Getting To Know You—Mitzi Gaynor & Jack Bean

In her capacity as Mrs. Jack Bean, Mitzi Gaynor has a word or two for the prospective bride.

“Any advice you get, listen to it very carefully,” says Mitzi, “but remember always carefully to forget it right away. You can’t make up rules for marriage. You have to be flexible.

“Yes, of course, there are hard things in that scary first year. Life isn’t all romance and roses. But every time something goes wrong you don’t have to run home to mother. If you do, you miss the pretty wonderful things that fill that first year, too.

“You see, it’s just like buying a new pair of shoes. If the leather is stiff they may rub a blister for a few days. But if you’re sensible you don’t throw away the shoes or cut off your feet to solve the problem. You just wear the shoes a while. And then you’re likely to find they’re the most wonderful shoes a person ever had.”

She knows whereof she speaks. She and Jack have had their blisters, in the form of tiff’s and fears both before and during their hectic, happy marriage. Occasionally it looked as if the wedding wasn’t going to come off at all. Looked that way at the darn-dest times—like just before the ceremony.

The wedding was taking place in San Francisco in the home of a friend, and all the guests had arrived and were waiting in the living room for Mitzi to appear so the ceremony could commence. Mitzi herself stood at the top of the staircase. She had stopped to say a little prayer.

“I suppose every bride does that,” Mitzi explains. “Then I started to go down. But suddenly I found I couldn’t. My feet just wouldn’t work.”

“You know you want to get married more than anything else in the world,” she said sternly to herself at last. “What’s the matter with you?”

Those words broke the spell. Mitzi rushed down the stairs so fast that she caught the heel of her shoe on the bottom step and almost fell flat on her face in front of all the guests. She looked around in embarrassment and saw her future husband looking at her with an expression that seemed to say, “Oh, well, this is Mitzi. I kind of expect that from her.”

Mitzi caught herself and walked forward more slowly. She got through the ceremony without further mishap but with a heavy heart. It seemed to her that all her worst misgivings about that terrible first year everyone talked about had been fulfilled. How could she ever get through it when she couldn’t even start the first day properly?

Dread of that first year had haunted Mitzi from the moment she and Jack had begun talking about marriage. Mitzi had seen evidence on all sides of the havoc it could wreak upon young couples. There were the movies for instance.

“In the movies, in their first year of marriage, someone always goes home to Mother,” Mitzi explains. “Hither your mother or my mother or sometimes both.”

Then there were some of Mitzi’s married friends. They were happy most of the time. But occasionally Mitzi would find them glum and preoccupied.

“We had a fight,” they’d tell her. “We haven’t spoken for three days.”

There was another source of information about that dreadful first year to which Mitzi turned. This was those magazine articles that attack the problem with an almost sadistic grimness. They give lengthy instructions for the prospective bride and are always accompanied by questionnaires and problems to fill out and solve.

So determined was Mitzi to find out if she was fit fodder for the marriage mill that she read all the articles in all the magazines. She even looked up the back issues. She worked the problems and answered questions like: “Do you know the color of your future husband’s eyes? Does he like pea soup or not?” She studied all the rules.

The trouble was, according to Mitzi, that in each issue the article was written by a different psychiatrist or doctor. They contradicted each other. In the end her head was spinning.

One worry was foremost in her mind. Jack wasn’t running true to form. He didn’t do all the things the magazines said he should be doing. She, too, was falling far short of what was expected. The situation looked bleak to Mitzi.

Then a bright idea came to her. She remembered that Jack had a master’s degree in psychology. He could use it to bring them around to the proper viewpoint.

“Darling,” she said to Jack one day, “why don’t you use psychology on us? Then everything would be fine.”

But Jack shook his head. “What you’re really telling me is, ‘Physician heal thyself,’ ” he explained to her. “And that’s impossible. You can’t work objectively either on your own problems or on those of someone you love and feel close to.”

So, rebuffed, Mitzi went back to brooding over the articles, filling out the questionnaires and trying to make up her mind whether to marry or not. With the passage of these weeks of uncertainty she and Jack were getting more and more irritated with each other. It was a far ery from the first three months that he had dated her.

“Hysterical, happy, laughing, ridiculous months,” Mitzi describes them. “I nearly died laughing at everything Jack said. And he thought every remark I made was very funny.”

The second three months Jack wasn’t so funny to Mitzi nor she to him.

“But they were awfully companionable months,” says Mitzi. “He was nice and I was kind of nice, too.

“Then for the next six months we were desperately in love.”

