Book review: Becoming the Ex-Wife: the Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, by Marsha Gordon
Some people are incredibly well-known in their time, only to be forgotten years after they are gone. Ursula Parrott is one of those. As the author of hundreds of newspaper articles, short stories and books, she was a celebrity in her heyday. Today, however, most people could claim that they have never heard of her. But this is about to change, with a well-researched book on Ursula: “Becoming the Ex-Wife”, a biography that lives up to its subject.
Born Katherine Ursula Towle, she was the half-sister of actress and screenwriter Madge Tyrone, who worked in silent films. Ursula majored in English at a girls’ college after her father prohibited her to follow his footsteps and become an obstetrician. At that time, she was already making headlines with her adventures and activities.
Ursula became an ex-wife at age 29, after a six-year marriage to Lindesay Parrott, newspaper reporter. Trying to have a modern marriage, Ursula pardoned Lindesay when he had an affair, but he didn’t react well when it was her having the affair. To make things worse, Lindesay went on to sabotage Ursula’s career in journalism in New York City. Infuriating, isn’t it?
Ursula lived in a time of change. Women were conquering more rights — like the right to vote and to work outside the home — and activities such as marriage, divorce and parenting were changing because of this. As the book puts in words: “Divorce rates and skirt lengths rose, seemingly in tandem”.
Ursula’s life is the main inspiration for her short stories, in which we can find comments about her father’s distress with her fame before he dies and also about how was the beginning of her first marriage. In interviews, she remained calm and spoke bluntly about her life _ she left her insecurities for the short stories.
The book describes Ursula’s first and best known novel, “Ex-Wife”, as “a tale from the trenches of marriage, infidelity, divorce, dating and remarriage in boozy, dissipated Manhattan”. Then the book goes on to describe the whole plot of “Ex-Wife” and make comments about it, so we don’t have to read the original. Many books and short stories are commented, to the point of spoilers. And it confirms that Ursula’s book was not about the free sex unmarried women were experiencing those days, but about how men used women’s bodies.
Ursula Parrott is a person of interest to us because she worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter and had her novels adapted to the big screen. She believed that films shouldn’t end with a marriage, but start with one and present the challenges the couple will have to face.
Parrott described her time in Hollywood by saying that she had “lived like a dead woman, in a sort of daze, where everyone made a great fuss of me, and seemed to think I was a very grand person.” Nevertheless, she came back after a first stint in the early 1930s, ready to sell stories to the screen and not care about changes in her writing. She even said that “I believe that the cinema magnate who signs a fat check for an author’s work and then risks hundreds of thousands of dollars in converting that story into a film has a right to add or subtract anything in an attempt to find its common denominator of audience appeal” — a pretty polemic remark, we may say.
Ursula wrote about female characters who were strong and self-reliant, but also miserable. Her stories “had plenty of romance in them, but are rarely romantic” and were well-researched and rewritten until Parrott felt they were perfect, despite her tendency to procrastination. Having described writing as a mix of misery and gratification, Ursula would often miss deadlines and find herself in trouble.
The war years saw a change of tune in Parrott’s stories. The new leads of these stories, women from a younger generation, took on odd jobs to help the war effort and did everything they could to be useful for their country. Parrott herself was doing her duty in the air patrol, as she spent time before the war learning how to fly a plane. In the mid-1940s, just after World War II, Ursula wrote a series of non-fiction articles about divorce as a tool to set one free and escape the boredom of home and abusive husbands who didn’t value their wives’ work in the house as real work.
Like many women of her time, Ursula had abortions, and resented some of them. Abortion was seen, probably also by Ursula, as “an acceptable hazard of modern sexual life”. Her characters also have abortions, like Pat in “Ex-Wife”, and express no grief about going through the procedure. Seeing abortion as a kind of rite of passage for modern women, Ursula discussed hers without drama, referring to the experience as “going to the dentist” — and indeed a safe abortion is safer than extracting a tooth!
In 1943, Ursula garnered even more attention as she was judged as an aid for a private of the US Army to desert. The Times referred, at the time, to Ursula as “aging” and “haggard”, terms that infuriated her friends and other contributors at women’s magazines. The wave of help that came for Ursula at the time, the book says, served as “sowing seeds that would grow into the next wave of feminism”.
The end is rather abrupt, but it’s explained: Ursula, so often in the spotlight in the past, virtually disappeared in her final decade. Her dive into oblivion was because she was misunderstood. She passed to History as a writer of trivial romances, when the book claims that her writings were much more than that. She investigated what is the place for women in the modern world, but her story isn’t “an inspirational feminist story”. And it doesn’t need to be: controversial and dubious, Ursula Parrott wasn’t a role model, but was a real woman whose rich oeuvre desperately needs a rediscovery. We wish that, with this book, the Parrott renaissance can begin.
