Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me): My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather

Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Davis

The Metzinger Sisters of Silver Scenes are hosting a classic film event,The Great Imaginary Film Blogathon - and this is my entry. Click here for links to participating blogs.

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In 1926, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather published her eighth novel, a novella, really, titled My Mortal Enemy. Among the writer's many poetic works of prose fiction, the book earned a reputation for both its lean structure and dramatic plot. When I read it for the first time, I couldn't help but imagine what a powerful film My Mortal Enemy might be. Yet I also knew that, because of Cather's profound unhappiness with the film version of A Lost Lady (1934, starring Barbara Stanwyck), she hadn't allowed her other works to be adapted in her lifetime and that at the time of her death in 1947, the terms of her will dictated a ban on future film adaptations. Mostly because I saw in My Mortal Enemy's central character, Myra Driscoll Henshawe, a role that would provide a golden opportunity for the right actress to deliver a blistering tour de force performance, I despaired that it would never be dramatized.

The tale unfolds from the point of view of its narrator, a young Midwestern woman named Nellie, who grew up enchanted by the local legend of a great romance that had taken place not too many years before she was born. Myra Driscoll had been the pampered only heir of her great-uncle, the wealthiest man in town. Though well-educated and handsome, Oswald Henshawe was of more humble origins, and the love that developed between the two was unacceptable to Myra's guardian. Myra threw away the certain inheritance of most of her great-uncle's enormous fortune when she defied him and eloped with Oswald. For young Nellie, Myra and Oswald's "runaway marriage" was "the most interesting, indeed the only interesting" story among those told on "holidays or at family dinners."

Myra had been taken in by her great-uncle when she was orphaned in childhood. He took her traveling with him to Europe, had her portrait painted by an esteemed painter, lavished her with clothing and jewelry as well as a riding horse and "a Steinway piano." She was spirited and witty and pretty and her guardian took pride in her. Though she enjoyed a close, affectionate relationship with her uncle, she was also proud and willful. When he solemnly promised he would "cut her off without a penny" if she married Oswald, she didn't react immediately. Some months later, though, Myra went out on a sleigh-ride with friends and never returned. She and Oswald met at a pre-arranged time and place, were married with his parents and her friends on hand and departed in the wee hours on an express train.

Drawing by Edward Hopper

The Myra we glimpse through Nellie's reminiscences of the stories she's been told all her life is  passionate, impulsive, determined and full of self-confidence. The Myra we encounter when Nellie meets her in person is much older and very worldly. Myra and Oswald return to the small town 25 years after their elopement and Nellie, now 15, is finally introduced to the couple she has idealized as storybook lovers. She meets Myra first and is both bewitched and intimidated by the still-handsome but heavier-than-expected middle-aged woman. Myra's "charming, fluent voice, her clear light enunciation" bewilders Nellie, who also notes that her "sarcasm was so quick, so fine at the point - it was like being touched by a metal so cold that one doesn't know whether one is burned or chilled." Oswald is less imposing though also charismatic, and Nellie is captivated by his "dark and soft" eyes, shaped "exactly like half-moons." She observes "something about him that suggested personal bravery, magnanimity, and a fine, generous way of doing things." Nellie was more comfortable with Oswald than Myra, "because he did not frighten one so much." By the time the Henshawes leave days later, it has been decided that Nellie and her aunt will spend the Christmas holidays in New York and stay at a hotel near Oswald and Myra's apartment on Madison Square.

Madison Square painted by Paul Cornoyer, circa 1900

Once in New York, Nellie falls instantly in love with the couple's apartment in a brownstone on the north side of the Square. She enthusiastically takes in every detail - including long velvet curtains "lined with that rich cream-colour that lies under the blue skin of ripe figs." She is dazzled at the celebrity-studded New Years' Eve party the Henshawe's host, and enthralled when an opera star sings an aria from Bellini's Norma to piano accompaniment. But she also observes first-hand a darker side to the Henshawe marriage.  After spending a pleasant day with Myra in Central Park, Nellie notices in her friend what seems an "insane ambition" when the woman offhandedly reveals her deep disappointment that her lifestyle isn't at all grand enough to suit her. Then, finally, Nellie walks in on the pair in the midst of a ferocious argument. Myra has found a key on Oswald's key-ring that he cannot or will not explain to her satisfaction. Already, Nellie is aware that a young woman of Oswald's acquaintance has given him a gift of topaz cufflinks and that, to avoid Myra's jealous wrath, he had asked her aunt to pretend they were a Christmas present from her. As Nellie and her aunt leave New York, Myra makes sure to tell them that she knows the cufflinks were not a gift from the aunt, "I was sure to find out, I always do," she says. Nellie will not see the Henshawes for another ten years and when she does encounter them again, it comes as a complete surprise.

