her time doing what she had always done:  traveling, writing, reading, and corresponding with her many friends, to whom she often recommended books that she had read and admired. In 1928, three days after she declined the invitation to appear in Woman Marches On, she wrote a letter to her friend Gaillard Lapsley, in which she recommended a book.  “I commend most particularly a new book, 'The American Band Wagon,' by Charles Merz.  It’s the best thing of the kind I’ve seen yet” (Letters 517).  Then she added the following afterthought:  “& by a German Yid, I suppose!” (517). [2]

Merz, a native of Sandusky, Ohio, and a Yale graduate, had been contributing articles to several American magazines, including Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and Collier’s, since 1920. He wrote The Great American Band Wagon after he had toured the Midwest by car, a trip he characterized as a drive through a landscape of “pop-stands, gas tanks, water cans, hot dogs, ukeleles, kewpie dolls and chocolate almond bars that has become the broad and pulsing artery of a nation” (iv).  Despite her remarkably anti-Semitic slur, Wharton enjoyed and endorsed Merz’s lively assessment of American culture, where she would have found support for many of her own attitudes.  In his chapter on Hollywood, “The Silver Screen,” Merz bemoaned the state of American celebrity worship, describing celebrities who might have been the feuding Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks:

Wharton would have agreed with Merz’s judgment on the quality of Hollywood cinema, that “the movies have romanticized life,” and reduced narrative to “as simple terms as possible . . . to manageable units . . . subdivided, cataloged, and card-indexed” (175-176).  She would have found confirmation for her own assessment of movies, that unlike good fiction, cinema provides “no tortuous psychological complication of character, no baffling mixture of evil and beneficence” (177).  Wharton would have also recognized Merz’s attack on mass consumer culture, where he describes the consequences of a mass market as “a scene which can be reproduced in any corner of the country:  people doing the same thing in the same way . . . for the same purpose” (15).  

Finally, Wharton might have been especially interested in Merz’s chapter about her native Manhattan, in which he explains New York’s reputation among other Americans as “an alien island off the eastern coast of the United States” where the population is “rolling in wealth, bursting with pride, and scorning the Ten Commandments” (233).  He calculates that “more than three-fourths of [New York’s] population is alien to that of the nation upon which it lives” (236).  “How many old-fashioned Americans are there in New York?” he asks (236). He answers that “Foreign stock . . . furnishes 78.4 per cent of the city’s population.  To this add the Negroes” (236).  He then quotes an unnamed “American historian” who calculates that not even “10 per cent of New York’s population is American in the sense of possessing, in the form of a heritage, old American ideals, prejudices, and characteristics” (236). 

Merz does not blame Manhattan’s image problem on the 90 percent of the diverse population who labor in the city.  In fact, he defends the immigrants and African Americans:  “Their lives . . . are first of all a grim race to meet rent, union dues, and doctors’ bills” (237).  “It is not the tenement-huddled alien population of New York,” he writes, but a different alien group, made up of bootleggers, Wall Street bankers, and advertising men from the American “hinterlands,” who have colored “the country’s thoughts” towards New York (238).  Merz concludes that New York’s “most successful immigrants come not from Poland and Ukrainia but from points west and south. . . . A great many of those Wall Street bankers whom the Iowa farmers now denounce . . . are simply ex-Iowans” (239). 

In Merz’s reference to the success of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants, he assumes that his American audience associates a group of Eastern European immigrants with wealth and success, and he tries to correct their false impression by explaining that these foreign immigrants do not have as much influence and power as the native born.  Wharton would certainly have recognized the group that Merz describes here, because she had already stereotyped these Eastern Europeans in her fiction.  By 1928, Merz’s wealthy Polish and Ukrainian immigrants were already so legendary that they had acquired a title:  the movie moguls. The vague nature of his allusion to Hollywood producers, and his slight defense of their success, exemplifies the complicated nature of the “Jewish question” in American film culture of the age.

“To be anti-Hollywood was, in a sense, to be anti-Semitic,” wrote American screenwriter Budd Schulberg (Hoberman, Entertaining 46).  Schulberg, the son of an immigrant producer, articulates and embodies the knotty problem of ethnicity in Hollywood that Merz also reflects.  Both were conflicted about “reading the annals of Hollywood as a Jewish story” (46).  Schulberg, for example, associated anti-Semitism with Hollywood, but he also wrote “the quintessential Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run? (1940), “a book that was itself accused of self-directed anti-Semitism” (46). “For American Jews” like Shulberg and Merz before him, “Hollywood has figured as a complex touchstone, generating wide-ranging responses — sometimes even from the same individual” (46).  For Jews and non-Jews, this longstanding “debate over the extent and significance of Jewish involvement” in cinema art “often focuses on those men whom Wharton parodied and Merz suggested, the moguls (45). [3]

The “Jewish Question” had been part of American and European discourse for some time before the advent of film, where “political leaders, writers, philosophers, and other intellectuals . . . had begun to debate the ‘proper’ place of Jews” (47).  Wharton’s explorations of the “proper place” for Jews in The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence reflect some of the early twentieth-century Jewish questions posed by others:  “Could Jews successfully integrate into the mainstream?  Could they become loyal citizens?” (47).  Among those scholars who tried to answer these and other questions about the impact of immigration and assimilation, University of Wisconsin professor E.A. Ross distinguished himself as a proponent of “a rationally engineered plan for social growth” (Bauer 116).  In 1914, Ross had published The Old World in the New, in which he catalogued characteristics of various ethnic groups of immigrants.  In his chapter entitled “The East European Hebrews,” Ross writes that the “Jew shines in literature, music and acting” (160).  However, he also describes Jewish business entrepreneurs:  “Credit men say the Jewish merchant is often ‘slippery’ . . . these . . . immigrants lower standards wherever they enter” (150). [4]

Questions of assimilation into society, or into Wharton’s Society, became increasingly pronounced among non-Jews during the years that the film industry was ascending. Charles Merz subtly challenged the assumption that Jews were powerful by pointing to the power and influence of non-Jewish “Iowans” in New York City, implying that he knew who held the real power in the United States. He probably knew that, for instance, during the 1920s and 1930s, several of the earliest non-Jewish filmmakers, Thomas Edison, D.W. Griffith, and Thomas Ince, had already come to be “respectfully referred to as cinema ‘inventors’ or ‘pioneers,’” by vocal nativists, while Jewish film distributors and producers were called “moguls” (Hoberman, Entertaining 49). Henry Ford, one of the venerated members of this club of American technology pioneers, became so obsessed with the moguls that he devoted several issues of The Dearborn Independent to diatribes against Jewish film producers. In a 1921 issue, Ford asked — and answered — the following question about the powerful film industry: “Who stands at the apex of this mountain of control? . . . The motion picture influence of the United States . . . is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind” (51). 

Ford’s well-documented anti-Semitism “had various sources,” among them his life-long suspicion of all financial institutions, and his dogged insistence that World War I “had been fomented by wealthy Jewish lenders” (Watts 382-383). [5] His anti-Semitism accelerated as he reacted to the changing demographics and popular tastes of Americans during the 1920s, when he began devoting more and more of his time to collecting pieces of “Americana” in an attempt to recreate “an attractive portrait of traditional Anglo-Saxon Protestant village life that had little room for Jews” (383).  During the years that cinema madness gripped America, Ford began targeting the movie industry specifically, sometimes launching into “tirades against Jews in the entertainment industry who were subverting sturdy American traditions with jazz and movies” (383).  He never allowed that Jews produced anything — including movies — but insisted that they had stolen their products. A Jewish producer, he told an interviewer in 1921, was a “a mere huckster, a trader, who doesn’t want to produce, but to make something out of what somebody else produces” (382).

Wharton, who was one year Ford’s senior, might have recoiled at the thought that she and Henry Ford had more in common than their age — she once referred despairingly to popular American culture as “Fordian culture” (Lewis & Lewis 547).   However, she and Ford reacted to changes in American society during the 1920s and 1930s in similar ways. During the same years that Ford began collecting artifacts for his ideal Greenfield Village, Wharton glanced backwards to earlier times in The Age of Innocence, the Old New York stories, and The Buccaneers.  During the 1930s, both lost prestige and struggled financially, as they watched a new generation of Americans rise into prominence with Wharton and Ford as their examples.  And although Wharton certainly did not share others of Ford’s sensibilities or tastes, they both became examples of Shulberg’s anti-Hollywood /anti-Semitic equation.

