A quick admission, before we get into things—I didn’t finish the book. Not because it wasn’t good but because my internet went out for six hours while I was trying to work on this and that’s no good if you’re trying to read the book from the Internet Archive. We’re even boonies enough at the Media Magpies Official Headquarters that mobile data doesn’t always help. I’ll probably finish it at some point, but I’ve had a busy week. My fault for not starting sooner, but blame Comcast that I didn’t finish yesterday.
So anyway. Written on the Wind is a book by Robert Wilder that is a roman à clef of the death of Zachary Smith Reynolds. In the book, we are looking at the Whitfield family. Andrew Whitfield had founded the dynasty, a tobacco company, and essentially the town of Winton. His sons were Cassius and Joseph. Cassius was weighed down by the family wealth; Joseph went wild with it. Cassius married Laura and had two children, Cary and Ann-Charlotte. And failed to raise them to be decent people, either by their own failings as parents or by their nature. Somewhere along the way, Reese Benton becomes part of the family and almost part of the family.
The story weaves back and forth in time, and I haven’t yet gotten to the important bits. Somehow Cassius marries Lillith. Ann-Charlotte is in love with Reese. Reese hates the whole family, not least because Cassius persuaded Lance Benton to leave Reese in the hands of the Whitfield family to make sure he would have the chance to go to college, and Lance felt that it would be wrong for Reese to return to a shack while on college vacation. So he’s disappeared.
In the movie, it’s oil and not tobacco that’s made the family fortune. Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) is the dissolute son of the wealthy family, but it’s his father (Robert Keith) who founded it, striking oil. He determinedly threw Kyle in with Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson) in part out of respect for Mitch’s father, Hoak (Harry Shannon). Kyle and Mitch are in New York when they meet executive secretary Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall). She hits it off with Mitch, but it’s Kyle who goes after her. They go off to Miami Beach; Lucy is going to return to New York because She’s Not That Kind Of Girl when Kyle proposes to her.
She goes to the family home with him, eventually, and for a whole year he doesn’t drink. Lucy does not get along with Kyle’s sister, Marylee (Dorothy Malone, who won an Oscar for the role), not least because Mitch clearly remains in love with Lucy and Marylee is in love with Mitch. Eventually, Kyle goes back to the booze, because he’s an alcoholic. We could class it up all kinds of ways, but that’s what’s at the heart of it.
The story has been summed up as Marylee wants Mitch, who wants Lucy, who wants Kyle, who wants to die.
The story has been summed up as Marylee wants Mitch, who wants Lucy, who wants Kyle, who wants to die. We never do find out what’s wrong with the family; maybe we do in the book and I haven’t gotten there, but I doubt it. It’s referred to a lot as the strength going out of the family, and there’s a lot of discussion that maybe it’s because they don’t do anything. But Cassius, in the book, is said to be the way he is in part because he feels the burden of his wealth and feels ashamed of it. But then he doesn’t really do anything about that.
It’s also true that there’s an undercurrent that Kyle is, in fact, also in love with Mitch. This could have actually been made more explicit in the book, given that there’s plenty of sexual shenaniganery in the story it’s based on. Shortly before his death, Reynolds had married Libby Holman, who also had a lifelong relationship with du Pont heiress Louisa d’Andelot Carpenter, who adopted a child who was raised as the sibling of the child Holman was pregnant with when Reynolds died. Holman was clearly bi and married several more times while always returning to Carpenter. Reynolds himself was married twice, divorcing his first wife for Holman.
As it is, the film skirts the borders of the Code. On their honeymoon, Kyle and Lucy sleep in beds so close together you could almost think it was one bed. While the incident where they’re at a speakeasy—not a speakeasy here but still selling illegal moonshine—and the brother stops the sister from sleeping with Some Random Guy happens, in the book, she was thirteen. Still, it’s implicit that Marylee is sleeping around. It’s all but said that without her money she’d be a sex worker. And there’s that unrequited love-go-round. Kyle even accuses Lucy of adultery, and Mitch wouldn’t say no.
Apparently Humphrey Bogart hated this movie and thought it was beneath Lauren Bacall to be in it. Bacall later said she only made it to work with Rock Hudson. It’s true that this does appear to be more acting from him than we necessarily see elsewhere. It may well be the best performance I’ve seen from Robert Stack, admittedly not much known as an actor these days. Sirk, I think, is a specialized taste, and the book is gloriously pulpy even before he got his hands on it. I’ve seen practically everyone playing a major character in something better; even the doctor is played by esteemed character actor Edward Platt. If you love a good melodrama, well, this is a good melodrama.
Next month, we’ll get creepy with Disney and Watcher in the Woods!