“M” Is for the Migraine That She Gave Me

If, in the tradition of Asmodeus, or The Devil on Two Sticks, you and the Prince of Darkness had happened to be flapping around over Sheridan Square one chill December evening in 1925, rubbering down at the human spectacle below, you might have seen the present writer bent over a drawing board in his hall bedroom, laboriously inking in a comic sketch. It portrayed a distraught gentleman careering into a doctor’s office, clutching a friend by the wrist and whimpering, “I’ve got Bright’s disease and he has mine.” How I had gravitated into this seedy locale, to subsist meanly on a pittance from a humorous weekly that rejected everything I drew, is not especially germane, yet, by and large, my lot did not seem to me insupportable. The temperature of the cubicle was subarctic, the pens and brushes kept fouling in the quilt draped over my head, and a week thence I was fated to collapse with scurvy from living exclusively on crullers, but I hummed a little song as I worked. Parnassus, I had convinced myself by incredible sophistry, was just over the next rise, and my tendons were not even fluttering.

At any rate, I had blown a layer of fixative over my handiwork and was holding it off at arm’s length to admire it when I heard the sound of a woman’s sobs issuing through the wall of the room adjoining. So piercing was her woe, fraught with such immediacy and heartbreak, that I sat aghast. The voice, I knew, was that of Ivy Spicer, a chlorotic, auburn-­haired graduate of Mount Hol–yoke who earned her cakes editing the society page of a Newark morning newspaper and wrote alexandrines on the side. In our few encounters, I had found her pretentious, too often addicted to the Gioconda smile and the quotation from James Elroy Flecker, but she was obviously in extremis now and I reacted as Jeffery Farnol would have wanted me to. Sprinting out into the hall, I beat a hasty tattoo on her door and entered. Ivy, enveloped in a Japanese kimono and obi that had probably belonged to Lafcadio Hearn, lay sprawled on a day bed, weeping convulsively. The candlelit room was heavy with the odor of sandalwood and there was no lack of icons.

“G-­go way,” she snuffled in response to my overtures. “You’re a nasty little hypocrite, like all the rest of them.” Interpreting her words as those of a woman betrayed, I declared with as much dignity as the quilt over my head permitted that I, for one, was not given to seducing ladies and abandoning them. Instantly, Ivy’s sorrow changed to exasperation. “What are you foompheting about, you idiot?” she snarled. “I’m not crying over any man. I just saw Stella Dallas.” She then made it clear, as if addressing a Queensland aborigine, that the movie of that title, unknown to me, was a masterpiece second only to the Götterdämmerung, and its star, Belle Bennett, the greatest tragedienne since Clara Kimball Young. Luckily, before she could recount the plot some sixth sense warned our landlady, an incorrigible snooper, that two lodgers of opposite sex were fraternizing abovestairs behind a closed door, and she began ululating outside. I made my retreat by the fire escape, and subsequently, when I could afford a visa to cross Fourteenth Street, went to see the picture. Its effect, I had to admit, was cataclysmic. Blinded by scalding tears, I groped my way downtown and confessed to Ivy that she was right. I got precisely what I deserved. She deadpanned me, and, observing that my taste was execrable, enjoined me to read James Elroy Flecker.

As one way of outwitting bailiffs and remaining incommunicado for a spell from the tensions of existence, I recently slipped into a projection room at the Museum of Modern Art, where, by a coincidence, Stella Dallas was being screened. Lacking a notebook, I jotted down on the film curator’s collar some memoranda which he has kindly allowed me to transcribe before sending it to the Chinaman. If they seem slightly incoherent, I can only plead that they were written in the dark on a slick celluloid surface and that the wearer kept squirming around in the most inexplicable fashion. Perhaps he had caught his pinkie in the spring mechanism of his chair, or possibly he had seen the picture before. It comes to about the same thing.

Ostensibly, Stella Dallas treats of mother love and the tremendous self-­sacrifice it is legendarily capable of; actually, it is the story—told with a degree of mawkishness such as only three virtuosi of bathos like Samuel Goldwyn, Henry King, and Frances Marion were capable of—of a vulgar, ostentatious woman who bedevils her husband and daughter so relentlessly that she loses them both. Unfortunately, whatever twisted satisfaction one might derive from this payoff cancels out, since the husband is a prig and the daughter a snob. If any movie ever had a more offensive set of characters than Stella Dallas, I’d like to know its name. No, I wouldn’t, really. I just said that out of nervousness.