Wharton’s anti-Semitism did not develop because of the successes of the Hollywood Jewish community, of course.  Her writings reveal that throughout her life, she “agreed with the standard, white, racist generalizations and stereotypes of her day” (Ammons, “Race” 68).  From her characterization of Simon Rosedale, the richest man in all New York in The House of Mirth, to her caricature of Serge Klawhammer in Twilight Sleep and beyond, Wharton wove into the fabric of her fiction a thread of anti-Semitism that became increasingly vibrant. The rancor she expressed toward Jews in her private letters and in her fiction increased almost proportionally to the income she made at the hands of Hollywood studios in the 1920s. By the time that one of her characters suggests that Jews ought “to be horse-whipped” in Twilight Sleep, Wharton’s anti-Semitism had become fully exposed by the bright lights of Hollywood, illuminating some of her most profound fears.

In the same way that Henry Ford’s rabid anti-Semitism masked “real fears” that seemed “to lie elsewhere,” so did Wharton’s anti-Semitism mask some of her anxieties during the last two decades of her life (Hoberman, Entertaining 51). Always sensitive to the stories of outsiders, Wharton might have recognized the affinity between the stories of the excluded foreigners who successfully crafted their own world, and a woman artist who was struggling to do the same:  the story of Edith Wharton. Recognizing this correspondence between herself and the Jewish moguls would have challenged her traditional value system, and would have demanded that she acknowledge her own stature as tentative.  If she understood that when she portrayed the movie producers who bought her work as unscrupulous foreigners, she was also redefining herself as fraudulent, this understanding made her angry and bitter. In the 1920s, Wharton angrily lashed out, sacrificing two white women who should have known better, to the Hollywood moguls:  she gave Lita to Serge Klawhammer, and Zinnia Lacrosse to some other nameless Hollywood producer. These sacrifices probably assuaged her somewhat.  However, fearing that she understood the Hollywood moguls better than she let on in her fiction, Wharton was afraid that she had sacrificed another of her characters, this one closer to Wharton herself than any other.  She feared that she had given her blessing to the marriage of Lily Bart and Simon Rosedale.

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The real Hollywood executives whom Wharton seemed to revile in her letters, and whom she attacked through Klawhammer, were a remarkable group of film pioneers: William Fox (1879-1952) from Hungary; Samuel Goldwyn (1882-1974) from Poland; Carl Laemmle (1867-1939) from Germany; Jesse Lasky (1880-1958), second-generation Polish from San Francisco; Marcus Loew (1870-1927), also second-generation, whose parents were Austrian; Louis B. Mayer (1885-1957) from Russia; Harry Warner (1881-1958) and Jack Warner (1892-1978) whose father Benjamin immigrated from Poland; and Adolf Zukor (1873-1976) from Hungary (49).  Their foreign heritage was only the most superficial of their similarities.  Especially among the foreign-born of the moguls, they shared “their utter and absolute rejection of their pasts and their equally absolute devotion to their new country . . . something drove the young Hollywood Jews to a ferocious, even pathological embrace of America . . . [They] embarked on an assimilation so ruthless and complete that they cut their lives to the pattern of American respectability as they interpreted it” (Gabler 4). 

Wharton’s Klawhammer corresponds to the profile of Samuel Goldwyn in a 1925 issue of The New Yorker, where Goldwyn was described as a man who “has a valet and dresses and looks like a gentleman, but to hear him speak is a shock.  He shouts in a vocabulary of ten words” (Hoberman 49).  In language that sounds especially Whartonesque, the writer admits that “if Goldwyn was uneducated, insensitive, crude, loud, self-promoting, and innately comic, he was nonetheless a ‘dramatic figure—an inspired buccaneer,’” who had first achieved success in “mongrel New York” before moving to Hollywood (49).  Especially for someone like Manhattan-born Wharton—who might have paused at Merz’s subtle suggestion of wealthy Eastern Europeans—the “mongrel” nature of New York City had a great deal to do with the success of the foreign movie moguls. 

Dorothy Parker, one of the darlings of New York during the 1920s who would eventually migrate to Hollywood, intended to title her (never-written) autobiography Mongrel, which might have been a reference “to her own mixed Jewish and Wasp heritage, but she could have been talking of racially and ethnically mixed ‘mongrel’ Manhattan” (Douglas 5). The complexion of New York had changed dramatically during the first part of the century.  The moguls and many movie stars whose careers had begun in New York, those on whom Wharton would draw for her Serge Klawhammer, Boris Kouradjine, and Zinnia Lacrosse, had been able to launch successful careers in New York because it was “vast enough to welcome extreme ethnic and racial diversity” (5). In the 1920s, Mongrel New York was cinema-age New York, where “there were no social barriers in a business as new and faintly disreputable as the movies” (Gabler 5).  New York City, with a history of ethnic and racial diversity, gave the moguls, who were “outside of that New England-Wall Street-Middle West money” represented by Wharton, Ford and others, the chance to “create a new country” for themselves (5). 

When the film industry moved to California during World War I, the moguls transplanted their hybrid culture, and established the film industry as the most diverse industry in the United States. The more lucrative their enterprise became, and the more popular their products became, the more hostility they encountered.  Like Wharton and Ford, many continued to regard “this foreign influence as a destabilizing, corrupting force that threatened the integrity of American culture” (Hoberman 50).  Although some of the most vocal critics of the film industry, like Ford, also condemned the movies on moral grounds, others, like Wharton, were dismayed by the blurring of racial, ethnic, and social boundaries. The origins of popular American culture of the 1920s could be traced to Hollywood via New York City, where blacks and whites made music together, Jews and Wasps made motion pictures together, and immigrants from Italy and Sweden became celebrated actors. American art was defining itself as diverse, plural, and collaborative, qualities whose value eluded Wharton.  As the matrix of American artistic expression, mongrel New York of the 1920s represented something especially foreign to Wharton, who saw as little promise in the collaborative American arts—music, dance, and especially Hollywood cinema—as she did in popular American magazines.

Yet in the same way — and for the same reason — that she contributed to popular magazines, Wharton learned to negotiate with Hollywood.  The Hollywood moguls, to whom Wharton referred in letter to Minnie Jones in 1934 as  “the Western morons,” would provide her with steady income during the 1920s and the years of the Great Depression. These Western morons, whom Wharton blamed for contaminating her beloved New York and for the decline of quality in American culture, would ensure that she earned more money by selling her fiction to Hollywood than any other American writer of her time. [6]   Although she never noted her debt to Hollywood specifically, Wharton owed her financial security to a group of Eastern European businessmen who were also talented visionaries.

The Hollywood moguls had backgrounds, skills, and interests that served them well in the film industry.  Since most of them had “come primarily from fashion and retail,” in New York City, they “understood public taste and were masters at gauging market swings, at merchandising, at pirating away customers and beating the competition” (Gabler 5).  They also understood more than a little about their audiences.  As “immigrants themselves, they had a peculiar sensitivity to the dreams and aspirations of other immigrants and working-class families” (5).  If Edison, Griffith and Ince were film “pioneers,” then the moguls were “gifted impresarios, who combined financial acuity with an appreciation for talent and a sensitivity to audience sensibilities” (Hoberman 49).  Finally, as outsiders, “proscribed from entering the real corridors of gentility and status in America,” the Hollywood moguls were free to define themselves and their new industry, which became a haven for other marginalized groups of filmmakers, performers, and craftspeople (Gabler 5).

Hollywood film art distinguished itself as cosmopolitan and international, with a perspective defined by collaboration. “Without immigrant businessmen and émigré artists, Hollywood might not have had the same universal appeal . . . both the moguls’ drive to assimilate and their success at building an audience are rooted in a minority’s acute awareness of the conventions that govern the majority culture” (Hoberman 275). The Hollywood moguls learned quickly to recognize “the image of prosperous Americans” that brought people into their theaters” (Gabler 6).  For the same reason that Randolph Hearst was willing to pay many thousands of dollars to publish short stories by a Pulitzer-Prize winning author in his Cosmopolitan Magazine, the Hollywood moguls could project good taste and dignity through Wharton.  In 1918, when Wharton’s Appleton editor, Rutger Jewett, suggested that he advertise her willingness to sell to Hollywood, she took the risk, which paid off. For three of Wharton’s best-known works adapted to the screen during the silent era, she earned at least $22,000 — probably much more than that — from the combined sales of the rights.  

