Love in Western Film and Television

Lonely Hearts and Happy Trails

S. Matheson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781137272935
• eBook ISBN: 9781137272942
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

This collection of ground-breaking articles examines problems romance presents in the American Western. Looking a range of films, this book offers readers important and challenging insights into the complicated nature of love and the versatile frontier narrative that address key social, political, and ethical components of the Western genre.

CHAPTER 1

VIRGINS, WIDOWS, AND WHORES: THE BRIDE POOL OF THE JOHN WAYNE WESTERNS

Helen M. Lewis

The topic of cowboy love in the Old West requires consideration of how the increasing male population obtained women to court and marry because the shortage of marriageable young women on the frontier led to the further competition among hundreds of bachelors to make the available virgins, including aging spinsters, as well as widows, widows with children, divorcees, and prostitutes, all part of the wifely domain. Figures vary regarding “the ratio of males to females in the nineteenth-century West [ . . . from] ten to one” (Lackman 120) to “from three to thirty times as many unmarried men as unmarried women” (Dick 232). And an 1870 census cites a ratio of 172,000 women to 385,000 men west of the Mississippi (Poling-Kempes 49). Thus, the women in the West became “more concerned about male suitability than availability [ . . . ]” (Luchetti, “I Do” 5). Indeed, the westering women often enjoyed the numerous choices placed before them as prospective marriage partners.

From the perspective of cowboy courtship, then, one can see historical influences in Westerns featuring women choosing their men, in Westerns showing men competing for a woman’s hand in marriage, in Westerns revealing a woman determined to leave the hostile West to return to the civilized East, and in Westerns treating a woman’s leaving her husband or partner of cohabitation for someone with improved economic prospects. When exploring cowboy love relationships, historical or otherwise, no single Westerns star offers as many opportunities as John Wayne for examining on the screen successful and unsuccessful romances of the itinerant cowboy, rodeo rider, rancher, cavalry man, lawman, miner, gunman, ex-con, and even bank robber.

The John Wayne characters in Westerns assume a number of typical roles for men in the historical West. However, the many love situations and sources of the love interests for the Wayne characters prove to be less historical. Exploring the John Wayne Westerns against real Western stories offers the advantage of studying an actor who ranked in the top ten box office draws from 1949 to 1973 (except 1958). Wayne did not always star in Westerns during this period. His Westerns consist of 84 films to examine, and in the majority most of these films, the John Wayne character wins and often keeps the girl. Wayne’s Westerns span from the 1930 The Big Trail to the 1976 The Shootist. When John Wayne died on June 11, 1979, he left a cinema legacy that for many remains their understanding of the Old West. Although the John Wayne Westerns often do depict a credible bride pool, they also omit significant populations of women marrying, divorcing, mourning, and remarrying on the Western frontier.

In Building and Breaking Families in the American West, Glenda Riley proposes that the very nature of life on the frontier, that is, the skewed ratios of men to women, affected the traditional stages of courtship that had led to enduring marriages in previous decades in the Eastern United States. Recognizing one’s “motivation for courting, meeting potential mates, following courtship rituals, dealing with opinions of parents and others, and bringing courtship to resolution [ . . . ]” (7) by marrying or cohabiting fell to the wayside in boom or bust makeshift societies, among independent youths without parental supervision, as well as in territories that readily granted divorce when one or both parties experienced dissatisfaction in the union. To this latter Western experience of divorce, women in the territories could obtain divorce for a variety of reasons. For example, Maude Davis wed and later divorced Elzy Lay, a member of the Wild Bunch because he refused to give up his outlaw life; she remarried, this time a “respectable farmer” with whom she had children (Lackmann 44); Belle Francis Allen divorced her lawyer husband, Samuel Allen, when he criticized her for wearing pink tights to a charity fundraiser event. She then wed Tom Noyes, son of the wealthy John Noyes, who objected to the marriage by cutting his son out of his will not because Belle Allen was a divorcee but because she had worn the pink tights(Chartier and Enss 97–107). In the John Wayne Westerns, however, the Wayne character does not divorce: although he can have his wife separated from him, but later in the film she returns to reconcile, as in McLintock! and Rio Grande. Or the Wayne character can leave, like in Big Jake. Either she travels East fascinated by the culture or he leaves to seek freedom and adventure outside the home. But the wife of the Wayne character never divorces him. Nor does the Wayne character wed divorcees, unlike what commonly happened in the historical West.

