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Featured Guest: Author of many books, including Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age and Film Is like a Battleground: Sam Fuller's War Movies, Professor Marsha Gordon teaches film and literature at North Caroline State University. Former co-editor of The Moving Image, she was a fellow at the National Humanities Center as well as a Public Scholar with the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Gordon holds a Ph.D. in English and Film from the University of Maryland. We talked to her about her book Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (University of California Press, 2023).
There are many reasons for this, but the most obvious to me is that the Jazz Age novel has been so dominated by F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which has a very limited imagination in terms of female characters. Parrott's 1929 bestseller, Ex-Wife, really changes the way contemporary readers can think about life in this era, especially for women. It's a great companion book with Gatsby for American literature courses and for readers interested in this period of American history. It's also just one of her twenty books and over 100 short and serialized stories – so there's a lot of rich literary territory for readers to discover, and I hope more of her works are brought back into print.
Why and how does her most famous novel – Ex-Wife – still resonate for readers today? Parrott perceived, experienced, and wrote about a lot of impossible contradictions in modern life for women, especially involving relationships, sex, marriage, what we now refer to as reproductive rights, child rearing, and work. If you read Ex-Wife and ignore the period-specific elements – speakeasies, slang, fashion, and the like – it can be shocking to realize that much of what she says would not be out of place in a modern novel or conversation. She called out a lot of male behavior that we are still reckoning with in the #MeToo era, and it's stunning to realize that she was engaging with these things in the 1920s and 1930s. During my book tour in 2023 and 2024, I met so many young women in particular who were delighted to find that there was a writer engaging with these ideas so many decades ago. The fact that McNally's republication of Ex-Wife, which coincided with the publication of my biography of her, has been so well received is a testament to the way the novel resonates with contemporary readers. But, of course, some of the wonderful things about her writing are the period details. She has a great ear for language and a great eye for details about fashion and life in New York City. She's also innovative, including bars from George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" in one of her chapters as a way to capture the sound and feeling of the period.
In Chapter 8, you discuss Ursula in Hollywood. Tell our readers more about that time in her life – especially in the context of screenwriting, Norma Shearer, the Oscars, censorship, and The Divorcee. Ursula Parrott didn't love her time in Hollywood. She was a New Yorker in sensibility, and her world was very East Coast oriented, so when she would travel west she'd dream of coming home. But she loved the economic benefits of working with the studios, and the way movies facilitated such a wide access to her stories and ideas. She took screenwriting seriously – reading books about the differences between writing stories and writing a scenario, for example – and was invested in making the female characters she created both worldly and smart; she aspired to create on-screen women who could hold their own in any conversation or setting, from the barroom to the bedroom. Since she wrote so much from experience, it must have been fascinating to see versions of herself, such as Norma Shearer in her only Academy Award-winning role in The Divorcee, on the big screen.
Ursula was involved in many scandals. Discuss a few of the most relevant in terms of our understanding of her as a writer and important historical figure. Parrott struggled with a lot of things – her physical health, alcohol, failed relationships, money management, depression. Sometimes, she held it all together. At other times, she just couldn't. She got desperate and did things that were self-destructive, and in the worst examples of these – stealing and pawning silver when she was housesitting in order to get money at a time she was not having any luck with her writing – she ended up making headlines for her behavior. These public scandals must have been humiliating, and no doubt contributed to her struggles. She really tried to avoid publicity at these times, using pseudonyms, for example, when she was hospitalized with the hope that her personal issues would not get into the paper. However, I think it's important to note that she was really not unlike the other authors of her generation who were prone to excesses of all sorts – Fitzgerald, again, is a perfect example here. Her post-flu pandemic, post-WWI generation often behaved immoderately, in part because they knew how fleeting life could be. And there were often consequences for that kind of lifestyle. It's part of what fascinates us about this generation of creative people – they did so much in such a short period of time, really maxing themselves out and often behaving in outlandish ways.
Why is it important that she be "overlooked no more"? I believe you are referring to the recent obituary I published in the New York Times as part of their "Overlooked" series, which was Parrott's first published obituary, all of these years later! She really deserves to be remembered, so it's gratifying to be part of the Parrott resurrection and to get to contribute to that remembrance. Of course, there are so many people who made notable contributions to the culture who have been forgotten, but Parrott really was part of a literary and cultural conversation about the modern woman that is important to remember, perhaps now more than ever as women continue to struggle for equality and autonomy.
This book reads like a mission or passion project. Was it? I've also been working with a friend who is an opera singer on a possible Ursula opera or song cycle, which would be amazing! I love the idea of bringing her story and her writing to audiences through another medium. And, of course, I dream of someone in Hollywood wanting to do an Ursula biopic one of these days – she's certainly got a movie-worthy story with lots of relevant hooks for modern viewers. A girl can dream, right?
What are you working on now? I've begun researching a biography of the golden age Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner, who had an extraordinary career and directed some of the great talent of her day, including Katharine Hepburn, Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, and Rosalind Russell. I've been doing archival research for about a year now, as well as interviewing some of the students I've found who took classes with her when she taught production at UCLA in the 1960s. I'm excited to tell another story about a woman who deserves to be known for her pioneering contributions to American culture.
Leslie Kreiner Wilson, Interviewer and Editor https://americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2024/gordon.htm
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