During those six months everything was tinged with the soft light of romance. Mitzi and Jack used to go to the Bublichki restaurant for Hungarian food. Sasha the fiddler would come to the table and play Hungarian melodies for Mitzi, who is part Hungarian. Mitzi would be so affected by the tunes that seemed to echo her own tender feelings of love that she would begin to cry. Then Sasha would cry, too, playing his fiddle with the tears rolling down his cheeks. And Jack would look on, touched by Mitzi’s warmth and sweetness and the soft aura of romance.

It was only after Mitzi and Jack began talking about marriage that the irritation crept in. The more they discussed marriage, the more edgy they became toward each other. Mitzi just couldn’t make up her mind whether she could get through that grim first year.

She and Jack no longer laughed and joked as in the first three months. The sense of companionship they had felt in the second three months seemed to have developed a strained quality. As for the feeling of romance, it had apparently evaporated altogether. Now when Sasha played and cried and Mitzi cried, Jack ceased to be touched.

“Do you have to be so schmaltzy, Mitzi?” he would demand, thus causing Mitzi to cry harder than ever.

At last Jack called for a showdown.

“You’ve got to make up your mind,” he said. “Are you going to get married, or aren’t you going to get married?”

“Yes, we are,” Mitzi said waveringly, her eye on that first terrible year.

“But when?” Jack persisted.

“As soon as I get things straightened around,” Mitzi answered. It was only after she’d said it that she realized she didn’t have anything to straighten around. She was just procrastinating because she was so scared. So she set the date with Jack, but the decision seemed to increase her fears.

“I was so upset during the last two weeks that we almost didn’t make it,” Mitzi recalls. “Everything was so icky. By the time my wedding day came I was a nervous wreck.”

It took Mitzi just two days of their honeymoon to decide that there is nothing so frightening about the first year after all. Those honeymoon days were, in her words, delightful, divine and perfect.

“Jack did a complete about-face,” Mitzi recalls. “In those strained two weeks before we were married he’d shout at me, ‘For crying out loud, Mitzi, hurry up!’ But afterward he was so gentle and sweet and kind. I thought, ‘What are they talking about, all those article writers? I don’t know what they’re talking about.’ ”

It was only after Mitzi and Jack came back from their honeymoon and prepared to set up housekeeping that Mitzi discovered there was something, after all, to the talk about the first year. The apartment they found was not by any stretch of the imagination one of those dream places into which the young husband is supposed to carry his bride. The former tenants had not been particularly good housekeepers. Everything was coated with dust. The woodwork was soiled. The floors were dirty. Jack looked around and said with masculine forthrightness, “What a mess!”

Mitzi looked around, too, but her eyes gleamed. The general dishevelment presented a challenge that delighted her. Mitzi loves to clean house because it’s so different from anything else she’s called upon to do. When she cleans she puts into it all the enthusiasm you see her displaying in a dance number on the screen.

“Here,” she said to herself, “is where you can really show your husband what a fine housekeeper you are.”

Mitzi got up at seven the next morning. She got out the Spic and Span, the Brillo, the mops, brooms, dust cloths and wax. She scrubbed and waxed the floors. She washed the woodwork and the windows. She polished the furniture. She unpacked clothes and put them neatly away. She house-cleaned steadily for two days while Jack worked at the office. At last everything was done. Mitzi surveyed her work.

“It’s a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It’ll impress him,” she told herself with satisfaction.

Jack came home, and it must have been one of those days for him. He stood in the living room and looked about him. And then in that wonderful masculine way he said, “Will you look at this place? This is the crummiest place I’ve ever seen!”

Mitzi tried to recall all the advice she’d heard from older people.

“Remember, he’s just a man,” they’d told her. “Whatever he says or does, don’t pay any attention to him. As long as you control your temper and laugh at him, you’ll get along just fine.”

But how do you control your temper when your meticulous handiwork of two long days has been not merely unnoticed but openly insulted? How do you keep calm when you feel like flying at your husband and throttling him?

“I got hysterical,’ Mitzi recalls. “I started to weep and wail. Poor Jack just stood there with his mouth hanging open.”

At last Mitzi got her breath.

“Oh, how could you say that after I did all this work for two whole days?” she moaned.

Only then did Jack realize what was wrong.

“Honey,” he said soothingly, “I don’t really mind the place. It’s just that I thought you didn’t like it. So I wanted you to know I was in accord with the way you felt.”

“Well, I like this place,” Mitzi flared back. “In fact I love it. My fingernails are stuck in the wood where I broke them off scraping away the dirt. Those floors are patched with the skin off my knees. I like this place.”

“All right, darling, all right, I like it, too,” Jack said.

And that was how they weathered the first crisis. They didn’t do it by rules. It just worked out by itself.

The usual bridal crisis over food didn’t happen to Mitzi. She had found out about Jack’s idiosyncrasies in the long courtship before they were married. The first dinner she ever cooked for Jack after they had become engaged was a gem.