Despite the real West’s population of thousands of bachelors competing for the sparse female supply, the John Wayne character seldom seems to wait long for the women to seek him. Yet many men in the historical West did resort to a variety of means to recruit potential wives: they write letters or even visit East to entice former sweethearts or past acquaintances to marry them and move West, request relatives and friends back in the East to select a prospective wife— some courtship by correspondence to follow, and post newspaper ads, including in the specialized Matrimonial News, which had brought the widowed Elinor Pruitt to Clyde Stewart, resulting in their marriage after six weeks on the Wyoming frontier after she had claimed her independent homestead (Enss x). The want ads placed by men and women seeking suitable matches to marry became popular in the last half of the nineteenth century; often these proved quite blunt, indicating age, weight, and personal disposition to money, land, and even fun. Catherine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1845 The Duty of American Women to Their Country, urging women to travel West “to supply bachelors with wives” (Poling-Kempes 50). Advocates also urged the American Women’s Educational Association to send teachers West, but not for lifetime careers in the classroom. Even the matrimonial services of business entrepreneurs like Asa Mercer and the widowed Eliza W. Farnham became a lucrative trade in the 1850s and 1860s (Chartier and Enss 47). Farnham and Mercer advertised and then charged to transport respectable single women by ship to San Francisco and to Oregon Territory, respectively. With the arriving women usually marrying within one year, the men waiting on the docks demanded even more women as bridal candidates (Luchetti, “I Do,” 5). The John Wayne character, however, never employs these means to obtain a marriage partner; he never advertises, checks the ads, nor sends for a bride.

Women journalists, dentists, writers, artists, and scientists populated the West, but they do not form the bride pool of the John Wayne characters. Occasionally, a college graduate marries the John Wayne character, but then she replaces her career potential with cooking and keeping house happily on the ranch, like Betty Benson in The Lucky Texan. Real women in the West worked as cooks and laundresses, milliners and seamstresses, midwives and restaurant owners. Although women miners and prospectors appear in the 1870s and 1880s from the Western mines to Alaska, they often choose not to marry. In fact, one prospector left her husband because he wanted her to cook and clean while she wanted to mine in the hills (Zanjani 8). While the Wayne character occasionally wins the daughter of a miner or saves the mine of a town, he does not seek the actual prospecting woman as a wife. Nor does the John Wayne character find romance with waitresses, not even among the Harvey Girls. From 1883 to the 1950s, Fred Harvey and his restaurant chain with the Santa Fe Railroad brought 100,000 single white women ages 18 to 30 to the Southwest. Suspected at first of prostitution, the Harvey Girls proved their virtue through their adherence to their strict code of conduct while under contract and through their high standards of customer service. At the expiration of their twelve-, nine-, or sixmonth contracts, half of the Harvey Girls stayed in the Southwest to marry cowboys or railroad men (Poling-Kempses xii-xiii). Another kind of professional woman, the attorney, also journeyed West, but in much smaller numbers than professional food servers. In 1892, when Henri J. Haskell was reelected the Montana State attorney general, he named Ella Knowles, a law graduate of Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, and first woman lawyer in Montana, as his assistant attorney general. Eventually, they married, but the John Wayne character weds no woman lawyer. Women doctors, like Nebraska’s Suzanne la Flesch and Oregon’s Bethune Owens, likewise do not attract the attention of the John Wayne character. Indeed, no intellectual professional woman wins the hand of the John Wayne characters.

The unmarried John Wayne character typically associates with the following female archetypes: nonprofessional virgins; widows, often with children; and soiled doves, or women of “professional experience.” Regarding the virgins, the Wayne character sometimes pursues and sometimes competes for a particular woman—true to the situation in Western frontier—but he also sometimes experiences women competing for him, unlikely in the historical West with so many men vying for each woman. In Wayne’s early Westerns career, the virgin supply consists of the daughters of ranchers and other wealthy landowners, such as Delores in Man from Monterey, Fay Winters in West of the Divide, and Celia in New Frontier. The virgin daughters of professional men also become acceptable bridal candidates for the youthful Wayne characters: judge’s daughter Maxine Carter in Man from Utah, doctor’s daughter Barbara Forsythe in Winds of the Wasteland, newspaper editor’s daughter Janet Carter in The Lawless Nineties, banker’s daughter Miss Florie in Three Godfathers, and store owner’s daughter Felece Newsome in The Trail Beyond.