 All three of these early films are lost:  The House of Mirth in 1918 (Metro), The Glimpses of the Moon in 1923 (Paramount), and The Age of Innocence in 1924 (Warner Bros).  We know something about all of them, and a great deal about the industry that produced them. [7]    The House of Mirth was a six-reeler that starred Katherine Harris Barrymore as Lily Bart, and was probably one of the last films that Louis B. Mayer’s fledging Metro produced in New York before he moved his operation to California in 1919.  Mayer’s competition had already settled on the West coast: Goldwyn in Culver City; Universal, Fox, Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount by 1935) in Hollywood, and the United Artists (Pickford, Chaplin, Griffith, and Fairbanks) on Santa Monica Boulevard, were all churning out picture after picture by the1920s.  To do so successfully, they had brought their motley crews to California, and had colonized.

Griffith and Mayer describe 1920s Hollywood as a circus populated by:

As Hollywood became popular, it also became notorious and newsworthy for its reputation as a wild place where scandal and sin were rampant.  By the early 1920s, when the federal government threatened to regulate the industry, one of the studios’ strategies was to improve their image by offering more movies based on the works of respected authors.  Producers looked to established writers like Wharton to help improve the image of Hollywood and add prestige to its films.  Studios scouted for stories everywhere, including in highbrow publications and among established literary works. They began buying rights to novels before the books had been published, gambling on a writer’s reputation or popularity. Not only did they pay exorbitant fees for novels, but also they imported college professors of literature to oversee productions in Hollywood, and they commissioned prominent or promising fiction writers to adapt screenplays.  The Glimpses of the Moon, a jazz-age novel by a Pulitzer-winning author, might have been recommended by one of their imported highbrows. That it was released in 1923, only one year after Wharton’s book was published, reflects the new public-relations strategy of Hollywood during the post-war years. 

In 1923, Hollywood offered to the American public not just Glimpses of the Moon, but also productions of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (Warner Bros.), and an adaptation of a novel by a young, pre-Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (Warner Bros).  Edith Wharton, who corresponded with Sinclair Lewis and whose Age of Innocence had bested Lewis’s Main Street for the Pulitzer Prize in 1920, never noted anywhere that she knew of the coincidence of the screen adaptations made from their works during the same year.  Nor did she ever acknowledge that young Fitzgerald, several years away from The Great Gatsby, had been lured to Hollywood and had written an adaptation of Glimpses of the Moon (ultimately rejected by the studio). [8]   Wharton could afford to remain coolly detached, a full continent away from Hollywood.  Fitzgerald could not, and his relationship with the Hollywood moguls, however rocky through the years, fueled his imagination.  He was especially fascinated with the youngest and most singular of the executives, Irving Thalberg.

A bright, articulate native-born New Yorker who began working as Mayer’s production assistant the same year as Glimpses of the Moon was released, Thalberg influenced the Hollywood motion picture industry — and American film art — in ways that would continue to define American films for a century.  He certainly did not meet the 1925 New Yorker profile of a movie mogul, but he did embody all of the qualities and talents of his older colleagues.  He read voraciously, everything from the classics and Shakespeare, to William James and D.H Lawrence.  He insisted that every aspect of a film be of the highest quality:  the sets and costumes were to be designed with care, the best writers and directors were to be on staff, and the most popular actors were to be onscreen as often as possible.  Thalberg oversaw all the details of a film on a daily basis, sometimes maddening directors with his interference. He had an uncanny ability to spot screen presence in stage actors and chorus girls alike, and he made stars of Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Jean Harlow.  He knew that most of the hundreds of movies produced in Hollywood were not good movies, and he wanted to improve the product.  “The people have to take what we give them,” he once remarked, “It seems to me they deserve better” (Marx 35).

The first film that Thalberg oversaw at Metro was Greed, a 1924 production based on Frank Norris’s McTeague, a book that both Thalberg and Edith Wharton admired.  Thalberg already knew the director, because he had fired him from a picture at Universal:  Austrian invader Erich von Stroheim, a writer / actor / director with an ego as big as all outdoors. The two men clashed constantly during the production of Greed.  Von Stroheim was determined to film a literal interpretation of the novel, and his final cut ran forty-two reels (about nine hours) long.  After several bouts of editing, von Stroheim presented Thalberg with eighteen reels (about four hours), which he hoped could be shown as a two-part film.  Thalberg gave the four-hour print to another editor with the order to cut it down to ten reels (two hours), and destroy the negatives.  Now one-fourth of its original length, Greed became “a fragmentary masterpiece with vast gaps in continuity . . . but . . .  a masterpiece nonetheless” (Cook 245).    

The story of Thalberg’s handling of Greed has become at least as legendary as von Stroheim’s film itself, and suggests the paradigm that would define Hollywood film production from Thalberg’s time on. [9]   The precedent that Thalberg set when he determined how von Stroheim’s film would look would become the norm in the American industry, and many years would pass before Hollywood filmmakers enjoyed the independence to make movies in their own way.  “By its excesses, von Stroheim’s experience — and his fate — mapped the terrain. . . . The businessmen were in charge (when had they not been?)” (Sklar 102).  Thalberg and his colleagues in the production rooms and counting houses of Hollywood studios ensured their own success by instituting a formula for movies.  “The director was responsible for finishing the film that had already been designed . . . the formula picture, deadening to creativity and the imagination, was a means of making the studio product as standardized and . . . as stable as the product of any other factory” (Mast 146). 

Thalberg’s model also ensured that serious writers would continue to look on Hollywood with suspicion and contempt.  Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other writers knew how movie studios were treating their works. [10]   Yet many of them, including Wharton and especially Fitzgerald, continued to take the money provided by Thalberg and other moguls to supplement their incomes. The Hollywood factory paid well, but especially after 1924, the year that Thalberg and Mayer renamed their studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, their Hollywood factory also began to mutilate the work of writers in unprecedented ways.  They routinely bought a property with a famous author’s name attached, then put it through the machinery of a production assembly-line of story writers, screen writers, and scenario specialists.  When the final film product came off the assembly line — sometimes with a new title — it was of a standardized size, shape, and texture.  As such, to anyone who had either written or read the original work, the film was, more often than not, almost unrecognizable. [11]   

This became standard practice throughout Hollywood studios during the 1920s.  In 1924, while Irving Thalberg was snipping away at Greed in Culver City, others were working on a film version of The Age of Innocence at Warner Bros.  Although the film itself no longer exists, the scenario does, and it reveals the changes to Wharton’s text that the producers at Warner Bros. thought were a good idea:

Those members of a viewing audience who might have read Wharton’s book would have no doubt have recognized faint elements of her work in this first Hollywood version of The Age of Innocence:  suggestions of a love triangle, the delineation of social strata, and the intrusion of pregnancy into the love triangle.  But this film was not especially intended for Wharton’s reading audience. The screenwriter Olga Printzlau, who wrote stories, scenarios, and screenplays throughout the 1920s (she would adapt Dumas’ Camille in 1926), specialized in one of Hollywood’s most popular genres, the “woman’s film,” and her scenario for The Age of Innocence follows the standard plot of many other women’s films of the time. [13]  

Perhaps to Henry Ford’s chagrin, 1920s Hollywood was an especially well-organized industry, patterned on the assembly-line model.  Films were categorized for production according to genre, and had been designed to fit into categories long before an audience saw them. [14]   “In studio production,” Sklar writes, “even before directors were assigned or performers were cast, films were planned and written in the framework of genres:  what kind of film is it?” (107).  The studios — with Irving Thalberg leading the way — assumed that audiences enjoyed these formulaic movies with their recognizable genre codes, codes that “play themselves out within structures that allow, but limit, variation . . .” (107).  The Age of Innocence went into the Hollywood factory as a Pulitzer prize-winning novel, and was projected out as a melodramatic love triangle. [15]

What insights we might have gained from this lost adaptation of Wharton’s most famous novel would have been insights about Hollywood, not about Wharton’s work, and most likely there were few comparisons published at the time.  The people who had read Wharton’s novel were probably not yet the same people who bought tickets to see the motion picture version in 1926.  Wharton’s American readers would have found the film ridiculous.  “‘Bad taste’ was the hallmark of the movies in the eyes of many,” Griffith and Mayer explain.  “‘Symbolic’ scenes and flashbacks . . . impressed the hinterlands but moved the highbrows to laughter, as did subtitles, which Hollywood . . . decked out with moralizing and ‘art’ backgrounds . . . ”(210).  When Wharton sold The Children to one of Irving Thalberg’s competitors, Paramount, for $25,000 in 1928, she probably knew that Hollywood would do things to her novel that she didn’t want to know about. She might have been amused to know that Paramount’s version of The Children would be a talking picture, and she might also have been relieved to know that the dream machine had been merciful to her, and had given the movie a new title. The Children, as treated by Hollywood, was now The Marriage Playground, a new woman’s film for the new decade of the 1930s.

