The Divorce Novel That Captured the Mores of Jazz Age New York
Illustration by Camille Deschiens
Ursula Parrott’s “Ex-Wife” caused a sensation when it was published in 1929. But it wasn’t the racy, frothy endorsement of sexual liberation readers were primed to expect.
By Jessica Winter
Originally published on newyorker.com
In the summer of 1929, a provocative New York novel titled “Ex-Wife” arrived in bookstores, quickly selling out its first printing. Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist and radio host, called it a “sensational book about husbands and sex.” It was published anonymously—a not uncommon marketing gimmick of the time—but the author was soon outed in Winchell’s newspaper column as Ursula Parrott, a thirty-year-old first-time novelist, the daughter of a respected Boston physician, a Radcliffe graduate, a single mother of a young son, and a verified ex-wife. The Hearst tabloid the Daily Mirror serialized the novel and teased “the most talked about story of the day” with a full-page ad prominently featuring Parrott’s name and pixie-cut likeness. No longer tantalizing readers by shrouding Parrott’s identity in mystery, the marketers of “Ex-Wife” now strived to make the attractive young author synonymous with her creation, insinuating that her novel was a barely veiled memoir. (“Fiction or confession?” a headline asked.) In October, 1929, amid the stock-market crash that precipitated the Great Depression, Parrott received her first royalty check, for the modern-day equivalent of almost three hundred thousand dollars. “Ex-Wife” was adapted into the hit movie “The Divorcee,” which won Norma Shearer the lead-actress Oscar. In the course of the next ten years, Parrott, as a best-selling novelist and in-demand writer for movies and magazines, became a multimillionaire and attained a Hollywood-adjacent literary fame comparable to that of Nora Ephronin the nineteen-eighties.
At a time in the U.S. when the stigma of divorce was fading, and divorce rates were rising accordingly, “Ex-Wife” presented readers and critics with a new woman, one who was pursuing new vocational, economic, and romantic freedoms. She spent her days chasing a career, while her nights were a boozy smear of restaurants, speakeasies, and amorous encounters. She was exciting and discomfiting and morally questionable; she was confusing to her suitors, some of whom found her at once repellant and irresistible. The book’s title refers to a singular person—Patricia, the narrator, a copywriter for a Manhattan department store—but also a type, a species, one that varies in quality and breeding. The Grade A version, per Patricia: “Sex-appeal, dresses well, looks young, dances lightly, can make wisecracks, and is self-supporting. Lets a man talk. Does not gold-dig, except for another round of liqueurs after dinner. Never passes out or gets raucous, or gets sick.” The plot of “Ex-Wife,” one reviewer explained, “concerns her who has shaken off the incumbrance of a husband. Husbands, one gathers from this book, cramp a lively woman’s style.” Another critic was shocked by the protagonist for “not so much her recklessness as her endurance. If half an hour a day in the gymnasium and a diet of Scotch will produce all the energy that the heroine of ‘Ex-Wife’ dissipates so gaily, the regimen is well worth investigating.”
But “Ex-Wife,” which is now being reissued (by McNally Editions) for the first time in more than thirty years, wasn’t the racy, frothy endorsement of cosmopolitan white women’s liberation that readers were primed to expect. As Marsha Gordon argues in her engaging new biography, “Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott” (University of California Press), the novel “offers a strong case for the protections of marriage and the dangers of being an unattached woman.” In Parrott’s view, women’s drive for equality in the post-Victorian age had “made their lives harder,” Gordon writes, “and her stories dramatized the consequences of this unwanted bequest.” Or, as Parrott once told an interviewer, “I am not a feminist. In fact, I resent the feminists—they are the ones who started all this.”
“All this,” in short, was the abrupt change in sexual and marital mores that cleaved Parrott’s Manhattan society from that of Edith Wharton’s age. Husbands could certainly run around on their wives then, but they were expected to do so with genteel discretion, while keeping their marriages intact. Divorce and desertion were near-unthinkable. Women of a certain class generally could not seek employment and financial independence outside the home—but they also couldn’t land in the predicament that Parrott did after her first divorce, when she couldn’t find work at a newspaper because her journalist ex had blackballed her from seemingly every publication in New York. It’s understandable, then, that Parrott might have associated the old ways with safety, certainty, even a threadbare chivalry.
