What becomes of their Wedding Rings!?

I started out this post trying to find a good scan of some of the early film fan magazines like Picture Stories which basically retold the stories of films that were out in theatre, with stills from the production. As in, they told the whole story (with varying degrees of accuracy), not just part of it for review purposes. Anyway, I wanted that because a friend had told me that my blog reminds her of Television Without Pity and other recap sites. So I wanted to find something that showed the long history of ‘recaps’ as a way of engaging with media.

But instead I found this, and there was no way that I could post anything else:

“What Becomes of their Wedding Rings?: The Merry – and Otherwise – Widows of Hollywood Dispose of Them Variously” by Dorothy Manners, Motion Picture Magazine, 1928.

Surprisingly, none of the stories involve throwing rings into the water.

Oh My God! Celebrity Wedding Rings of the 1920s! Ex-Wedding Rings! None of them are actually widows, so far as I can tell - all divorcees. I love texts from the past which remind us that tabloid journalism, celebrity schadenfreude, and divorces didn’t just start happening with the downfall of society in the 1980s (or any recent decade to which is attributed the beginning of the end of the supposedly idyllic past).

And don’t you just love that picture? Stars of today – dump your rings in the pond!

So, you may ask, what did the stars of the past do with their wedding rings, “that little band of gold with which they once took vows to love, honor and obey?  That little gold circlet that at one time stood for so much happiness, or unhappiness, or alimony, as the case may have been?” So many things!

Of course, “some of the Hollywood ladies refused to answer” – which is why you will probably not recognize any of the names of the film stars who did answer. Any publicity is good publicity if you're up and coming, I assume?

Priscilla Bonner (“the downtrodden damsel of the movies who has always been cast out in the snow with a baby in her arms – for publicity purposes” – of course) giggles as she reveals that she pawned her ring: “I needed the money a lot more than I did that solid gold reminder of a tinsel experience. Why shouldn’t I have sold it? I paid for it in the first place.”   

Why not, indeed?

Still others, like Jacqueline Logan, give them to their chauffeurs! Jacqueline Logan’s story has a lot of great rhetoric in it: “peppy and red-headed,” Jacqueline “didn’t have much luck in her matrimonial flyer with Ralph Gillespie.” As Manners puts it, “as a husband, Mr. Gillespie was a great luxury. The girl has a lot of sweet memories – all of bills.”  Ouch. 

Anyway, her chauffeur, a “young coloured gentleman named Freddie” was about to get married, but couldn’t afford a ring. Instead of paying him a higher salary, Jacqueline gave him her ring, with the statement that it’s “just as good as new, and you can have the initials crossed out.” You could probably write an entire paper about race, gender and narrative in 1920s Hollywood just from that story...

Others are more “lavender and old lace,” as Manners puts it, and still wear their rings or keep them safe in a drawer. For example, “the separation of Virginia and Jack Daugherty is very recent. The imprint of the ring still shows on her finger.” A more poignant touch.

And then, of course, there is the art of making a story out of what is essentially ‘no comment.’

Leatrice Joy (yes, her name is Leatrice) ‘won’t tell’ about the whereabouts of the ring from her marriage to Jack Gilbert: “it’s too personal and too intimate.”  And “Florence Vidor felt the same way. Only more so.”

Which is just to say that the rhetorical work of film fandom is endlessly fascinating. At least to me… Has anyone seen this kind of story in current magazines, or would it be too tacky for current tastes?

Back to romances next, a more recent one this time: The Sheik’s Christmas Bride.

Rapture of the Desert: Finally, the Desert!

Wow, I’m finding this one a bit hard going. I don’t know what it is, because Violet Winspear is usually good for some enjoyable, if sometimes overdramatic, reading. This book, however, feels like it is missing a plot and is thus entirely stretched-out banter with nothing underneath it. The banter itself is occasionally entertaining, but without something moving it forward…

Anyway, here’s the conclusion of Rapture of the Desert:

Chrys spends the night at the Russian grandmother’s castle and wakes well-rested. Anton talks her into going to the beach with him. As he puts it: “I must bathe in English waters before I make my return to the desert” (87). Chrys talks to Anton as if she really hates him and has proof that he kills babies or something. And then Anton overbearingly doesn’t pay any attention to what she actually wants to do. It’s intended to be a Taming of the Shrew dynamic, I suppose, but things seem a bit mismatched to me. She accuses him of having a harem, he says, of course I don’t, but why are you so afraid of love. And then they swim in the ocean and have a picnic.

After the swim, Prince Anton gives her one searing kiss: a “shock of pleasure, contracting all the many tiny, sentiently placed nerves in her slim, cloistered body” (102). Basically, they should just have sex and I think both of them need a therapist. One kiss, and then Chrys heads back to her life and Prince Anton to his.