We can only imagine how The Children was transformed into The Marriage Playground by the producers at Paramount.  The film conforms perfectly to other melodramas and women’s movies of the early years of talking pictures.  The director, Lothar Mendes, specialized in women’s melodramas at Paramount, all with telling titles:  Ladies’ Man (1933), Personal Maid (1931), and Strangers in Love (1932) were his next three films.  The script was written by J. Walter Ruben, a Paramount writer whose next two pictures would be Dance Hall (1929) and Lovin’ the Ladies (1930), and who would adapt many short stories into films with suggestive titles, including Behind Office Doors (1931) and Bachelor Apartment (1931).   The adaptation and dialog writer was Doris Anderson, who had a long screenwriting career in Hollywood, and who adapted or wrote for movies with some of the most famous titles of the pre-Hayes Code years:  Fast and Loose (1930), Men Call It Love (1931), Wild Girl (1932) and Glamour (1934) are just four of many titles to Anderson’s credit (IMDB).

At the time of its release, The Marriage Playground was considered a successful formula picture.  The New Movie Magazine characterized it as one of “the best films” of the year, a “sympathetic story” with “beautiful acting by Mary Brian” (9).  Wharton’s dark, complex story of Martin Boyne’s deluded obsessions and ultimate isolation, and Rose Sellar’s sense of harmony and understanding, was transformed into a seventy-minute talking picture that projected Hollywood standards and tastes. Wharton scholar Linda Costanzo Cahir describes the new story with its new provocative title: “love and marriage are a playground on which happy endings are manufactured.  The ending is blissful, Hollywood style” (214).

This 1930 film translation exemplifies the process of  Hollywood transformation from complex novel to formula picture.  In order to reshape Wharton’s work into a simple Hollywood love triangle, the screenwriters eliminated all of Wharton’s suggestions of incest or pedophilia by adjusting the ages of the main characters.  Boyne becomes an energetic, athletic 35-year-old (Wharton’s Boyne is squarely middle-aged at 46).  Wharton’s troubled, naïve fourteen-year-old Judith, who is always called by the more modern “Judy” in the film, is almost eighteen years old in the Paramount production, which allows her to be mature enough to fall in love with, and pursue Boyne legitimately. [16]   The other children, who have distinct personalities in Wharton’s The Children, become a chorus of talented rascals who provide the formulaic comic relief in the movie.  Throughout, the camera privileges close-ups of the younger children while they are being mischievous, and also includes gratuitous scenes showing us their daily shenanigans. In an early scene, they are playing “divorce court,” where they are dressed in adult clothing, and delivering adult lines.   The scene suggests any number of similar sequences from the then popular Hollywood series Our Gang (Hal Roach’s series of shorts starring a multi-racial, multi-ethnic group of children who spoke with adult jargon while they caused mischief).

In The Marriage Playground, this early divorce court scene is only the first of several where the script has been adapted to give the diverse Wheater children the characteristics of a comedy troupe of little rascals. [17]   A subsequent scene includes another Our Gang moment when we see a shot of the six children lined up with their heads in a bathtub full of water, competing for a longest-breath-underwater championship.  In a later sequence, Judy, now smitten with Boyne, takes vixen lessons from her half-sister Zinnie, who is explaining how her mother gets men to propose to her. She delivers a relatively long soliloquy in which she playacts her way through a melodramatic love scene between two adults, and then she teaches Judy how to walk like a vixen intent on snaring her man.  With her broad urban accent, her poor grammar, and her bobbed hair, little Zinnie provides us with a set piece — she becomes the vaudeville showstopper in this film. [18]

Wharton created the Wheaters, Zinnia Lacrosse, and their various friends and lovers to be shallow nouveau riche Hollywood types with great accuracy, and the screenwriters saw little need to revise these characters for The Marriage Playground.  Selfish but harmless, the adult performers (Huntly Gordon and Lilyan Tashman as Cliffe and Joyce Wheater; Kay Francis as Zinnia Lacrosse), provide easy comic relief in the film. Wharton’s darkly funny scene where all of the parents are trying to make a decision about the children translates well into The Marriage Playground, where their four o’clock cocktail meeting becomes a colossal brouhaha.  Boyne, who has high hopes that all of the parents can reach an accord, realizes that nothing will come of the meeting when he cannot keep all of the women from fighting over their clothes (Zinnia and Joyce are wearing the same beach outfit), and the disaffected men just keep pouring martinis. 

In order for The Marriage Playground to conform to the Hollywood love triangle, Wharton’s clear-eyed Earth mother Rose Sellars had to be rewritten as the unsympathetic third point of the triangle.  Now a conniving shrew of melodramatic proportions, Rose (Seena Owen) delivers the predictable lines of a woman scorned. When she can take no more of Boyne’s attraction to Judy, she becomes strident and hostile toward Judy and the children, finally holding open the door and yelling at them “Get out of here, you brats!”  Near the end of the film, when Rose challenges Boyne’s affection by ordering him to leave with her immediately, Boyne refuses.  With dramatic flair, Rose flings her engagement ring into the air, and takes her dramatic leave.

The screenwriters needed to rework the conclusion of Wharton’s Children significantly to accommodate the studio’s happy ending between Boyne and Judy.  They chose to fade out by using a conventional Hollywood prop:  the telephone. [19]   In the final scene of the film, Boyne and Judy, finally alone, move toward each other to kiss, when the telephone interrupts them. Playfully, Boyne lifts Judy from the floor, twirls her around, and then answers the phone.  The two of them listen, heads close together, while Cliffe Wheater tells Boyne that not only have he and Joyce reconciled, but that they give their blessing to Boyne and Judy. In the final shot of the movie, the happy couple has moved out of the frame, showing us only the telephone receiver dropping and swinging back and forth, while we hear Cliffe’s voice, “Hello? . . . Hello?” 

Cahir points out that The Marriage Playground was produced during the tiny window between 1927 and 1934 — between the first talking movies and the Federal Code of the Motion Picture Industry that would screen film content and eliminate suggestions of sex or vice. [20]   This code, nicknamed the “Hayes Code” after its initial czar, Will Hayes, was first a “gentleman’s agreement” between Hayes’s office and the industry.  After 1934, however, the Code became federal law.  Films had to be submitted for “precensorship and . . . had to abide by the Code Administration’s rulings, on pain of a fine of $25,000” (Griffith and Mayer 297).  Movies were to avoid depictions of brutality and excessive violence, sexual promiscuity of any kind, and unwholesome or profane language.  Marriage was now holy and wholesome — married couples would always be shown in twin beds. [21]   The Marriage Playground, with “its unabashed  . . . bid for audience popularity and commercial success,” had the kind of provocative title and blatant suggestions of sex, illicit or otherwise, that would disappear from Hollywood pictures after the early 1930s” (Cahir 214). 

Hollywood studios had little choice but to abide by the Production Code for many reasons, not the least of which was financial.  The early 1930s were lean times for Hollywood studios, which had been used to an ever-flowing supply of revenue until the years of the Great Depression.  After 1934, the Code would force studios to change the way they did business.  “Prudent studio economy measures, the aid of government dollars, and a new moralistic path of righteousness nursed the film industry back to health” (Mast 273).  Studios transformed themselves completely, from the business offices to the screening rooms.  They began eliminating the peepshow element of their 1920s films; they stopped buying scripts that had to do with the excesses of the jazz age, and they began looking backward to classic literature for their screen adaptations.   

In time, Hollywood filmmakers would learn to negotiate the restrictions of the Hayes Code, but in the early 1930s they worked with the Code Office to dispense with “their fixation on contemporary life” toward “a sweeter day.  Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Sir James Barrie were the spiritual . . . authors of the stories on which the screenplays of 1934, 1935, and 1936 were based” (Griffith and Mayer 299).  No longer able or interested in transforming novels into one-dimensional puppet shows, screenwriters and directors began to make pictures with titles that a reading public would recognize.  When RKO Radio announced that it would release a film entitled The Age of Innocence in post-Code 1934, they were not referring to some silly trifle. They meant The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.

