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16. Rivalry, Romance, and War Reporters: Martha Gellhorn’s Love Goes to Press and the Collier’s Files
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In the spring of 1945 as the war in Europe was coming to an end, Martha Gellhorn and fellow war correspondent Virginia Cowles were in London, “feeling aimless like millions of others.” “Though no one spoke of it, sorrow affected me; now there was time to think of the heart-sickening cost of war,” Gellhorn recalled. “Nothing seemed worth the effort of doing it. Ginny, more energetic, dreamed up this brilliant idea. We would write a jokey play about war correspondents. After a successful run in London, the play would be bought by the movies, bringing us pots of money, of which neither of us had much. I said no, it’s silly, we don’t know how to write a play, not even how to begin. Ginny observed that I might as well try it, since I was clearly unemployed” (Introduction viii). A madcap romantic comedy set in a press camp in Italy in 1944, Gellhorn and Cowles’s Love Goes to Press was a hit on the London stage in the summer of 1946. The play features a pair of sexy, quick-witted women war correspondents who try to juggle their careers and their love lives and¤nd it easier to deal with war than with men. Action on the Italian front picks up when one of our heroines unexpectedly encounters at the press camp her ex-husband, himself a famous writer, whom she had divorced— twice—on the grounds of plagiarism. Our other heroine falls in love with the Public Relations Of¤cer, a proper Englishman whose angry objection to women at the front turns to fantasies of hunting, ¤shing, and tending dairy cows together on his country estate, assuming that once they are married she will give up the nonsense of writing. 16 Rivalry, Romance, and War Reporters Martha Gellhorn’s Love Goes to Press and the Collier’s Files Sandra Whipple Spanier The London run was so successful that play and cast were moved to New York. It opened on Broadway on New Year’s Day 1947 and folded after four performances, earning, as Gellhorn’s hometown paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, put it, “the combined doubtful honor of being the ¤rst play and the ¤rst ®op of the year.” Gellhorn later wrote that for the English audiences, laughter was a vital escape. Those who had experienced war on their own soil and were living in the ruins felt free to laugh at “this comic unreal version of war.” The American response ranged from yawns to moral indignation. One critic was downright offended, calling the play “a libel on the profession”: If this is the way Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles themselves behaved in the pursuit of their newspaper assignments, it would seem wise for the high command to banish all women journalists from the next war. Presumably the whole affair was supposed to be funny but since their writing lacks wit and their plotting any elements of conviction one is driven back to a criticism of the content of the play and the strange ethics as well as the incredible human callousness exhibited by the characters they portrayed. (Gilder 18) As Martha Gellhorn later said, “There you are: some jokes, like some white wines, do not travel” (xi). Like any newsroom comedy, the play is rife with rivalries. The opening scene is a conversation between correspondents Hank and Tex, who scoff at the “eyewitness stuff ” of their “poor dumb ambitious colleagues wading around those roads near Mount Sorello” while they get their stories hot off the typewriter of a diligent dupe the minute he goes off to the bathroom (8). But however competitive they are among themselves, when the men hear they are about to be joined by “internationally known, glamourous war-correspondent” Jane Mason, we witness instant male bonding (10). The Public Relations Of¤cer is incensed: “Dressed up in Molyneux uniforms. Cooing at all the men. They act as if the war was some sort of special coming-out party. Want to go to the front, and scream when they get there. Any decent woman would stay at home” (10) Newsman Joe Rogers remarks: “I’m allergic to newspaper women. I married one once. They never stop trying to scoop you, and when you scoop them they divorce you” (10). Imagine the surprise when a second newspaperwoman Rivalry, Romance, and War Reporters 257 turns up: Annabelle Jones, Jane’s old war buddy and Rogers’s ex-wife. To add to the...