The “young single woman in the city” genre feels almost as old as cities. Probably someone was wandering around ancient Athens in a fetching tunic with a papyrus scroll detailing how Hermes got handsy.
But modern New York is where the genre has reached its apotheosis, from Edith Wharton to Beyoncé and beyond. In this mostly upward and exuberant history, the writer Ursula Parrott has been largely (and sadly) omitted.
Marsha Gordon, who has written a new biography, BECOMING THE EX-WIFE: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (University of California Press, 304 pp., $29.95), could not unearth a single obituary from 1957 when her subject died destitute, at 58, of what her son called “a mercifully fast cancer.” This neglect was particularly striking because Parrott had been adjacent to newspapermen for much of her unlong, action-packed life.
Born Katherine Ursula Towle, “lace-curtain Irish” in Dorchester, Mass., and educated at Radcliffe, she longed to be a reporter, and married one, Lindesay Parrott, who later worked for The New York Times. Their divorce would inspire “Ex-Wife,” the most successful of her 20 books. Unable to get hired by sexist editors, Parrott would become so famous with her fiction, magazine writing and movie deals — and for just being that relative novelty, an ex-wife — that they were compelled to cover her.
For better and a long slow slide into worse: three more husbands; painful affairs (one with a pot-smoking Air Force private 17 years her junior ); multiple abortions; the squander of her considerable earnings; a federal indictment for helping the private desert; a grand larceny charge; and homelessness. The gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who himself came to a sorry, secluded end, regularly put Parrott’s corkscrew turns of fortune on blast.
Why did a once-transfixed reading public turn away, and why is Parrott so often now eliminated from a pantheon of popular urban “working girl” writers that includes Helen Gurley Brown, Candace Bushnell, Nora Ephron, Dorothy Parker and, perhaps most comparably, Jacqueline Susann?
Gordon has no overarching theory but surfaces plenty of colorful period detail: passport photos of everyone looking mussed and truculent in that Jazz Age way; correspondence from exasperated agents, editors and lovers; even an adorable “mapback” version marked with key locations in “Ex-Wife.”
The novel was originally published anonymously as a publicity tactic to underscore the salaciousness of its material, just before the 1929 stock market crash. After a long successful run through the 1930s, it fell out of print (at least one edition, the title orange against a black cover, could double as a Halloween decoration), but was reissued in 1989, when the country was again in an economic slump after Black Monday.
Let us not divine any market predictions from the timing of the latest reissue of EX-WIFE (McNally Editions, 218 pp., $18), but rather revel in the surprising freshness of its prose. The references may have changed — “alligator pears” instead of avocado toast; Vionnet, not Vuori; telegrams rather than texting — but the preoccupation with love, money, fun and trouble is eternal. In the midst of what would now be described as a quarter-life crisis, the distressed heroine, Patricia, even regularly goes to the gym after her high-stress job writing fashion advertising copy for a department store.
The uncoupling in “Ex-Wife” might be described as semiconscious, thanks to the next-level Prohibition alcohol consumption. There is wine and beer but also gin fizzes and martinis and Alexanders, “Clover Clubs cold as ice cream and pink as fingernail salve” — and highballs, an absolute waterfall of highballs.
The romanticization of white people “slumming” in Harlem at the “little unpretentious dance halls” will certainly arch eyebrows in 2023; as will lines like “We did not know many Jews. He was one of the nicest.” Gordon writes that “whenever the occasion arose, Parrott did not miss the chance to be casually antisemitic,” though her third husband, a lawyer, was Jewish. Frustration in Hollywood, where the Hays Office steam-pressed “Ex-Wife” into the tamer “The Divorcee,” starring Norma Shearer (who won her only Oscar for it), further spurred this bigotry.
“Ex-Wife” depicted remarkable erotic freedom — “I think chastity, really, went out when birth control came in,” a more seasoned ex-wife named Lucia remarks — but abuse and violence is always lurking around the corner. Patricia is slut-shamed mercilessly by her husband, Pete, after she cheats on him — even though he’s cheated on her. They had a baby he was jealous of, who dies, and when Patricia gets pregnant again he beats her. Going to terminate the pregnancy, she wonders if she herself “might be turning up a corpse before sunset.” Later, she is raped, and considers suicide.
What saves “Ex-Wife” from utter maudlin despair is the same formula that has made 50 similarly themed TV shows hits. One is its tender depiction of female friendship, even in the face of rivalry. As in the Clare Boothe Luce classic “The Women” (which featured only women), here they have all the best lines, all the snap and sophistication, plus sensual consolations like bath salts, facials and lacy underthings — while the fellows are generally wretched, patronizing or pathetic, when they’re not going “caveman.”
Patricia chastises herself for residual Victorianism (“I knew that I was being 1880 about her,” she thinks after judging Pete’s new paramour), mentors a “younger woman” of 21 at work — in the world of “Ex-Wife,” 35 is ancient — and soothes another in the abortionist’s waiting room.
And most extraordinarily, and perhaps symbolically, she helps a disfigured romantic rival by commissioning decorative masks from another, artistic friend. “If a woman with half a face could glow, Beatrice glowed when she tried them on,” Parrott writes.
The other thing that glows in “Ex-Wife,” and the biography of its author, is New York City: the lights, the fights, the freedoms, constraints and terrible costs. “A jail to which, once committed, the sentence is for life,” as one character puts it. “But that it is such a well-furnished jail, one does not mind much.”