Parrott’s particular case of false consciousness resulted in less an anti-feminist book than, at times, a methodically misandrist one. The other major female character—Patricia’s best friend, sometime roommate, and fellow-divorcée, Lucia—is idealized: she’s beautiful (a “Titian Madonna,” but “much slimmer”), unfailingly warm and kind, and brimming with pull-quotable bons mots. (“Ex-wives . . . young and handsome ex-wives like us,” Lucia says, “illustrate how this freedom for women turned out to be God’s greatest gift to men.”) But, when Patricia is away from Lucia, “Ex-Wife” often reads as a litany of male sexual aggression and violence. Patricia’s union with her philandering husband, Peter, disintegrates after she reluctantly acquiesces to the advances of Peter’s oldest friend; the sexual act itself occupies a gray zone of consent, which Patricia examines clinically: “But in that moment I had lost the wish to do much about it. Curiosity? Desire? The feeling that Pete experimented and why should not I?” Peter hits her, drawing blood, and twists her arm badly; when Patricia discovers that she is pregnant by Peter, and indicates that she wants to keep the baby to save their marriage, he throws her through a glass door. She goes home with one man only to find she’s been tricked into the home of another, who rapes her. Another man presses her for sex in exchange for his maple lowboy. (“Permit me to light another cigarette for you, and take five minutes to consider the lowboy. There is not another like it in America.”) She falls in love with a married man, Noel, who was the drunken driver at fault in a car wreck that destroyed his wife’s face and sent her into seclusion; it is ostensibly Noel’s guilt that prevents him from leaving his marriage for Patricia. In the milieu of “Ex-Wife,” this passes for gallantry.
What the quasi-liberated, cosmopolitan woman of “Ex-Wife” has won above all, Parrott believed, is the freedom to be harmed. She presents her strongest evidence in the book’s most scandalous episode: in its frank depiction of Patricia’s abortion. Parrott was ahead of her time here—Dorothy Parker’s short story “Lady with a Lamp” would not appear for three more years. Parrott describes Patricia, on the day of the procedure, displacing her dread by attending to the face in the mirror (“Cold cream, skin food, astringent, rouge, powder, lipstick”); her morning toilette takes on the cast of a mortuary ritual. “I dressed with extreme care,” Patricia recalls, “with the feeling that I might be turning up a corpse before sunset, and that did not matter very much; but I would prefer to be a well-groomed one.” She thinks of the baby she did have, whom Peter likewise did not want, and who died at three months old, in the care of his grandparents, in Boston, while Patricia was on a trip. She tries out an aphorism so bleak it might have left even Parker unsteady on her feet: “To die when his mother had gone away and left him. Sentimentality, that. Well, this one would not live to die.”
Perhaps the most obvious distinction between Parrott and her protagonist is that Parrott raised a son, Marc, to adulthood. Marc, a schoolteacher and librarian who died in 1988, is given the last word in the McNally edition of “Ex-Wife,” in the form of a mordant but affectionate afterword. He directs the reader to a 1927 Vogue cover that he feels captures his mother’s essence: “Pallas Athena as a Fitzgerald-era flapper.” He speculates that she may have been snubbed at Radcliffe “as a pushy lace-curtain Irish girl from Dorchester.” He reckons that nobody born after 1929 or so “can remember what a drinking society was, a whole society that drank on that scale”—in his mother’s affluent Northeastern circles, he estimates, one-third of the grownups were regularly “tight” by dinnertime. “Handing around the hors d’oeuvres,” Marc writes, “I met, by the time I was fifteen, one Nobel winner and a man who later ran for President; both were drunk at the time.”