“I’m not a bad cook,” Mitzi says modestly, “even if I do say so myself.” Actually, she has a reputation as an exceptional cook. She inherited her talents from her Hungarian father, whose real profession is music, but whose avocation is the culinary art. Mr. Gerber is a genius at preparing exotic dishes.

Mitzi called upon all the culinary wisdom she had learned from her father and, coupling this with her own talents, concocted a meal that would have appealed to a fastidious gourmet. The table literally groaned with delicious dishes. Jack was properly impressed. He sat down and ate everything that was put before him.

“It’s just wonderful,” he told Mitzi.

Mitzi didn’t learn his real sentiments until just before he was ready to leave.

“You know, honey,” he said then, “next time could we have hamburger?”

Mitzi was hurt. She had slaved all day, had turned out a meal that would have done credit to her father, and here was Jack asking for lowly hamburger. It could only mean he didn’t like her cooking.

She brooded over it until she found out that Jack wasn’t insulting her cooking at all. He really liked hamburger. It was one of his passions.

“In a way, that was a relief to me,” Mitzi laughs. “I knew that when we were married I wouldn’t have to break my neck dreaming up new dishes to please him. All those jokes about the bride turning out a bum meal couldn’t even apply to me. I was saved one problem—the one some of the experts describe as the worst of all.

“That’s what I like about long engagements. You can find out so much about your future husband before you’re married. When two people are locked up in a very small area there’s going to be some friction no matter how compatible you are. For instance, if you don’t know your husband doesn’t like pea soup and you cook enough pea soup to last a whole week, you’re likely to run into real trouble.”

But food did cause something of a tiff.

Jack, having been a bachelor for several years, had learned to cook for himself. The fancy dishes which Mitzi concocts aren’t his specialty. He never works by inspiration. He cooks strictly by the rules of the recipe book. But he rather prides himself on being able to turn out satisfactorily the simple, standby dishes.

Once they were married, Jack insisted that Mitzi eat breakfast before going to the studio. Until then Mitzi had never bothered with breakfast. It was Jack who explained to her why she always felt exhausted. And it was Jack who did more than insist she eat breakfast. He got up and prepared it for her.

“It’s a wonderful thing for him to do all by himself,” Mitzi says proudly. “He still gets up at quarter of five before I do and turns off that awful alarm clock just so I don’t have to hear it. Then he makes my breakfast and serves it to me. He fixes the eggs in new ways so they don’t taste like eggs every morning.”

It was over the scrambled eggs that the tiff started. Apparently Jack especially prided himself on the way he scrambled eggs, for he scrambled them for Mitzi four mornings in a row.

“Well, how is it?” he would ask.

“Just f-f-fine, dear,” Mitzi would reply.

But Jack noticed the hesitancy in Mitzi’s voice and he saw, too, that she didn’t touch much of the scrambled eggs. When this phenomenon occurred on the fourth successive morning he decided to investigate.

“You don’t like scrambled eggs much, do you, darling?” He asked.

“Oh, yes, I love scrambled eggs,” Mitzi answered truthfully.

“Well, is it the way I cook scrambled eggs?” Jack persisted.

“Darling,” Mitzi answered, “do you really want to know the truth?”

“Yes, shoot!” Jack agreed.

“Look, dear,” Mitzi replied, taking him at his word. “You’re a wonderful husband, the very best husband anywhere in the world. But I don’t think much of your scrambled eggs.”

Mitzi was giving her criticism with all the detached forthrightness of an inspirational cook and the daughter of a culinary genius. But Jack didn’t appreciate it.

‘Well, if you don’t like my scrambled eggs you can make them for yourself from now on,” he snapped huffily.

“Exactly as though it were all my fault that he cooks a lousy scrambled egg,” Mitzi says, recalling the incident.

This tiff like the first one, however, blew over without benefit of rules.

“The way we. straightened it out,” says Mitzi, “is that he just doesn’t make scrambled eggs any more.

“We have other tiffs, too,” she continued, “just like every other married couple. But never about important things. Usually the reasons are positively ridiculous.”

Sometimes Mitzi will get all dressed up to go out. She thinks she looks pretty sharp but Jack will take one glance and snort, “You’re not going to wear that, are you?”

“At the beginning of our marriage that was enough to break my heart,” Mitzi confesses. “I’d throw myself on the bed and cry hysterically. But now I know it’s not the end of the world. It’s just that Jack, like any other man, likes to have his wife look the way he wants her to look.”

They settle this kind of tiff, too, without resorting to the rules.

Mitzi just says, “Yes, I am, dear.”

But the tiffs, far from making their first years of marriage grim, have accented their happiness together.