Occasionally, the young prospective brides themselves have employment, but not all careers attract the John Wayne character. Postmistress Eleanor Hale in Rainbow Valley received her job through the corrupt Morgan, but John Mailin rescues her from Morgan and the post office. Ann in Desert Trail attracts the romantic interest of John Scott from the moment he sees her behind the counter of the general store, but by the film’s end, one doubts that the beautiful Ann will continue serving customers in the store. While the Wayne character might not court a domestic, a hairdresser, or a professional woman with a college degree, he does not dismiss all working women from the bride pool any more than he prefers the daughters of one professional man over another.

In a number of the early Westerns, the John Wayne character must overcome obstacles presented by family members of the young virgin. The Quaker farm family of Penny Worth, in Angel and the Badman, supports their daughter’s growing affection for the gunman but they ban Quirt Evans’ loaded guns from their house. Often these young virgins have no mothers; they either have just fathers or have no parents at all; sometimes the young woman has become recently orphaned through the murder of her father for whom the Wayne character will seek justice through vengeance. Several of the eligible virgins have undesirable family members whom the Wayne character dispatches by the film’s end. These sisters of the villains remain oblivious to the robberies and the murders committed by their beloved brothers, as in the cases of Clara Moore of ’Neath Arizona Skies, Ann of Desert Trail, and Alice Gordon of The Dawn Rider. Of course, each of these films contains the last confession scene of the lawless brother, pleading to the Wayne figure, “Please, don’t tell my sister what I’ve done. It will break her heart.” Naturally, the Wayne character preserves that trust! In all cases, courtship occurs swiftly, thus mirroring the conditions on the Western frontier when the wedding trip often equaled the move to the homestead.

True to many historical anecdotes of marrying in the West, stories abound of women who married and then divorced or just abandoned their husbands in pursuit of someone wealthier, more honest, or less abusive. Women in the West also broke engagements or understandings in favor of the seemingly more educated, more civilized, more promising candidate for marriage. The John Wayne character does experience these setbacks. In The Dark Command, Mary McCloud weds the teacher/aspiring politician for his sophisticated ideas of bringing civilization to town, but her choice of the infamous Cantrell leads her to reject Bob Seton, the itinerant worker who becomes literate and eligible to run for sheriff just to win her attention and affection. Hallie in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance actually asks rancher Tom Doniphan to protect tenderfoot lawyer Ranse Stoddard from Liberty Valance’s threats. Doniphan’s protection of Stoddard, however, costs Doniphan the girl. These films gain interest because the women never seem to realize the tremendous pain that their rejection causes the John Wayne figure.

As John Wayne gained more experience on screen, his characters likewise gained more diversity in love interests—not racial diversity, despite the presence and practice of marrying tribal women in the early West—but the Wayne hero figure no longer needed the virgin heroine; an experienced woman could prove acceptable as a prospective wife. Thus begin the Wayne roles that involve relationships with widows. According to Cathy Luchetti’s “I Do”: Love and Marriage on the American Frontier, “in the Frontier west, widows were often in demand, not only for the properties they might own, but [also] for their expertise in domestic economy; they often remarried quickly [ . . . ]” (11). The older Wayne character, himself conveniently widowed before the film begins, has the maturity to make a suitable match with a widow. In Comancheros, Paul Regret advises widower Jake Cutter, captain of the Texas Rangers, to marry “that widow,” the attractive Mrs. Melinda Marshall who has always fed the visiting Jake Cutter well and who seems to have had an attraction to Cutter before both of their marriages. More mem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Virgins, Widows, and Whores: The Bride Pool of the John Wayne Westerns
• 2. Only a Woman After All? Gender Dynamics in the Westerns of Barbara Stanwyck
• 3. Violence, Vixens, and Virgins: Noir-like Women in the Stewart/Mann Westerns
• 4. From Whore to Hero: Reassessing Jill in Once Upon a Time in the West
• 5. “Wild” Women: Interracial Romance on the Western Frontier
• 6. Paladin Plays the Field: 1950s Television, Masculinity, and the New Episodic Sexualization of the Private Sphere
• 7. Reverse Transvestism and the Classic Hero: The Ballad of Little Jo and the Archetypal Western (Fe)male
• 8. The Melancholy Couple in Winchester ’73
• 9. Outlaws, Buddies, and Lovers: The Sexual Politics of Calamity Jane and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
• 10. Horse Power: Equine Alliances in the Western
• 11. A French Unsettlement of the Frontier: Love and the Threatened American Dream in Heaven’s Gate (1980)
• 12. Midnight Cowboy: A Love Story
• 13. German Saddle Pals and the Absence of Love in the Karl May Westerns
• 14. “When you side with a man, you stay with him!”—philia and the Military Mind in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969)
• Notes on Contributors
• Index