Stephen Dallas (Ronald Colman), a pharisaical young squirt with the visage of a plaster saint, has been in love since childhood with Helen Dane (Alice Joyce), one of those unbearable girls whose faces are always transfigured by an inner radiance. (Any enlightened premedical student knows that this condition stems from a disordered bile duct, but no matter.) When Stephen’s father is detected in embezzlement, and suicides, the son flees to an obscure mill town and there succumbs to the wiles of a frivolous, rather sluttish creature named Stella Martin (Belle Bennett). Soon after their marriage and the birth of a daughter, Stella develops social ambitions and a taste for gaudy clothes that pain Stephen immeasurably. While he pursues his legal duties at the plant, we see her at the country club sipping tea with a group of matrons whose genteel derision she excites by her extravagant ostrich plumes and killing manner. To make matters worse, she openly hobnobs with Eddie Munn, the club’s riding master (Jean Hersholt), a greasy and overaffable tinhorn shunned by the ladies. Eddie’s buffooneries—he drolly pretends to swallow a table knife, advertising the feat as “a little parlor trick Eve tried on Adam’s apple”—horrify the gathering, but Stella thinks him beguiling and invites him home to dinner. They have uncorked a bottle of beer and are very much en famille when Stephen comes in from work. His sniffish displeasure at seeing a stranger posturing about in his wife’s hat eventually penetrates to Eddie. “Well,” remarks the latter, sheepishly resuming his jacket, “like the roof says to the cyclone, I’m off now.” In the domestic squabble that ensues, Stephen involuntarily provokes a tantrum from Stella by announcing his transfer to New York. She refuses to accompany him; they wrangle about the custody of the infant, a curious diversion considering that it is patently a doll rented by Mr. Goldwyn for the occasion, and finally Stella wins the little effigy on the understanding that she will bring it to New York at some undisclosed date. At about this juncture, the curator I was scribbling on lit a match, which struck me as temerity in a man with a celluloid collar, and I had a moment of anxiety for my notes. However, nothing untoward happened, and shortly both of us were again nodding to the hypnotic drone of the projector.

The next couple of reels are a somnambulistic exposition of the child’s girlhood; Stella, progressively blowzier and more enamored of Eddie Munn, vegetates in the small town, but her daughter Laurel (Lois Moran) regards her mother’s suitor as intolerably boorish and pines for Stephen. Her tenth birthday is ruined by her expulsion from Miss Philiburn’s private school, the headmistress having followed Stella and Eddie to New York and seen them enter an unsavory rooming house. Needless to say, they are guiltless of wrongdoing, and the scene in which Laurel and her mother await the guests who never arrive is a sentimental holocaust on a par with the death of Little Nell. I had a strong impulse to blubber, and let me tell you, Dick, I don’t blubber easily. Stephen Dallas, meanwhile, has rediscovered Helen, his early flame, now a widow with three sons, and is pressing Stella for a divorce. She has broken with Eddie, by this time a decrepit wino who shambles about chewing a bunch of scallions for some arcane low-­comedy reason, and she clings obstinately to her marital status, fearful that Laurel may throw in with her father. Eight or nine years pass in this gloomy state of emotional disequilibrium, and then, at a spa, the girl falls head over heels for a blueblood named Richard Grosvenor, played in his most whippy vein by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Their exquisite rapport—dramatized in a febrile montage of tennis, hiking, and various aquatic sports under the caption “Days that flew on swallows’ wings”—is short-­lived; mortified by Stella’s parvenu clothes and deportment, Laurel precipitately terminates their stay. Homeward bound on the train, Stella by chance overhears several women chuckling over her deficiencies, cruelly referring to her as a millstone around Laurel’s neck and a major obstacle to Grosvenor’s marrying her. Comes now the actor’s dream, the big obligatory scene of self-­abnegation as Stella seeks out Helen Morrison and, amid more nose-­blowing than a school of sperm whales, begs her to wed Stephen and adopt Laurel. “I couldn’t rob a mother of her only little girl,” Helen protests, all swollen with nobility like Bertha Kalich. Whether from Helen’s proximity or because her own bile duct is beginning to kick up, Stella’s face becomes transfigured with that old inner radiance. “But you don’t understand, Mrs. Morrison, I’ve thought it all out,” she implores. “When you get married, your name will be Mrs. Dallas, too, and when Laurel gets married, the wedding invitations will read right. I’d like people to think she’s yours. You’re the kind of a mother she could be proud of. I—I ain’t. She’ll never be nobody, Mrs. Morrison, with me shackled around one foot.” Well, sir, you can imagine the weeping and the kissing and the slobbering this brings on. And as though it weren’t gruesome enough, they have to top it with a shot of Stella pausing impulsively at a bouquet, asking “May I take a rose to remember you by?” and imprinting a kiss on the bolster of the bed Laurel is to occupy. I vum, it makes a man come all over queasy.

