Dr. Metablog

Through the continuing miracle of TCM, we watched Divorcee, a 1930 "pre-Code" drama of marriage and adultery. It's a film that was shocking in its own time and still carries a bit of an edge. Jerry Martin (Norma Shearer) and Ted Martin (Chester Morris) attempt to create a marriage of perfect equals, but Ted strays. There's a great understated scene in which Jerry, the betrayed wife, cold-bloodedly tells her unfaithful husband, that "I've balanced our accounts." Ted, though he has proclaimed a commitment to equality, does not, let us say, handle the revelation of his wife's adultery with grace. The marriage comes to a disastrous end. But alas after an hour or so of travail and weeping, Jerry loses her nerve, succumbs to propriety, pursues her erring husband to Paris, and promises to be true. The assertion of equity turns out to be just so much blather. The double standard has been tested but has held firm. The film flirts with radicalism but reverts to a Hollywood ending in which love conquers all and an adventurous woman accepts her subordinate place.

I was sufficiently intrigued by the film to investigate its background. The source is a novel called Ex-Wife (1928) by Ursula Parrott, which sold 100,000 copies and was a sensation in its day. I confess that although I'm supposed to know something about literature, I had never heard of this scandalous piece of fiction. Ex-Wife sunk like a stone and has been out of print for many years, but our interlibrary loan department managed to locate a 80s reprint in Fort Lewis, Colorado. (Thanks, Interlibrary Loan!).

Ex-Wife is an inartistic piece of writing — hectic, repetitive, padded, but one that obviously struck a nerve. In this novel, a young divorced woman does not just pine for her wandering husband. Instead, she enjoys her independence, and "sleeps with more men than [I] can count." She then she falls deeply in love with the wrong man, and finally opportunistically marries a third fellow whom she doesn't love but to whom she promises to be faithful (we are skeptical). The novel is marinated in speakeasy bootleg liquor and easy morality. Much wilder than the rather tame film version, it is also more challenging and revolutionary.

In the course of the novel, our heroine has a baby (who conveniently dies) and also an abortion. The babies are important to the larger backstory. In 1922, the then Katherine Ursula Towle, a recent Radcliffe graduate, married Lindesay Marc Parrott, a young reporter for The New York Times. 

They had a son named Lindesay Marc Parrott Jr. two years later. However, his existence was kept a secret from Ursula's husband, as he never wanted to have a son. So, Ursula left the child in the custody of her father and sister and returned to Lindesay, still not speaking a word about the son. It was not until 1926 that Lindesay found out that he was a father. As a result, he immediately divorced Ursula, rejected the existence of his son, and never once went to see him.

It's an astonishing revelation that certainly does not speak well for Lindesay Parrott, but adds some autobiographical interest to the plot of Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife. Suddenly, the deceased child and the abortion make a certain kind of sense.

I should add that Lindesay Parrott was a name well known to me in the days of my youth. I was then a diligent reader of The New York Times and Lindesay Parrott covered the Korean War, so I encountered his name every single day from 1949 to 1955. And then in the 70s, I learned that Lindesay Parrott had retired from the Times and had purchased a small farm on Kidder Road in Bradford, Vermont, a bit more than a mile, as the crow flies, from where we lived on Hackett Hill Road. I gave thought to knocking on his door, but I heard through the local gossip chain that Parrott was a recluse and a terrible alcoholic. Whether true or not I don't know. Of course I had no idea that Lindesay Parrott had once been married to a notorious novelist.

As for Ursula, after her divorce from Lindesay Parrott, she married three more times, and was also rumored to have had affairs with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. She died in 1957 "in the charity ward of a New York City hospital."

Here's Ursula Parrott's Radcliffe graduation picture: 

 

Here's a lurid paperback book cover:

 

 

And here she is in maturity:

 

 

[September 24, 2023]  I've just read a remarkable biography of Ursula Parrott, called Becoming the Ex-Wife, by Marsha Gordon, a professor of film studies.  It's a deeply researched piece of writing, and a revelation. Ursula Parrott's life was both more tied to convention and more lurid than it was represented in the Wik article from which I drew my information. The story about Lindesay Parrott not knowing about his son's birth nowhere appears on the biography. It's a myth, though it is true that Parrott was not much interested in his offspring (but in a indifferent-father rather than an ignorant-father way). Can't always trust Wikipedia.

 

How Ursula Parrott managed to burn through the huge sums that she garnered from her writing is mysterious to me, but it is unquestionable that she was a tragic homeless pauper at the end. Although Professor Gordon seems to have read everything Parrott wrote (and she composed acres of novels and stories), she did not entice me to read further in Parrott's work — even if I could locate these long-out-of-print performances.

 

Gordon does not interest herself in the later career of Ursula's first husband so my anecdote about Lindesay Parrott's last years might yet be accurate.