At 25, Nellie ventures, without much conviction, to a West Coast city (reminiscent of Los Angeles then) to teach. She takes rooms in an apartment-hotel and once there finds that the Henshawes are living in the same building. Their circumstances are much reduced and Myra, now a wheelchair-bound invalid, is dying. Oswald, who holds a low-paying job with the city while carefully tending to his wife's needs, looks far older than his years. Myra appears to Nellie "strong and broken, generous and tyrannical, a witty and rather wicked old woman." Those traits the younger woman had admired and disliked have become ever more distilled.

As death approaches, Myra grows more demanding and difficult, as does her dark resentment of Oswald. She is openly suspicious of him and seems to blame him for her every discomfort and complaint. On one particularly bad night she laments that she must "die like this, alone with my mortal enemy..." Nellie, chilled as she listens to these bitter words, reflects that "...violent natures like hers sometimes turn against themselves..." 

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I’ve envisioned many actresses in the role of Myra Henshawe.

A rich, multifaceted character like Myra would have tantalized Miss Bette Davis during her heyday. With William Wyler in the director’s chair, Davis had turned in three outstanding performances – in Jezebel (1938), The Letter (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941), all of them earning Best Actress Oscar nominations for her, and Jezebel bringing the gold statuette. And all three characters possessed traits in common with Myra – spoiled, impetuous Julie, manipulative Leslie Crosbie and fierce Regina Giddens. So, with Wyler directing Davis and an evocative score by Max Steiner, My Mortal Enemy could easily have been another stellar Warner Bros. release during Hollywood’s Golden Age. While Warners might’ve been inclined to put George Brent or Herbert Marshall in the role of Oswald, the studio’s best bet would’ve been Paul Henreid. It seems to me, though, that another actor, someone like Lew Ayres, would've been a better fit.

I’ve also imagined My Mortal Enemy as a Technicolor production from the 1950s starring Deborah Kerr and Gregory Peck. Kerr’s lofty poise and ability to convey tumultuous emotions (Black Narcissus, From Here to Eternity, The Innocents) would've made for an interesting take on Myra, who was as haughty as she was passionate. Gregory Peck would have had no trouble portraying gentle, magnetically attractive Oswald. A good pick to direct might’ve been John Huston, who so often and successfully adapted literary gems (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Moby Dick). Huston also devised the vivid color concept of Moulin Rouge (1952) and directed both Kerr and Peck in popular films of the 1950s.

In the late 1960s, My Mortal Enemy could’ve provided a high profile vehicle as well as a solid follow-up to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The characters were within their range, but Liz & Dick's  tabloid notoriety and worldwide superstardom at the time might well have overpowered the actual characters and story. Perhaps with Mike Nichols, who directed Virginia Woolf, at the helm, My Mortal Enemy could’ve been one of those memorable transitional films that bridged the shift from the studio era to the age of “easy riders and raging bulls.”

Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, The French Lieutenant's Woman

Meryl Streep was well established by the 1980s, and a complex and meaty role like Myra would’ve seemed tailor-made for her remarkable talents. Teaming her with Jeremy Irons, her co-star in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), would’ve worked well. On the other hand, there’s the superb but relatively underrated Judy Davis, who emerged with My Brilliant Career (1979) and A Passage to India (1984), earning a Best Actress Oscar nomination for the latter. Davis possesses, along with an ability to express the deep anguish of a divided soul, the vivacity and sharp humor integral to Myra’s personality. I would pair Davis with William Hurt and put them under the direction of Martin Scorsese, who later rendered a moving and meticulous adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1993).

By the early 1990s, adaptations of Willa Cather’s fiction for television had begun to surface. Perhaps the ban on “film” adaptations did not, technically, apply to broadcast media. A PBS production of O Pioneers!, starring Mary McDonnell, appeared in 1991 and a Hallmark Hall of Fame adaptation of the same novel appeared in 1992, starring Jessica Lange. In 1995, the USA Network aired a TV-movie version of My Ántonia, the second novel in Cather’s Prairie Trilogy (after Pioneers), starring Jason Robards and Eva Marie Saint. Finally, in 2001, the third book in the trilogy, The Song of the Lark, was adapted for PBS, starring Maximilian Schell and Alison Elliot.

Following the death of the last living executor of Willa Cather’s estate, Charles Cather, in 2011, The Cather Trust dropped the prohibition contained in her will against the publication of her letters and the adaptation of her fiction to film. In April of this year Knopf published The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. A dramatization of My Mortal Enemy, it seems, could actually come to pass. Cate Blanchett, now in her early 40s, is still young as well as old enough for the plum role of Myra. But the possibilities are endless - and fascinating.

Cate Blanchett by David Downton

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Father of the Bride (1950)...and a reflection on mid-century Hollywood...

