Bachelor Girl

But the movie reduces all conflicts to sex. And so it is centered on the novel’s key story—the epic tale of Marjorie and songwriter/intellectual poseur Noel Airman. The film, starring Gene Kelly and Natalie Wood, streamlines the years-long affair—separations, rapprochements, Noel’s impossible drunkenness and cruelty—and in the end marries Marjorie off to the wrong person, which is to miss the whole point. But who cares? It tortures with that core question: Does Marjorie ever break free of her strict Jewish upbringing and sleep with Noel?

In Franny and Zooey, the J. D. Salinger novella, the entire narrative is propelled by Franny Glass’s faint in a restaurant and long, depressed recovery on the living room couch. She claims to have had a religious experience (a common enough occurrence in the Glass family), though young female readers were desperate to know if she was pregnant.

I think it’s been fairly well established that she was. And in the book, yes, Marjorie slept with Noel after months of tortuous concerns about frigidity. In the film, though, as in any fifties film, it’s hard to say. Any discussion of sex, any hint of two people possibly having had sex, was so oblique that the only way to really know was to go back to Peyton Place and From Here to Eternity and read them again. For many young women of the time, that constituted “close” reading.

Sex, and life generally, was even more tortured for the fifties widow. Jane Wyman plays a blind widow who must somehow “go out and meet new people” in Magnificent Obsession, then moves on to playing a lonely widow in All That Heaven Allows. She is only in her forties, but her two grown children believe that Mother must now stay at home, mourning her loss. She tries, then slowly does the unexpected: falls in love with her young gardener, Rock Hudson, who takes her out driving and—very unusual for someone of her social standing—to lobster parties at the beach shacks of bohemian friends. She returns home to lectures on how she is maladjusted and possibly insane. In consultation with members of the family’s country club, the children arrange a match for Mother with a respectable doctor. When she turns them down, they drive the gardener away in retaliation and disgust. Then, to make it up to her—to give her something warm and new in her life—they present her with her first TV. That will keep the old girl company! She sits there staring at it, unable to turn it on, her reflection staring back, a lone face trapped in a box. But then she’s up! Breaking with all form, tradition, her entire life, she races out to find her gardener before it is too late.

Of course the most famous single-girl film franchise of the era belonged to Doris Day, as she played a series of working girls with nice apartments, wise-cracking maids, and careers in demanding but still feminine areas, usually interior decorating. She was always well dressed, articulate, and unusually happy with herself. Until someone started teasing her about her love life. Usually this came down to the question of whether she was a virgin. It’s clear that the accusation bothers her—she probably was a virgin—but it’s not something that, until now, she’s felt badly about. To achieve the kinds of things she has achieved, she’s had to live a disciplined life, looking after herself, part of which meant keeping in mind society’s vicious sexual double standard. For the time period, this attitude seems less prudish and warping than it does practical. (For of course if she had not been a virgin, she’d have had hell to pay for that, as well.)

Unfortunately the issue would in short time make a joke of Doris Day. As comedies began their descent into so-called sophisticated sex romps, the Day/virginity factor became a repetitive gag. (As one producer famously quipped, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”) She came to seem righteously wholesome. Dull. A too-chatty full-figured gal snobbish critic Dwight MacDonald once described as “bovine.”

But the best of the Day characters were stalwart about sex for a reason. They understood how easily it could be misinterpreted and used against a single woman. In Minor Characters, a 1983 memoir of 1950s Manhattan, Joyce Johnson wrote: “The crime of sex was like guilt by association—not visible to the eye of the outsider, but an act that could be easily conjectured. Consequences could make it manifest…. In the 1950s, sex—if you achieved it—was a serious and anxious act.”

CROSS YOUR LEGS. DO NOT UNCROSS UNTIL WED

By 1957, sex seemed to be everywhere—in magazines, novels, in the movies—and if you were single and living in the city, there was a sense that it might soon arrive in your very own apartment. The Saturday Evening Post was not alone in declaring, “There are new considerations a girl living alone must take into account.”

In all the many etiquette guides, sex had been little more than a shadow presence, an issue alluded to but not directly addressed. Most of these how-to-live guides covered general comportment—how a woman should walk down or cross the street without seeming too “available”; how she should remove an apartment key from her purse, and how, if there was no doorman, one stood there seeming respectable while opening a door, on a city street, all alone. One could further study how to walk down the apartment hallway when putting out garbage; how to stand or sit while talking on the phone, including, in one book, some pointers on gracefully twirling the cord.

Sex, however, rated few paragraphs. Because allegedly there was no sex. Guides were there to help young women better avoid even the hint. A small sampling of postdate evasions from two books, circa 1953:

—(To be said just before reaching home, while yawning). “Gee, I wish I didn’t have to get up so early—six A.M.! (checks watch) How did it get to be so late? I wish I could ask you up, but perhaps another time. I’ve had such a nice evening. Goodnight.” (Girl then very quickly races up steps to house or out of taxi cab. She waves.)

—(To be said as she opens her apartment door and sees a suitcase, a prop she planted earlier). “Oh my, look! Ssshhh! She’s here! My roommate! She’s a stew! She just flew in from Japan. Oh, dear. I’m so sorry. We’ll have to take a rain check on that nightcap, I think.”

—(To be said if the man was already inside, drinking that nightcap). “Well, I do have to get up awfully early.” If that didn’t work, “I wish I could offer a refill, but (blinks, squints) I’m getting a migraine.” In desperation: “My mother is here from Cincinnati. She’ll be back any minute and so…” Sometimes a roommate might magically appear, or a neighbor who needed (female) help with “a very personal and very upsetting emergency! ”

But it got harder to delete sex as a presence in one’s living room and, generally speaking, in one’s life. As one twenty-five-year-old told a Sunday newspaper supplement in 1957:

I was involved in a… conversation with an unfamiliar young man… and I mentioned that I’d just moved out of my parents’ home into an apartment of my own in Greenwich Village. The young man’s ears perked up, his eyes took on a new gleam, his smile grew enterprising and his manner insinuating. “Oh-h-h, so you live alone, do you? And in the Village!?” I realized I’d apparently taken not a new address, but a new address that gave me a whole new character…. I could just see him at my place. We mix up some drinks and… so much for the conversation. You can imagine the rest.

Let’s go back to that man, circa 1953, having his nightcap and listening to excuses in the living room. Here’s how a 1958 guide updated the situation.

From the moment he entered, he leapt to certain conclusions… the curtains are closed and there is alcohol out and on display. The girl has an obvious familiarity with mixing drinks. Note and note well: The way a woman handles… the liquor question is essential because men, except for an unusually sensitive minority, immediately assume that if a girl lives alone she is worldly and, especially if she drinks, she must certainly hope to use her freedom as fully as possible.

Many advice columnists counseled meeting men elsewhere—blocks, entire districts, away from one’s apartment. One 1958 guide, Today’s Manners: Footloose and Fancy Free, was devoted to this idea, providing many specific suggestions on how to manage oneself while entertaining in public. For example, if a single woman invited friends out for dinner, she would designate an escort for herself, first “making it clear to the management that she was the host, that she would sign the check, but that ‘an escort’ would handle the actual transaction.” If there was no available escort, a man at the table could be “discreetly called upon to do the honors.”

If the plans called for her to arrive at the appointed place alone, there were comparable instructions.