He notes, with typical understatement, that his mother was “trouble-prone,” and more so as she grew older. She was also a preposterous spender. Parrott herself seems to foretell her own decline in “Ex-Wife,” when Patricia frets, “What will become of me? A bad end no doubt—walking Sixth Avenue, and touching Peter on the arm begging for fifty cents.” By the nineteen-forties, the scandals of Parrott’s life had eclipsed those of her fiction. Amid her fourth and final divorce, she was arrested for helping a soldier escape from an army stockade in Miami; she was later acquitted of charges that included “impairing the loyalty, discipline and morale of the armed forces.” By the turn of the fifties, her royalties had dried up, and her books were out of print. She skipped out on hotel bills in Manhattan and Maryland; the police caught up to her on a Delaware train platform. In 1952, the year she told Walter Winchell that she was sleeping in subways, Parrott was charged with grand larceny for stealing silverware from the house of friends in Westchester. (She sent them a pawn ticket for the missing items.) She moved to Brooklyn Heights, rented rooms and a typewriter, took hours working at a dry cleaner, turned in no pages. She died in 1957, in a hospital charity ward, at the age of fifty-eight.
In her biography, Gordon makes an excellent case for Parrott as an unjustly forgotten historical figure: a sociological flash point, a beneficiary of feminism and victim of patriarchy who got her enemies mixed up. Her rightful place in the literary canon is trickier to judge. Gordon notes that Parrott often journaled “in a distancing third person voice she used throughout her life when tackling difficult matters.” This remotion infects “Ex-Wife”; I would put the book down for a short spell and, picking it up again, realize that my memory had reclassified Patricia’s first-person narration as a close third. (Some of the last lines of the novel, in fact, recommend maintaining a kind of respectful distance from the self.) This sense of detachment, even of disassociation, is especially acute in the book’s violent scenes. After Peter throws Patricia through the glass door: “I lay on the breakfast room floor, and thought vaguely that things like this did not happen.” After Patricia is raped: “It couldn’t have happened.”
Writing in The Paris Review, the critic Michael LaPointe sees Parrott’s affinities with her contemporary Jean Rhys in the ways that “Patricia keeps her focus on surface appearances to safeguard her emotions.” But Parrott lacked Rhys’s synaesthetic descriptive acumen, her ability to make rooms and objects breathe with meaning and atmosphere even when their human occupants may remain emotionally reticent. Nor did Parrott, who relies heavily on dialogue in “Ex-Wife,” possess anything like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wit or his ear for deflective banter. Eavesdropping on the lusty nocturnal denizens of “Ex-Wife,” you will never overhear riffing half as good as, say, Julia Ross describing Dick Ragland in “A New Leaf.” (“Handsome! He’s an archangel; he’s a mountain lion; he’s something to eat. . . . Why, that man’s never done anything in his life except lead cavalry charges and save children from drowning.”)
Unlike its author, “Ex-Wife” peaks late, with an interpolation of melodrama and a glimpse of something like a gynotopia. Noel’s disfigured wife, heretofore hinted at as a madwoman in the attic, suddenly shows up at Patricia’s door, veiled and all business, like Evelyn Mulwray materializing in Jake Gittes’s office in “Chinatown.” She has startling news and a serious request. Patricia’s impulsive response triggers a series of events that are small in their practical effects but thrilling in their emotional complexity and, tellingly, made possible by the talents and generosity of the only “liberated” woman in all of “Ex-Wife”: the maybe-lesbian-coded Helena. A friend of Patricia and Lucia’s, Helena is a painter and mask-maker who, Patricia says, “sneered at those of us who got involved with men” and who “had absolutely perfect taste in clothes.” Patricia encourages Noel’s wife to emerge from her isolation and travel the world with her husband, and so, at Patricia’s request, Helena crafts a set of beautiful cosmetic masks for her, at no cost for her immense labors. In a mischievous flourish of dual solidarity, Helena models the mouths and chins—the “grave smile”—of the masks as if they were cast from Patricia’s own face.
Meanwhile, Patricia, with dear, constant Lucia by her side, fends off sorrow with expert handiwork of her own: “I had cold creamed my face. Now I was putting rouge on. . . . I arranged my lipstick, as I felt the effect important.” Patricia tells her friend, “Maybe the only satisfaction in anything, in the end, is the consciousness of having behaved well.” “Ex-Wife” soon returns to the mandatory mission of heterosexual coupling, but even Parrott herself may have been surprised by what she found in this odd and lovely interlude: the agape of women who have been briefly relieved of men; the profundity of putting on a face. ♦
Jessica Winter is an editor at The New Yorker, where she also writes about family and education. She is the author of the novels “The Fourth Child” and “Break in Case of Emergency.”