The cast and crew of RKO’s Age of Innocence were stellar.  The producer, Pandro Berman, had a reputation for professionalism and style.  By 1934 he had produced several critically acclaimed films, including Katharine Hepburn’s first film, Morning Glory (1933).  He assembled casts and crews who worked well together, and he was especially effective with costume dramas.  During the 1930s he would produce some of the most stylish and beautiful movies of the decade:  The Gay Divorcee (1934) and Top Hat (1935) with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; Mary of Scotland (1936) and Stage Door (1937) with Katharine Hepburn; and the stunning Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) with Charles Laughton. 

Margaret Ayer Barnes had adapted Wharton’s novel for the stage in the 1920s.  The Broadway production, starring Katharine Cornell as Ellen Olenska, had opened in 1928, ran for 207 performances in New York, and then went on the road through 1929 (Marshall 293).  Barnes’s dramatization was adapted to the screen by the talented partners Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman, whose credits included adaptations of Little Women in 1933 and Imitation of Life earlier in 1934.  Mason and Heerman would go on to have many more successes during their long careers, including screenplay credits for Stella Dallas (1937), Golden Boy (1939), and their second Little Women in 1949 (IMDB).

The cast was also distinguished. Irene Dunne and John Boles, who had worked well together as star-crossed lovers in the successful adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s tearjerker Back Street in 1932, were cast as Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer.  Among the supporting cast were several popular veterans of the stage, including Laura Hope Crewes as Mrs. Welland, and Helen Westley as Granny Mingott.  The other cast members included more stage actors:  Julie Haydon as May Welland, Theresa Maxwell-Conover as Mrs. Archer, Edith Van Cleve as Janey Archer, Lionel Atwill as Julius Beaufort, and Herbert Yost as Mr. Welland.  The film’s musical score was coordinated by Max Steiner, who had just completed work on King Kong.  Best known as the composer of the score to 1939’s Gone With the Wind, Steiner would win Academy Awards for his scores for The Informer in 1935, Now Voyager in 1942, and Since You Went Away in 1944.

For all of its impressive credentials, The Age of Innocence is an unremarkable film that best fits into the Hollywood subgenre of the “teacup drama.” [22]   During the clean, lean 1930s, studios tried to abide by the Hayes Code, and, at the same time, save costs by “canning stage hits on celluloid, using the original players with little or no adaptation of the plays to movie terms” (Griffith and Mayer 256). In addition to The Age of Innocence, studios released Noel Coward’s Private Lives and a lavish production of Rudolf Besier’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1934.  All three films did fairly well at the box office, but, for all of their sophistication, none of them distinguished themselves or had lasting power.  Like them, The Age of Innocence, wrote the New York Times critic, was “a painstaking but emotionally flaccid photoplay” (Cahir 219).

There really are too many teacups in The Age of Innocence.  Like other drawing room photoplays, “nothing ever happened . . . they left their characters where they found them, and  . . . what passed for action . . . consisted exclusively of hand-kissing, cigarette-lighting, and an eternal pouring and serving of tea” (Griffith and Mayer 256).  The screenplay resembles Barnes’s stage version almost exactly, except for one notable change:  in the stage production, Newland Archer’s son is named “Newland Archer, Jr.” (in Wharton’s novel he is named Dallas).  In the screen version, this character is once again named Dallas, but he is Archer’s grandson.  As the only interesting departure from the stage play, this change affords this “teacup drama” to do something that only movies can do:  incorporate a film montage into the narrative. [23]

By the 1930s, film editors throughout the world, including Hollywood, understood the technology of montage sequencing, and many American films of the period employed these sequences, with their swift, jarring images and their fades and superimpositions.  In the Hollywood movie factory of the 30s, however, filmmakers used montage not to provoke or disturb audiences, but to move them along through time by way of a series of images they already knew, so that they would arrive smoothly at the other end of the sequence. The Age of Innocence provides three good examples of Hollywood’s use of montage sequencing.

The film opens with a dazzling montage of New York City in the 1920s:  an image of the twinkling skyline at night, shots of black entertainers on a stage, a shot of a black saxophone player performing in a crowed nightclub, a shot of a cocktail being mixed and poured, shots of bootleggers firing machine guns, and finally a series of newspaper headlines with sensational news — “Bathing Beauty Tells All,” and “Armstrongs Tell All to Divorce Judge.”  Unless viewers were sleeping, they understood by the end of the opening sequence that they were watching a story of the raging, roaring Twenties.  By the time the sequence dissolves into a close up of Dallas Archer reading the sensational headlines, and he and a white-haired, bearded man with a cane get into a car, the audience understood that they were in 1920s New York with Dallas Archer and his grandfather, Newland Archer.

The opening montage sequence of The Age of Innocence allows for a brief suggestion of sex, alcohol and sleaze that the Hayes Code would not have allowed in the narrative, and also frames the film as a story about generational difference.  There are more superimposed montages of automobile tires fading into buggy wheels, and then buggy wheels becoming automobile tires, that frame Newland’s story as a flashback.  We also see another long montage of changing scenery through a train window, as Newland travels to Florida from New York to see his fiancée May Welland.  In the final sequence of the film we are back in 1920s New York, where we see the elderly Newland, having finished telling his story, as he sits alone on a bench in front of Ellen’s hotel.  As he looks up at her window, the young Ellen Olenska is superimposed onto the screen, and we understand that Newland is remembering her as she was in his youth.

If montage sequencing — however obvious — could show up in an otherwise mediocre teacup photoplay of the Age of Innocence in 1934, then montage sequencing was now in Hollywood to stay.  Filmmakers, especially film editors, were challenging the boundaries of film technology (and the Hayes Code).  Experimental cinematography and sophisticated editing and sound techniques began to transcend Hollywood’s preordained genres, and showed up in a variety of movies—the good ones and the bad ones. Whatever The Age of Innocence does not tell us about Wharton’s novel, the film does suggest that Hollywood movies were becoming more complicated, with their own discourse and a faint but undeniable integrity.  Despite regulations and overbearing producers, by 1934, the art and craft of filmmaking had matured into a serious artistic enterprise.  Like Edith Wharton’s Sophy Viner, the movies were growing up like beautiful weeds through the cracks.

In 1934 Hollywood studios released some especially interesting films that reflected an unprecedented degree of technical and artistic sophistication. Frank Capra directed It Happened One Night, W. S. Van Dyke directed an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s detective story The Thin Man, and Cecil B. DeMille offered Cleopatra.  John Cromwell directed a screen version of W. Somerset Maughm’s novel Of Human Bondage that won acclaim from critics, and also showcased the talents of a young stage actress named Bette Davis in the role of Mildred.  Five years later, by then a movie star, Davis would be a commanding presence in Hollywood, powerful enough to choose her own roles.  In 1939 she chose the role of Charlotte Lovell in an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novella The Old Maid.

Wharton had written The Old Maid in 1921. It had been rejected by Ladies’ Home Journal and Metropolitan Magazine because the subject matter — the story of an unwed mother — was “a bit too vigorous for” their reading audiences (Lewis 435).  Perplexed by this reaction, Wharton wrote to her publisher “Have the readers of the Metropolitan never read ‘The Scarlet Letter’ or ‘Adam Bede’ to mention only the two first classics that come to my mind?  And how about my own ‘Summer’?” (Lewis and Lewis 443).  The Old Maid might have been too much for readers of Ladies Home Journal in 1921, but it has always been considered by many Wharton scholars to be one of her best works, certainly among “the most powerful of her short fictions” (Wolff, Feast XX).  Like she did with The Age of Innocence, Wharton set The Old Maid in her mythological nineteenth-century New York.  Also like the best of her work, including Summer and Ethan Frome, she took a standard melodramatic plot and infused this “backward glance with an acrid sense of disappointment and loss” (XX). “Because of its sympathetic treatment of an unmarried mother, her failure to reveal her previous pregnancy to her fiancé, and the successful concealing of the daughter’s illegitimacy for two decades,” The Old Maid represents Wharton’s “best portrayal of an intense and prolonged struggle for dominance between two women, Charlotte Lovell and her cousin Delia Ralston” (McDowell, Edith Wharton 43).

