-
4. There’s Something about Mary
- The University of Alabama Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
4 There’s Something about Mary All the things we knew about each other, all the things that accumulate through a lifetime, or through ten years, sat quietly, waiting for us, while we lived politely and tried, like most people, to push them out of sight. Polite and blind, we lived. —Lillian Hellman, Days to Come Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934) combines a highly melodramatic plot, fueled by the malicious lies of an evil child, with sensational (for its time) subject matter concerning an alleged lesbian relationship between two teachers at a private boarding school for girls. The playwright’s biographer, Richard Moody, registered no doubts about the root cause for the play’s spectacular run of 691 performances on Broadway: “And though audiences may have focused on the evil machinations of the child as they watched the story unfold, it was the advance gossip about unnatural love that drew them in” (38). While such illicit stuff may have been and may, curiously enough, continue to be the compelling interest of this play, I’m going to dig at the clunky dramaturgy, rather than its subject matter, to discover hidden values. The limitations of the stage cram all the action in a living room, and the loose talk there titillates the audience ’s imagination about what goes on elsewhere in more private spaces. The play first incites and then indicts the audience as an obtrusive and prurient witness to the action. But, unlike in either subsequent film treatment of the drama, what actually happens in these unseen places remains unclear. Whatever enduring strengths the play possesses lie within the undiscovered countries of doubt and ambiguity. William Wyler directed both film adaptations of the play that feature the bad-seed child, Mary Tilford, but distort the relationship between Karen Wright and Martha Dobie. Produced twenty-five years apart, the two films chronicle the rise and fall of the Motion Picture Production Code (1930–66) as enforced by the Hays office. Among its many moral duties, the Hays Code aimed to reduce sexual content in films. In his first effort to make a movie of Hellman’s play, Wyler could not even use the same title. These Three (1936) starred Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins, and Joel McCrea and lesbian love transfigured into a heterosexual triangle with the two women competing for Dr. Joe Cardin’s affections . In this version, Mary accuses Martha of subjecting the students to sexual 52 / Chapter 4 situations in Martha’s bedroom. In the end, Martha admits her feelings for Joe but sacrifices her love so that Karen can reunite with him at his favorite cake shop in Vienna. The Hollywood ending dissolves with a big kiss between a man and the woman who loves him. T wenty-five years later, Wyler produced and directed a second version in an attempt to be more faithful to the original material . The Hays Code, about to be replaced by the familiar ratings system, had weakened significantly by then and grown lax during the intervening years. The Children’s Hour (1961) starred Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine and restored Martha’s confessional speech to Karen and her subsequent suicide at the end. Martha names the exact charge leveled against them, propagated first by a not altogether comprehending Mary, as “sinful sexual knowledge of each other.” Analyzing the later film, Joan Mellen declares, “The Children’s Hour is most interesting from a sociological point of view, in showing the intolerance of a puritanical , self-righteous community which would drive a woman to death for her sexual preferences” (98). This critic, like most others, discards the film’s container , form, and dives quickly into its meaty contents. Despite the apparent differences between the two film treatments of the same material, remarkable similarities persist as well. Mary, the engine behind the plot, tells a different lie in each version, but it is a lie nonetheless and it produces the same effect. Doris Falk, taking Hellman’s point of view, describes the play as “the ruin of two women by the spreading of a malicious lie” (29). For critics such as Falk, the question of whether Martha is or is not a lesbian is irrelevant. The fact that what Mary says may contain the seeds of truth is also irrelevant. It may not even be significant that Mary lies at all. As Joe says in the play, “Look: everybody lies all the time. Sometimes they have to...