During World War II Hollywood churned out popular pictures both entertaining and patriotic, bolstering home front morale and earning enormous box receipts. Between 1942 and 1945, Americans were spending 23% of their recreation dollars on movies and by 1946 weekly attendance was over 90,000,000. But the boom years would soon go bust.

A decline in movie attendance began in the late '40s driven by changing audience tastes and two major events. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that certain film industry practices violated anti-trust laws and required studios to divest themselves of their theater chains. Without a guaranteed outlet for every film produced, filmmaking became riskier and the studios began cutting costs and making fewer films. And then, just as the 20^th century reached its mid-point, the industry faced a threat unlike anything that had come before - the arrival of commercial television.

empty seats

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, headed by founder Louis B. Mayer since the 1920s, had been the dominant studio for nearly two decades. But the blow to the studio system and declining audiences affected production companies large and small.  By 1951, Mayer was forced out and MGM’s head of production, Dore Schary, took over.

Director Vincente Minnelli had been one of MGM’s top directors since his breakout film, Meet Me in St. Louis, the top-grossing film of 1944. Minnelli married the film’s star, Judy Garland, in 1945. The following year he and Garland produced Liza Minnelli, but from 1946 to 1948 the director's career was uneven, including only minor successes along with outright failures. But a 1949 effort, Madame Bovary, was successful and a point of pride with Minnelli. For the most part he'd felt sidelined from major film work by the overwhelming demands of his marriage to the emotionally volatile MGM star.

In 1950 MGM assigned Minnelli to a Robert Walker comedy, The Skipper Surprised his Wife. The director was rescued from this bland task by producer Pandro Berman who offered him a more enticing project. Also a comedy, it was an adaptation of Edward Streeter’s 1949 bestseller, Father of the Bride, for which Berman owned screen rights. Because the two stories shared similarities, Berman wanted the director of Meet Me in St. Louis on his new production.

 

Jack Benny

As the project began to develop, comedian Jack Benny heard about it and approached Dore Schary. He told the production boss he wanted the role of Stanley Banks, the father of the bride. Without consulting the film’s production team, Schary all but promised Benny the part. Berman was not pleased, nor was Minnelli who went to Benny Thau, veteran MGM executive, and told him he wanted Spencer Tracy for the part and no one else. Thau gave Minnelli the bad news that Tracy was out of the running – the actor had already flatly refused to do the picture.

1950 would mark Spencer Tracy’s 20^th year in movies. The winner of back-to-back Best Actor Oscars in 1938 and 1939, he was by this time one of the most respected actors around. Laurence Olivier remarked that he learned more about acting from watching Tracy than from any technique. But away from the set Tracy wrestled with a serious problem - he was a notorious drinker. Between the efforts of MGM’s PR team and Katharine Hepburn’s care, Tracy had been able to avoid scandal and continue working. By the late '40s it appeared the actor’s drinking had tapered off somewhat, however, his hard living had aged him and he looked older than his years. Despite all this, Tracy was still much in demand and worked steadily, even as the industry went into a serious slump.



Hepburn and Tracy, Adam's Rib (1949)

In the midst of the box office downturn, Adam’s Rib (1949), one of the the best of the Tracy/Hepburn battle-of-the-sexes comedies, became a major hit. Though Tracy’s follow-up had been a less memorable potboiler called Malaya (1949), Vincente Minnelli remained convinced that he was the only actor to play Stanley Banks. Eventually, Minnelli decided to enlist Katharine Hepburn’s help. Hepburn invited him over for dinner and, during the meal, Minnelli told Tracy that with him in the lead the comedy had the potential to become a real classic.This was all it took to win Tracy over and he agreed to take the part. It came out that the actor had not refused to do the picture at all, but had known others were being considered for the part and assumed Minnelli didn't want him. To save face, Tracy had resorted to spreading a rumor that he had turned down Father of the Bride.

Joan Bennett was chosen to play the bride's mother, Ellie Banks. Bennett and Tracy had last co-starred in Raoul Walsh’s Me and My Gal (1932) eighteen years earlier. That film had ended with Tracy and Bennett’s characters marrying each other, and Tracy liked to joke that the plot of Father of the Bride indicated that his 1932 “marriage” to Bennett had worked out.  



Elizabeth Taylor in the 1950s

 Elizabeth Taylor, as bride-to-be Kay Banks, supplied the delectable frosting on the rich cake of Father of the Bride's cast. Spencer Tracy cracked that the film's only hard-to-believe detail was that the lovely girl could possibly be his daughter. Taylor was just 17 when she made the picture, but had already begun to portray more mature characters; at 16 she’d played the wife of 38-year-old Robert Taylor in Conspirator (1949). But Elizabeth Taylor was not so mature off-screen. She was still under the thumb and eagle eye of her mother and although the young actress had begun to date, her romances consisted of girlish infatuations and arranged dates mined for publicity by MGM. She was, despite her stunning beauty and poise, quite naïve when it came to love.