Wharton’s story of Charlotte (whose very name, Charlotte Lovell, suggests Charlotte Temple, the unwed mother and title character of the most popular sentimental novel in 19^th century America) owes a great deal to The Scarlet Letter, as Wharton recognized.  Hawthorne had also used the form of the popular sentimental novel (Charlotte Temple, for example), which he had then subverted into something else.  Wharton used the same model, the sentimental novel of a woman in trouble, and twisted it into a bleak story of relentless yearning. Also like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, Wharton’s Charlotte has already delivered her daughter, Tina, when the narrative opens, and we must only imagine the circumstances that led to her pregnancy.  Like Hawthorne, Wharton marginalized any suggestion of romantic love in The Old Maid, forcing her characters and her readers to adjust to the grim realities of a world without Romance. [24]

The results are devastating.  Wharton belied “the stylized surface” of Old New York to reveal its “disturbing underside” (Benstock 444).   In her story of how the two cousins negotiate an illegitimate child in an unforgiving world, Wharton transformed their dreams into the bleakness of Hawthorne’s prison door. “While she does not rule out happiness,” writes Funston in “Clocks and Mirrors, Dreams and Destinies,” Wharton “redefines it within the narrow constraints of society; ultimately, it is a happiness muted and greatly diminished” (156).  Both Charlotte and Delia suffer throughout the novella because of their jealousy as they struggle for Tina’s love.  Wharton gives us no measure of comfort at the story’s end, but instead provides us with a sense of the high price that both women must pay, for whom “it was a terrible, a sacrilegious thing to interfere with another’s destiny, to lay the tenderest touch upon any human being’s right to love and suffer after his own fashion” (Old New York 132).

Wharton’s novella was finally bought and published by Red Book in late1921.  Three years later, Wharton published The Old Maid, now with the subtitle The ‘Fifties, as the second of four novellas which spanned the 1840s to the 1870s, handsomely packaged “in four volumes, boxed, with graceful illustrations” and titled Old New York (Lewis 459).  In 1935, Zoë Akins adapted The Old Maid for Broadway, for which she won a controversial Pulitzer Prize. [25]   Hollywood, never shy about taking on a too-vigorous story or a controversy (they excelled, after all, in changing and defusing the works of authors), became interested in the rights to the play.  Paramount first bought The Old Maid, and sold the rights to Warner Bros., who saw The Old Maid as an especially attractive property for their star, Bette Davis.

The antecedents to Wharton’s story about an unwed mother lay not just in great classic literature, as Wharton had suggested, but in popular melodrama as well.  Hollywood knew all about the unwed-mother story, which had served as a stock plot device in cinematic melodramas since the early years of motion pictures, and studios had been offering movies about the trials of unmarried mothers for twenty years.  In the 1930s, these “confession films” were especially popular.  One of the best of the silent confession movies, Stella Dallas (1925), based on the popular novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, was remade into a hit for Samuel Goldwyn in 1937, and represents only the most enduring of a host of movies about illegitimacy and single mothers that were filmed in the 1930s.  With titles like Common Clay (1930), Born to Love (1932), and Bed of Roses (1933), these movies appealed to working girls and married women alike during the Depression years, and made stars of Constance Bennett and Barbara Stanwyck, whose performances suggested that unwed mothers were heroes.  “Once a figure of shame,” write Griffith and Mayer, “the unwed mother now asked for and presumably received the sympathy of her audiences” (279).  

The transparent and shallow film versions of The Children and The Age of Innocence of the early 1930s might have suggested that The Old Maid would suffer a similar fate in the hands of Hollywood filmmakers.  However, The Old Maid was not just another sentimental story about an unwed mother, and the 1939 film was not just another predictable women’s melodrama.  By 1939, American filmmaking had matured in remarkable ways, both technologically and artistically.  What might have been just another formula weepie a decade earlier became instead a film with both style and substance, one in which Wharton’s vision was projected onto a screen in clear ways.   The Old Maid became an early example of deft translation from text to screen, a rare feat during any decade.

The cast and crew had worked together before.  Casey Robinson had written the screenplay for another of Bette Davis’s 1939 films, Dark Victory, and he used both Wharton’s text and Akins’s stage play as his sources for The Old Maid.  The British director Edmund Goulding was known as a “woman’s director,” having made successful pictures of Grand Hotel with Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford in 1932 and That Certain Woman with Davis in 1937 (he would also direct Davis in The Great Lie, an interesting 1941 movie that resembles The Old Maid in many ways). Playing Delia to Davis’s Charlotte was Miriam Hopkins, who had worked onstage with Davis in New York, and who would spar with her again in Old Acquaintance in 1943. 

The earnest George Brent, who had just finished filming Dark Victory with Davis, played Tina’s father Clement Spender, a character who was newly created by Robinson, since he is only mentioned in the novella and the dramatization. [26]   The adult Tina was played by Jane Bryan, who would also star in another Goulding film in 1939, We Are Not Alone.  Perhaps the most interesting cast member was Donald Crisp (1880-1974) as the wise Dr. Lanskell.  A distinguished British actor who had worked for D.W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Broken Blossoms (1919), Crisp had starred with Davis in Jezebel in 1938, and would win an Academy Award for his role as a Welsh patriarch in How Green Was My Valley in 1941.

1939 was a landmark year for American movies, among them  Stagecoach; Wuthering Heights; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; The Women; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Ninotchka; and Destry Rides Again.  As impressive as these movies were, they were only the runners-up to the two movies made by Hollywood that were destined to become iconographic:  The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind.  Both presented in crisp, clear color, with special effects and epic proportions, these two films would come to define more about American movies — and American popular culture — than any other movies made in the United States during the twentieth century.  In 1939, however, they could only claim to be spectacular movies.  As such, they both provided Hollywood with new faces and new technologies, and ensured that, on the brink of world war, Hollywood could provide Americans with an escape over the rainbow and an epic backward glance.  As another film of the class of ’39, The Old Maid shares characteristics with both films.  Like Gone with the Wind, it takes place during the American Civil War and its aftermath.  Like The Wizard of Oz, it provides a glimpse of a new paradigm for an awkward, lonely girl who dreams about “some place where there isn’t any trouble.”

Robinson, at the request of producer Hal B. Wallis, reset the film version of The Old Maid from 1850s New York to 1860s Philadelphia, most certainly to “take advantage of Gone with the Wind mania” (Wright 191).  Robinson had to refigure the plot as well, in order to provide a Rhett Butler for Davis’s Charlotte/Scarlett.  The film opens on Delia Lovell’s wedding day.  She is fretting over a message she has received from a suitor she has rejected — Clem Spender — and she is trying to decide how to tell him that she is marrying someone else, Jim Ralston of the “Philadelphia Ralstons.”   She shares her dilemma with her cousin Charlotte, who, dressed in her bridesmaid’s finery, decides to deliver the message herself to “poor Clem” at the train station.  Charlotte meets Clem in the station crowded with Union soldiers, and delivers Delia’s message.

In the next sequence, Clem shows up in Delia’s bedroom, and confronts her just before she is to descend the stairs to be married.  Just as Charlotte enters the room, Delia tells Clem that she gave up waiting for him to “make a success” of himself and can’t “bear to be lonely.” Throughout their heated exchange, the camera shows us cousin Charlotte in close ups, as she listens to them argue.  Clem stalks out, and the wedding march begins.  The other bridesmaids begin to assemble to go downstairs, and we see cousin Charlotte run out of the house after Clem, trailing him in her bridesmaid’s dress.  Delia begins to walk down the aisle, without her cousin Charlotte in attendance.

In the scene that follows, we watch Clem escort Charlotte back into the same door from which she had run, only now it is late at night, and the house is dark and quiet.  He tells her that he plans to enlist in the Union army, and they share one chaste kiss in the darkened hallway.  Our final shot in this scene is a close-up of Charlotte’s face over Clem’s shoulder, as he holds her one last time. The next scene — the following morning — we are again at the train station, where first we see Delia pouring coffee for the Union soldiers who are waiting to board their trains.  Delia spots Charlotte, who tells her that she is waiting to say goodbye to Clem.  When Charlotte finds Clem, she brings him to Delia, and he says goodbye to Delia, while Charlotte watches in the background.  Then, as Charlotte and Clem move toward their final goodbye in a classic Hollywood train-station scene, they share their second chaste kiss.  The camera provides us with a shot of Delia in the background, watching Charlotte give a goodbye kiss to her own rejected true love. 