We fade back in after Chrys’ sister’s wedding. Chrys has taken  that job as a companion . She’s accompanying Maud Christie, an adventurous widow, on a dig in Egypt. Maud’s now deceased husband was an archaeologist and Maud got the travelling bug from him. Maud and Chrys arrive in to Port Said and Chrys is quite taken by the city: “the gleaming minarets and domes of an oriental city, floating on the horizon, and making her heart beat so much faster than the admiration of any man” (109). The last third of the book is set ‘in the desert’ and is mostly about how Chrys falls in love with ‘the East’. She really really likes the desert. She even suggests that her training as a ballerina has prepared her for desert life, not a particularly common suggestion in sheik romances.

As we might expect, Prince Anton shows up again in Egypt. First, he’s in ‘disguise’ as a mysterious Arab who appears wherever Maud and Chrys are travelling. He’s got a thin mustache, so Chrys doesn’t initially recognize him. He watches her get her pocket picked and then sends her a beautiful Hand of Fatima to make up for it.

Maud and Chrys meet up with a young Dutch archaeologist who worked with Maud’s husband and will be on the dig with them. As they head out into the desert, Maud worries about Chrys’ safety (around the native men, naturally) – she’s obviously read a lot of orientalist fiction. Fortunately (or unfortunately) there are no abductions in the book. Instead, as they are riding towards the desert camp, Maud’s horse is startled and runs away with her and Prince Anton somehow happens to be there to rescue her. He takes Maud and Chrys to his house (called Belle Tigresse) to recover.

It’s a beautiful house, of course; it also has an excessive number of fur throws. Like a Siberian tiger skin which matches the colour of Chrys’ hair. Anton and Chrys spar and then he strong-arms her into a kiss, quotes Oscar Wilde at her and proposes. She accepts, despite the fact that she won’t be able to be a top ballerina if she marries him (he has no interest in facilitating that). No one has changed their behavior and nothing is really resolved. It’s an abrupt ending.  The novel didn't follow the typical structure of a sheik romance, which could have worked in its favour, but for all that it just ended up feeling aimless, to me. A lesson in the effect of genre structure on genre readers?

Well, that was Rapture of the Desert. It started off so well, with the Russian prince named Casenove and the passionate ballerina (!), but maybe the next one will be better. Next up, twenties film magazine fun!

Rapture of the Desert: the grandmother edition

When last we left them, Chrys (a ballerina recovering from a terrible fall) and Prince Anton (a prince) were having dinner and dancing at a fancy Regency-style club in London. Then Prince Anton heads out into the night with Chrys in his car: destination unknown.

While they’re driving, we learn a little bit more about both of them.  As is common in many romances, Prince Anton had a strained relationship with his mother.  As in, she divorced his father and deserted him. She was too “selfishly gay” and needed more attention than his father gave her, and so ran away with a “French artist who came to North Africa to paint the Ouled Nail dancers, and the Arabian cavalry, and all the wonders I remember from my boyhood” (55).  Even Anton's tragic past is full of Orientalist motifs!

Anton tells Chrys that in the old days, this journey might be described as a “Cossack abduction, with the man snatching the girl away on the back of his horse and riding full tilt across the steppes with her” (60). Another commonality between Cossacks and sheiks, I suppose. As it turns out, Anton is taking them to Kent (which apparently reminds him a little of certain parts of Russia, due to the scent of apple orchards – UK and/or Russian readers: any truth to this?) to…wait for it…visit his grandmother!

He’s definitely a bit of a jerk, but his grandmother is charming (as is usually the case). She is also wearing a fabulous outfit: “a kaftan of deep-purple brocade, trimmed with braid around the full sleeves […] her hair was covered by a kind of veil, almost nun-like” (64). She has henna on her hands. And she is very happy to see her grandson. 

Anyway, they all have tea and sandwiches together and talk about Madame’s old days as a Russian ballerina and the nature of passion (both for people and for a career). Then Madame shows Chrys her guestroom and leaves her for the night, leaving behind “a subtle insinuation” which seems “redolent of the distant East” (79).

But when are we going to the East, that’s what I want to know?! So many hints, but no action yet!

We’ll see next time…

I'm back!

This blog has been quiet for a while for happy reasons; I've been defending my PhD about flexible labour and romance writing associations, teaching two courses and taking a trip to the UK with my girlfriend.

But now I have a bit more time (and mental energy), so it's back to all sheiks all the time. I still have a shelf-full of books to get through and I'm sure you were all waiting to hear what happens to the ballerina and the Russian sheik.  And you will find out in the next post!

Until then, here's a post on movie fan magazines by media scholar Anne Helen Peterson, who also occasionally writes fabulous gossip round-ups of classic star scandals on the Hairpin. Photoplay, how I love you!