In case anybody thinks these lachrymose doings prefigure a squeeze, though, he doesn’t know a false climax when he sees one. After Stephen and Helen have been united in what looks like a warehouse for aging bourbon, Laurel comes to stay with them and inadvertently learns of Stella’s sacrifice. She returns to the maternal roof, and, as hallowed movie custom requires, keels over with brain fever. While wielding a palmetto fan at her bedside, a peerless method of inducing pneumonia in an invalid, her mother peeks into Laurel’s diary and discovers she still languishes after Richard Grosvenor but fears the union to be hopeless on account of Stella. Why she doesn’t strangle the brat then and there is unclear, except that it presents a juicy opportunity for further histrionics. She seeks out Eddie Munn, who has drunk himself into oblivion, peremptorily declares her intention of marrying him, and abstracts one of his early photographs. She then hastens back to apprise Laurel of her impending nuptials, feigning immense exuberance and cooing sticky endearments to Eddie’s picture. The stratagem succeeds; Laurel hurtles back to Stephen and his family, and there is an orgy of reconciliation, climaxed by the reappearance of Richard—an older, more understanding Richard, with a new dignity about him. This time he has a mustache.

The closing section of Stella Dallas is, I suppose, more familiar to more people on the weather side of forty than “Tipperary.” The mansion ablaze with lights on the night of Laurel’s wedding, the throng clustered outside in the rain-­swept street, and finally Stella, in sodden rags held together by a giant safety pin, clinging to the fence and yearning upward for a last glimpse of her child—boy, that’s catharsis like Mother used to make. The beating Sam Goldwyn inflicted on his heroine and his audience surpassed anything that Gus Flaubert ever did to Emma Bovary. He gave anguish a new dimension, lifted nausea into another sphere, with the juxtaposed shot of the bride nearing the altar on her father’s arm and Stella being pried away from the gate by an inexorable policeman. “I’m going,” ran the immortal subtitle. “I was only seeing how pretty the young lady was.” No restorative in the world can counteract the effect of a line like that, except maybe a cherry smash.

Like a delayed-­action mine, however, the full impact of the picture did not hit me until hours later—dinnertime, to be exact. In the role of paterfamilias, which I play with considerable brio, I was carving a Smithfield ham and suddenly found that I needed an extra plate for the nubbins. Without slackening rhythm, I directed a fifteen-­year-­old baggage on my right, currently home from boarding school, to fetch it from the kitchen. At least thirty seconds passed while Sleeping Beauty sat gaping at the ham, her thoughts far away. I ripped out a more forcible command, couched in the idiom of the quarterdeck. “I’m going,” she said resentfully. “I was only seeing how pretty the cloves were.” The cadence of her words sharply evoked all the misery I had been closeted with that afternoon; I let fall the cutlery and, burying my face in the crook of my elbow, broke down.

The baggage stared at me mystified. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked her mother. “Is he jingled?”

“No more than usual,” said the mem kindly. “Probably been nosing around a film vault again. Eat your squash.”

In a short while, I was right as rain again and had everybody in a roar pretending to swallow a table knife. It’s a trick I picked up from some movie or other whose name escapes me. If you think of it, do me a favor, will you? Thank you.