These sequences are the first of many scenes in the film that show us images of both women as they alternate between the background and the foreground. Because we have seen Charlotte and Clem returning in the dark from their one night together, we may already understand that they have become lovers, and that they have conceived a child.  By providing us with this goodbye scene in which the first love triangle of the story is clearly defined in visual terms, the camera also provides us with an apparatus for reading the struggle between Delia and Charlotte in their second love triangle — Delia, Charlotte, and the fruit of Charlotte’s and Clem’s night together: Tina. 

One of the strengths of this film, especially apparent in the early train station scene, but also used in subsequent scenes, is the manipulation of our sympathies by the camera — the narrator of the story — in order to divide our loyalties between Delia and Charlotte. By giving them equal time on the screen, and by allowing them to mirror each other, the camera leads us to understand that they share jealousy, fear, regret, and loneliness equally.  More than once Wharton’s textual narrator allows us to see the reflection of Charlotte through Delia,  “Delia understood now that Charlotte had guessed all this” (Old New York 132).  In many scenes, the camera in The Old Maid allows us to experience the mirror-in-the-mirror-in-the-mirror that Wharton gives us:  we see that Delia understands that Charlotte has guessed what we already know.   

In a series of montage sequences, we experience the Civil War year by year, and a shot of Clem Spender’s gravestone tells us that he dies a heroic soldier’s death.  When the montage ends, we are in 1866, and we see a close-up of a sign on a door:  “Charlotte Lovell’s Nursery for War Orphans.”  Now that Clem has been buried, and Charlotte has hidden her own daughter from society within the walls of her nursery, we watch one final departure from Wharton’s text.  In Wharton’s Old Maid, Charlotte confesses to Delia about Tina and Clem in their first conversation of the book, when Delia, married with two children, tries to understand Charlotte’s peculiar attachment to a foundling.  We see our first display of Delia’s desperate needs in this scene.  When Charlotte confesses the father’s name, Delia appropriates Charlotte’s story — and her daughter — by making it her story:  “It was almost as if, for a moment, this other woman were telling her of her own secret past” (74).

In the film, Delia makes this discovery herself, when she chances upon the little girl while visiting the nursery (Delia visits the nursery in the novella, but after Charlotte has identified Tina as her and Clem’s child).  In the scene where Delia meets the five-year-old Tina, she and Tina are alone in a room.  Delia looks the little girl in the eyes and we watch her face in close up, while she slowly begins to recognize her true love, Clem Spender, in Tina.  We watch her as she puzzles through the girl’s name and figures out the riddle:  “Tina.  Tina.  Clementina!” she whispers to herself, and to us.  She gives Tina the necklace she is wearing — a necklace Clem Spender had given to her at their last parting on her wedding day — and she pulls the little girl close to her.  Since Charlotte is attending to other children in another room, we are Delia’s only audience, and now we share her secret, that she has appropriated Clem Spender’s daughter by holding her close and tying them both to Clem through the necklace.

From this point, the film follows Wharton’s text quite carefully, including long passages of Wharton’s dialog.  In carefully composed scenes where the two women’s images are often alternated, the camera continues to show us that which Wharton’s narrator tells us.  Delia and Charlotte spend their lives mirroring each other’s struggle for power, for Tina, and for ownership of Clem.  Beyond the hoop skirts and the sentimental soundtrack (a slow “My Darling Clementine” plays every time one of them thinks of Clem), the movie provides us with a complicated, handsome story of two women who spend their lives carefully negotiating a shared secret.  Both are imprisoned in a world where they are confined to strict roles, and both yearn for alternative ways of living, or, as lonely adolescent Dorothy Gale of Kansas might tell them, a place where there isn’t any trouble.

Wharton’s text of “The Old Maid,” writes Wharton scholar Cahir, “illustrates society’s crushing imposition of conformity and sacrifice, of the worst sort, on its members, who are beset by a vision of something more” (217).  The “something more,” suggested in The Wizard of Oz, is a world in which a girl has freedom to make her own choices, love whomever she pleases, and be loved for who she is.  An unlikely pair, 1939’s Wizard of Oz and The Old Maid both anticipate one of the most interesting and sophisticated genres of American film, the women’s film of the 1940s.  In many ways, Wharton’s text becomes especially powerful on the screen when viewed as a part of this genre. Many of the images and narrative strategies in Wharton’s Old Maid correspond in uncanny ways to the images that women’s films employed to signify confinement, yearning, and a glimpse of a new world.

The genre of the “woman’s film” of the 1940s includes some of Hollywood’s most interesting movies from the decade, among them Now, Voyager (192), Tender Comrade (1943), The Great Lie, Since you Went Away (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and To Each His Own (1946). Among the distinguished scholarly works on these films, Mary Ann Doane’s The Desire to Desire; The Woman’s Film of the 1940s includes some of the most significant and useful insights.  Doane concludes her study by tracing “a consistency in certain recurrent themes as well as . . . the dependence on a limited number of spatial and temporal categories” in the woman’s film (179).  She explains that a woman’s film:

“In watching a woman’s film,” Doane concludes, “one actively senses the contraction of the world attributed to the woman, the reduction of meaning and its subordination to affect” (179).

          Doane might have been describing The Old Maid, which includes examples of all of her characteristics of a woman’s film.  Time stands still for Charlotte, as she watches Delia and Clem end their courtship, and she is allowed to pursue Clem into a night of love.  Then, with a montage sequence that moves time through the five years of the Civil War, we must imagine Charlotte’s pregnancy, Tina’s birth, and how the news of Clem’s death affected both Charlotte and Delia. There are also several scenes where Charlotte and Delia wait endlessly for Tina to arrive home, all scenes fraught with suspense, as Charlotte and Delia struggle to decide how, or whether, to tell Tina about her biological parents.

          In the spirit of Wharton’s scrupulous detail, the film translates Delia’s overstuffed, claustrophobic house beautifully.  We have the same sense of suffocation in the film that we do in the text, where Wharton describes Delia’a sense of entrapment:  “Now, as Delia glanced about her at the Leopold Robert lithographs, the family daguerreotypes, the rosewood and mahogany, she understood that she was looking at the walls of her own grave” (110). Doors open and close regularly.  In the very first scene, while Delia ponders her wedding day dilemma, Charlotte closes two doors to the bedroom, so that they can plot secretly.  From that time on, doors are opened and closed in almost every scene:  Charlotte closes the front door on Clem as he leaves her late at night, Delia closes her bedroom doors on Charlotte, and they both share scenes with Tina where, after enclosing her in her bed linens, they close her into her bedroom. 

          Wharton’s novella also includes many doors closing — on almost every page of the text.  Delia listens for Charlotte:  “she heard Charlotte Lovell’s door open and her stiff petticoats rustle toward the landing.  A light glanced under the door and vanished; Charlotte had passed Delia’s threshold on her way downstairs” (Old New York 110). Delia summons Charlotte to her bedroom for a talk about Tina:  “Miss Lovell, closing the bedroom door with her dry deliberateness, advanced toward the chintz lounge between the windows” (118).  And, in the last scene of the book, Delia comes into Tina’s bed on the night before her wedding:  “Delia sat down beside her, and their clasped hands lay down upon the coverlet . . . But suddenly she thought of Charlotte, alone behind the shut door of her own room, watching, struggling, listening” (134).

          Wharton also includes many references to the stairway of the house.  Delia watches as “Charlotte and Tina went upstairs together” on their way to bed.  As they wait for Tina to return home from a ball, the “two cousins lit their bedroom candles and walked upstairs through the darkened house” (107). In the final scene, “Delia started up from her musing.  There was a step on the stair — Charlotte coming down through the silent house.  Delia rose with a vague impulse of escape” (133).  In the movie, most of the action takes place in Delia’s overwrought house, where the three women who share the house most often discuss or hide their secrets. The large curved stairway that leads to their bedrooms, where most of the secrets lie, takes center stage in many sequences of the film.  All four wedding scenes include shots of the wedding parties coming down the stairs, and many times we see Delia or Charlotte moving slowly up the darkened stairs, where they will try to sleep, but will watch, struggle, and listen anguished silence. 

