I’m such a fan of classic Hollywood movies that my most often watched TV channel, naturally, is TCM – Turner Classic Movies. As a Midlife Dating Expert, what I love to do with the Hollywood glory day movies is watch them and pull out their love and relationship messages.
Some of them, how the women dress is one of the most important messages. Current red carpet and movie fashion seems to be telling us that the only way to look alluring is to shove it all out there and leave nothing to the imagination. Whereas, the older Hollywood films give us glimpses of the classy fashion style icon of Kate Middleton with her ability to wear a variety of hats, which I started collecting at 18 years old as I went off to Smith College, and glovies. Of course, my generation of women might have started having a thing for gloves ever since the smashing blue glove appeared in the cartoon feature film, “Yellow Submarine,” where “everyone knows heaven is blue.”
So I adore to watch the Hollywood movies over the different decades and either enjoy or laugh at the messages purported to women about having a career and being a wife and mother. For most of the decades, the message was tremendously either/or. If she was a successful business executive, then she could never attract a man herself. If she ever did, they all wanted her to back their career interests with her money, but they never desired her for the woman she was [Ruth Chatterton in “Female.”].
1959 brought us a slight spin on that old tale in “The Best of Everything” starring a trinity of 3 fresh faced starlets, lead by Hope Lange before she became Mrs. Muir. It also features make up and hair iconic model-turned-actress, Suzy Parker. The third actress, Diane Baker, is our love innocent who falls for a rich playboy and becomes pregnant outside of wedlock. What is so refreshing from Hollywood from the era when often that young woman’s life would have been forever ruined, instead her character goes on to find a new love with a rather handsome doctor who stands by her knowing her story fully. Parker’s love affair ends more tragically as she loses her grip on reality after having a sophisticated affair with theatrical bounder and cad played deliciously by Louis Jourdan.
It’s Hope Lange’s character as well as the tertiary starring role played by Joan Crawford in the autumn of her career that I am so enamored of for there lessons in love.
Of course, the two new employee career girls of Lange and Baker sport darling daily wear of simple cotton gloves. It’s not that I want us all to return to having to wear gloves even to leave the house, but I do adore them as a fashion accessory and they’re marvelous for keeping the skin of our hands protected. Lange starts out promised to a young man who abroad in England for a year on a scholarship. She is one of the few young college graduate women who is working in the Park Avenue publishing business but who does not aspire to advance to a full-fledged editor position. She most desires to leave her career and to wed her beau and start a family. That how it starts….
She starts out as the secretary assistant to demanding Senior Editor Joan Crawford. Her natural go-getter tendency surfaces as she reads book manuscripts in the evening at home on her own time, critiquing them herself. Management via Brian Aherne notice her innate sense of what will sell well, and she is rapidly promoted from secretary/typist to the more illustrious position of Reader. By this time, Lange’s character has been thrown over by her expate beau who has married another. Lange’s coloring is much like my own, so throughout the film, I am desiring all of her outfits. She even manages to make dove gray look fetchingly appealing as her character wears demure necklines with darling collars. Thrown over by her beau, she shares an evening of drunken debauchery with Stephen Boyd’s teen market editor, awakening the next morning with a hangover, her virtue still intact and with a new focus to her life, career ambitions.
What is so fabulous with this movie as a romance lesson is how Lange dresses and acts feminine throughout the whole film. Sometimes she desires to cook a massive meal in response to being cast aside by her beau, displaying her domestic goddess side. Others, her ambitious verve enlivens her whole demeanor, drawing the attraction of male love interests. She starts to take up with Boyd, but he soon realizes she remains in love with her two-timing beau and breaks it off with her.
Crawford surprises everyone when she resigns her position, choosing to leave the sophistication of Manhattan and marry a Midwestner widower. Having been widowed myself, and further from the ingenue role years of 20 years ago, I found that scene and Crawford’s performance as she reveals this to Lange quite touching. Usually Hollywood doesn’t depict mature spinsters having any romantic hopes. So, I was a bit delighted when they gave that to her character. Lange advances to full-fledged editor with a raise (in a darling coral suit which I greatly desire, coral being such a flattering color for me and hard to find in a femininely shaped and darted suit).
Her former beau reappears, missing her, loving her, desiring her. Lange thinks he is offering to divorce and marry her, clad in a fabulous LBD. And then his true intentions become self-evident when he makes his pitch to her to become his mistress. That is the romantic role option which Crawford’s character has taken on with a executive in their firm. However, Lange, being of the new generation of ambitious career girls desires more than erotic crumbs off of another’s table, and rejects his offer. By now, she is free of him.
Crawford returns from the midwest, having found Midwestern married life was not to her suiting. Still, for Hollywood in the 1950s, that was a great that she even had had the option and tried it out. Crawford is granted her old position back, including her once a week dinner affair with Brian Aherne whose charm is just perfect as the bottom pinching executive. Lange return’s Crawford’s former office to her, leaving the skyscraper with her career still advancing, and her heart her own. And there’s Boyd, noticing how alluring she looks in a black pill box hat with demi-veil, approaches her. The two walk off southbound on Park Avenue, together to strains of “The Best of Everything.” Indeed, finally allowing women to have options of thriving careers as well as romance.
Happy Dating and Relationships,
April Braswell
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