Father of the Bride, like Meet Me in St. Louis before it, is in its way a fond glimpse into American family life. Contemporary when it was released, the film plays today as a snapshot of a bygone, fairly idyllic, era. That mid-century moment is caught as if in amber by the solid screenplay of screenwriting team Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Vincente Minnelli's meticulous attention to what is now period detail...a well-chosen cast, cinematographer John Alton and the minimal, mostly diegetic soundtrack of Adolph Deutsch. Father of the Bride is invariably referred to as a “sparkling comedy.” It most certainly sparkles and brims with sophisticated humor as it casts a skeptical, if bemused, eye on the incongruous goings-on at the heart of its plot, the American marriage ritual, circa 1950. The plot follows suburban lawyer Stanley Banks who is by turns besieged and put upon as he as he spends an enormous amount of money to finance every stage of a tradition that will end in his beloved daughter Kay leaving home. Adding insult to injury, Banks is (amusingly) ignored, belittled, the butt of jokes and barely tolerated while at the same time forced to pay and pay and pay. As the wedding nears he is beset by irrational fears and surreal nightmares. Given that the Stanley Banks character, a lovable and loving curmudgeon, carries the film, Minnelli's judgment was unerring when he insisted on Tracy or no one for the part.


Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Bennett

Father of the Bride was released on June 16, 1950, and was an immense hit. Contributing what can best be described as a publicist's dream, Elizabeth Taylor married her first husband, Nicky Hilton, just weeks earlier. Hilton was the son of the founder of Hilton Hotels, and though the pair had only begun dating months earlier, they succumbed to a whirlwind courtship. MGM naturally, and heartily, approved. Taylor's marriage at the very moment she starred as a virginal bride onscreen was an early indicator of something that would become a habit...her life imitating her art. Taylor's marriage to Hilton ended less than a year after it began...even before a quickie follow-up film to Father of the Bride was released in late 1951.

Father's Little Dividend (1951) is a charming, if less inspired, sequel. The dividend is Kay and her husband's first child and the plot, once again, covers the indignities Mr. Banks (Tracy) must endure...this time as grandfatherhood approaches. It, too, was a hit, but it was not on a par with Father of the Bride which had earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Actor and become an instant classic.

By the time both films had been released, Minnelli and Garland were divorced. Their final split came not long after MGM terminated Garland's contract in 1950. As she struggled to rebound and rebuild her career, Minnelli went back to work with a vengeance. He embarked on the most productive and celebrated decade of his career, a period that included An American in Paris (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), The Band Wagon (1953), Brigadoon (1954), Lust for Life (1956), Designing Woman (1957), Gigi (1958) and Some Came Running (1958). Minnelli received a Best Director Oscar nomination for An American in Paris (winner of six Oscars including Best Picture) and won for Gigi (winner of nine Oscars including Best Picture). Though Minnelli wasn't nominated, The Bad and the Beautiful won five Oscars.

Spencer Tracy went on make another 17 films and earn five more Best Actor Oscar nominations. His later years were difficult; he fell off and got back on the wagon, became withdrawn and taciturn and lost his health. He was fired from a picture for the first time with Tribute to a Bad Man (1956); it would the last time he worked for MGM. He was so ill during the making of his final film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) that he was uninsurable and Hepburn put up her own money to help cover the costs. Spencer Tracy died a few weeks after the film was completed and received a posthumous Academy Award nomination for his performance.

Elizabeth Taylor made a permanent transition to adult roles with Father of the Bride. Her stardom was cemented a year later with the haunting George Stevens drama A Place in the Sun (1951). Taylor went on to become one of the biggest film stars of the 1950s and 1960s and remained a celebrity for the rest of her life.

The studios of Hollywood met a less cheerful fate. By 1951, TV had made significant inroads into the movie audience. Cities with TV stations showed a decrease in movie attendance and wherever TV appeared, theaters closed. The age of the studio system came to an end by 1954. In 1956, Dore Schary, who had tried in vain to restore MGM's glory, was fired and in 1957 Louis B. Mayer, who had never recovered from his ouster, died at age 73. Television, of course, continued to flourish. By the end of 1952 there were 19,000,000 TV sets in homes across America and by 1955 there were 31,000,000...

Some have called Father of the Bride prototypical of the family-oriented TV sitcoms of the '50s and early '60s. In fact, in 1961 a series version of Father of the Bride debuted on CBS; it was shot at MGM studios. Ruth Warrick (Citizen Kane) played Ellie Banks, Myrna Fahey starred as Kay...and Leon Ames, who had portrayed the father, Alonzo Smith, in Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis, took the role of Stanley Banks.

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