Charlotte and Delia are inside closed rooms, with closed doors, through most of the film. In the final scene, however, they are outdoors, having just said goodbye to Tina as she leaves for her honeymoon. “From tomorrow on,” Delia tells Charlotte (in Wharton’s language), “until death comes for one of us, we’ll be sitting here alone together, beside the same lamp, in an empty house, with heaven knows what thoughts to keep us company.” They turn away from us and, arm in arm, walk slowly toward the door, which closes behind them.  Although the scene mimics any number of Hollywood happy endings, the film has established enough imagery of entrapment within the house to make their going back indoors not a victorious ending, but a diminishing one.  Wharton’s bleak ending to the novella is softened, for sure, by sentimental music in this final shot.  However, anyone reading this film as a woman’s film, one where the women are trying to escape lives of conformity and heartbreaking sacrifice, will understand that when Delia and Charlotte return inside, they are returning to the walls of their own prisons.

Wharton privileges Delia’s thoughts in the novella, allowing us to hear her as she juggles her fear, jealousy, and sympathy for Charlotte and Tina.  In the film, Charlotte becomes our best guide, not because of how she thinks, but because of how she appears.  Through Charlotte, we are given our only glimpse of another world — a place over the rainbow — where women are vibrant, free, and full of love.  Charlotte seems happiest, healthiest, and most vibrant during the middle scenes of the film, those that begin with the shot of the sign “Lovell Nursery for War Orphans.”  Without being told, we understand that somehow, Charlotte has negotiated a way to keep her daughter and lead a fulfilling life within a society that otherwise would have condemned them both. Somehow, she has figured out a way to build a new kind of family that thrives within the structure of her closed society. She looks competent and content.

 When Charlotte tries to incorporate her new family into society, however, she is thwarted.  She cannot have a traditional marriage or family, and so she is forced to submit to society by breaking her engagement and relinquishing her daughter to Delia.  At this point in the film, her appearance changes drastically.  No longer fulfilled nor happy, Charlotte becomes what those around her — including her own daughter — call her:  an old maid.  Gaunt, severe, and steely, Charlotte’s façade hides the passion for life and the ingenuity that allowed her to have and keep her daughter.  Back from her trip to Oz, Charlotte is now in the old black and white world where she is powerless, diminished and often dismissed by all around her, including those she loves.

Charlotte exemplifies another quality that Doane attributes to female characters in women’s films, “double mimesis.”  As we watch female characters, we must remember that “textual pleasure is produced primarily through processes of recognition and misrecognition” (180).  We see Charlotte first as the patriarchal projection of a lively, passionate young woman, sexually attractive and affectionate.  Then we see the post-nursery Charlotte as another patriarchal projection, an old maid.  However, “credibility of these representations is sometimes undermined, in isolated images or scenes” where “something slips through” (180-181). 

What slips through in The Old Maid is Charlotte in her own alternative universe, where she is an unmarried mother who controls her own life. The images of the sexual Charlotte and the old maid Charlotte become mere reflections of a type that we know is artificial. “In the woman’s film, the process of remirroring reduces the mirror effect of the cinema, it demonstrates that these are poses, postures, tropes — in short, that we are being subjected to a discourse on femininity” (181).  Charlotte mimics and mirrors back what her society sees in her, but we have glimpsed another Charlotte in this woman’s film, one who appears, however briefly, as she wants to be.

Wharton uses mirrors several times in The Old Maid to show “self-scrutiny and alter egos,” and also as  “a kind of two-way mirror, reflecting both a horrific past and a past made rosy by girlish dreams” (Funston 151).  Charlotte, the old maid, sees her reflection in Delia, also “an ‘old maid’ at heart because of her suppressed passion” and her willingness to conform (156).  Both see themselves in Tina, which allows Wharton to “examine a woman’s need to go beyond motherhood to find selfhood” (157). Wharton’s damnation of a New York where “babies” “were to make up for everything,” and where women’s lives were restricted, is projected through scenes of the babies themselves in the film. The brief glimpse of a happy, robust Charlotte taking care of her daughter and the orphans in her nursery, suggests a struggle with which Wharton had been grappling during her entire career and nearly forty years’ worth of fiction:  there is no place in this world for women who do not conform to their prescribed lives.  That a 1939 film could suggest this heartbreaking state, and could provide a glimpse into Wharton’s imaginary different world, testifies to both Wharton’s narrative skill and the reflective power of the movies.

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After the Greed debacle of 1923, Erich von Stroheim would direct only three more movies in Hollywood.  By 1928, his reputation as a dictatorial, difficult and expensive director made him a liability.  During the 1930s and 1940s, he acted in several Hollywood productions, but he never again lived in the United States, having moved to Edith Wharton’s beloved Paris in the early 1930s.  In 1949, he returned to Hollywood to act in Sunset Boulevard, one of Hollywood’s darkest and best movies about a doomed Hollywood screenwriter. He costarred with one of Wharton’s models for her movie-age sirens, Gloria Swanson, now the former Marquise de la Falaise de Coudray, who had come out of retirement to play an aging siren of the silent screen after Mary Pickford, now entirely secluded at Pickfair, had turned it down.  Von Stroheim’s performance as Norma Desmond’s former husband was stellar, and garnered for him a nomination for an Academy Award later that year.  He returned to France in 1950, where he died in 1957.

Von Stroheim’s nemesis, Irving Thalberg, a man who lived with a congenital heart condition and who worked sixty hours a week, died at 37 in 1936.  Between 1921 and 1937, he had been instrumental in transforming American motion pictures from novelties into a multi-million dollar industry.  His insistence that movies could be more than light entertainments, that they could be products of enduring value, became his legacy.  In 1937, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established the Irving Thalberg Award, “given for consistently high quality of production” (Osborne 28).  Hal B. Wallis, the producer who would oversee The Old Maid the following year, was awarded the first Thalberg Award in 1938. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald socialized with Thalberg during the 1920s and 1930s.  He based several characters on “the boy wonder,” including the young producer Miles Calman in his short story about Hollywood, Crazy Sunday, and Monroe Stahr in his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon.  In 1925, Fitzgerald had visited Edith Wharton at her home outside Paris, where he had made a bad first impression by arriving drunk.  During the 1930s, now struggling with debt and alcoholism, Fitzgerald continued to write screenplays for the studios at the same time that he continued to disparage Hollywood in his letters.  He received credit for only one complete screenplay, Three Comrades, an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s story of three friends in post-World War I France, produced by Thalberg’s M-G-M Studio in 1938.  Several of Fitzgerald’s own works, including Tender Is the Night (1962), The Last Tycoon (1976), and his masterpiece of jazz-age America, The Great Gatsby (1949, 1974), would be adapted to the screen.

Edith Wharton died in 1937, just before production began on Hollywood’s version of The Old Maid.  She would have had no interest in the production, nor would she have cared how American audiences reacted to the movie.  During the 1930s, while she was most happy for her cinema income, she would continue to disparage the popularity of motion pictures, and she would continue to blame their popularity on a group of Eastern European invaders who had conquered her beloved Manhattan. She assumed that the Americans who had been nourished by her fiction had been displaced by readers whose interests she did not understand.  The “world is so changed,” she wrote in a letter in 1936, “and readers and reviewers belong to such a new breed, that I feel in despair at the lack of any interest or understanding of the inner life . . . I can think of lots of things I want to write about, but who will read me?” (Bauer xi).

          In the late 1930s, Americans were reading, but they were not reading Wharton’s fiction.  Her late letters reveal that she understood that she was out of fashion by then. The year before her death, she had written an introduction to Owen and Donald Davis’s stage adaptation of her most famous novella, Ethan Frome.  The Davises had dedicated their published adaptation to Wharton, who, sensing that the reputation of her fiction had diminished, seemed gratified to know that her works were still alive.  “Here at least is a new lease on life for ‘Ethan,’” she wrote (Marshall 293).  We can only imagine how she would feel to know that Martin Boyne, Rose Sellars, Ethan Frome, Mattie Silver, Newland Archer, Ellen Olenska, and her earliest and most intriguing character, Lily Bart, would be brought back to life a half-century later.  She might have glimpsed signs of rebirth in the 1939 production of The Old Maid.  And she might have appreciated the next chapter of her story on film, when, after a fifty-year silence between 1939’s The Old Maid and 1990’s The Children, Wharton’s narratives would attract the attention of filmmakers.   She might love the twist of this story:  the same mechanical terror that had butchered her fiction during her lifetime, would nurture it back into bloom.