Both Mitzi and Jack realize that one of their causes of friction is that they are extreme opposites so far as temperament is concerned. But they know also, that this difference in their personalities has really served to enrich both their lives. Mitzi, with her wealth of cultural background, artistic, literary and musical, has rounded out Jack’s deficiencies in those fields. Jack, with his practical outlook and good business sense, has helped Mitzi in the organization of all her assets. He also realizes her great need to relax, for Mitzi over-expends herself in nervous energy.

To help Mitzi relax, Jack resorts to those zany little things that are always sure to bring a laugh. He calls her from his office—a funny, kidding call reminiscent of those first three joking months.

Mitzi gets the message on the set where she’s working, a note telling her that a Mr. Kronkite or a Mr. Fiddlefaddle phoned and left his number. As soon as Mitzi gets a moment off she dials the number.

“Is Mr. Fiddlefaddle there, please?” she says.

“Ya, dis iss Mr. Fiddlefaddle,” he answers. “Vot iss?”

“Well, Mr. Fiddlefaddle.” Mitzi replies, “this is Mrs. Brunoff that you called at the studio.”

“Vot Mrs. Brunoff?” Jack says in his best German dialect. “I don’t recall ever phoning you, Mrs. Brunoff.”

And the conversation goes on like this for some time until finally Mitzi laughs and says, “Well, did you have your fun?”

And Jack answers, “Yes, I was good, wasn’t I?”

And Mitzi exclaims, “Oh, you were wonderful!”

Whenever possible Jack comes round to the studio at noon to have lunch with Mitzi. If a business engagement prevents this he makes it a point to drop in once a day if only for a quick call. This means a lot to Mitzi, for Jack understands her mood, knows how to raise her spirits.

There was the time, for instance, in the days before Jack and Mitzi were married, that she snapped her ankle while doing an exacting number in No Business Like Show Business. They had to carry her into the dispensary to tape up her leg. There she sat, wrapped in a big sheet, for all the world like an unhappy little girl with the tears rolling down her cheeks.

Only Jack knew she was not crying from pain. It was from pure anger at herself for having allowed such a dreadful thing to happen. Mitzi is a great believer in good and bad luck. It seemed to her that she was being plagued by bad luck and passing it on to the whole company. Jack alone was able to cheer her with assurances that accidents will happen.

On her side, Mitzi has learned to understand mannerisms that betray a man’s secret displeasures.

“I think I was pretty bright,” she says a little proudly. “Most brides go a whole year or more before they learn to read the signs. And I know them already though Jack and I won’t pass our first milestone until November 18th.

“I’d like to pass out a tip right here that will save other girls a lot of heartaches. It’s this. When your husband comes home irritable from work and finds fault with this and that, don’t take it too much to heart. Let him complain. He’s not sore at you at all but at something that happened in the office. He has to get rid of his pent-up anger on someone. And he picks you because you’re the one who’s dearest to him, the only one he’d dare let down the bars to. His irritation is really just a sign of his love.”

Mitzi can always tell if something has displeased Jack when he visits her on the set. As soon as he shows up she always runs to greet him with a “Hello, dear,” and a kiss. When he’s been disturbed by something at the office he says sternly, “Don’t kiss me, Mitzi, you’ll get your make-up all messed up.”

At first Mitzi was hurt by this strange reversal of character. Now that she knows it only means something has gone wrong, she’s especially sympathetic with Jack at those times.

But when Jack is really depressed, says Mitzi, he acts in a far more drastic manner. He stands in front of the mirror and looks at himself for a long while as though what he saw staring back was something somewhat less than human. Finally he hits himself a resounding blow in the stomach.

“l’m getting fat,” he says in a tone of disgust, whether it’s true or not.

Mitzi knows that this is a sign of real unhappiness and that Jack can be cured of it only by going on a diet, even if he doesn’t need it.

“So we go on a diet,” Mitzi says in a resigned voice. “Ohhhhh.”

But diet or no diet, tiffs or no tiffs, Mitzi has this to say about the first year of marriage that started with her almost falling flat on her face on her wedding day: “It’s been wonderful, every minute of it. Jack has made me one of the happiest people in the world and I know he loves me too.”

Sometimes after one of their tiffs Jack will say, with the bleak despair of which only a male is capable, “I don’t understand it at all. Why are we so unhappy when we should be very happy? We’ve got the whole world in front of us. Life is beautiful. And here we are quarreling with each other.”

Then it is Mitzi, remembering all those articles she read and all the groundless fears that almost prevented her from marrying, who comforts him.

“Darling,” she says very calmly and quietly, “after all, this is our first year. member?”

THE END

—BY MARK FLANDERS

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 1955