Did Eve Arden Live the Life Sylvia Plath Desired?

Why didn’t Sylvia Plath want to be like Eve Arden? I’m thinking specifically of Arden’s character in “Cover Girl” (1944) as the quintessential career woman, attached only to her male boss, that Plath was determined not to become. She owned Hayworth and Hedy Lamarr paper doll books and grew up with friends that fulfilled the Eve Arden function: The attractive female friend, sensible and supportive but not competing for the starring role that Plath accorded to herself. By the time Arden became the star of her own radio show, “Our Miss Brooks,” Plath was just about through with listening to entertainment programs, and with virtually no interest in television that brought Arden every week into American homes.Plath didn’t want to be a housewife either, or just “the wife,” a role that Arden played in “Three Husbands” (1950) and other movies. Plath certainly did not want to learn shorthand and be the secretary Arden plays in “That Uncertain Feeling” (1941), a woman who almost gets her man but in the end is defeated by Melvyn Douglas’s beautiful stay-at-home wife, Merle Oberon, who forsakes her infatuation with an artist, a temperamental pianist (Burgess Meredith). Whatever role Arden played, though, she seemed self-sufficient, the kind of character actor that leading women and men rely on. She appeared content in those supportive roles — never the star but the woman without whom the star — female or male — could not thrive.Sylvia Plath. Via Poetry FoundationPlath did think about planning for a career. “I hate the word,” she wrote in her diary on April 18, 1951: “if I ever catch a man who can put up with the idea of having a wife who likes to be alone and working artistically now & then?” She wrote to her mother on January 29, 1956 that she did not want to be a “career woman,” but waiting for someone she could honestly marry was “so hard.” Plath’s dilemma is exactly what “The Lady Takes a Sailor,” from 1949, starring Jane Wyman and Arden as her supportive friend addresses in the form, of course, of a Hollywood romance fantasy, in which, in the end, love conquers all. Wyman is a scientist/business woman, unlucky in love, but eventually susceptible to leading man Dennis Morgan, relieving her of the peril that single businesswomen Arden has experienced. She tells Wyman: “I know one thing, though. Comes a real cold night and the biggest business in the world is only so much bookkeeping.”Plath had no way of knowing that she had much in common with Eve Arden, who often emphasized she was nothing like her screen avatars. Arden grew up in Mill Valley California, outside of San Francisco, raised by a working single mother and aunt. Her mother had a brief early career as an actress, but then divorced her husband and went into business for herself as a milliner. Like Plath, Arden was close to her mother and yearned to have a family of her own. A career might be satisfying, but Arden would never be happy without her own family, her mother told her.After a failed first marriage, Arden married exactly the kind of man Plath thought she had found in Ted Hughes. Brooks West, an actor, became not only Arden’s husband but her leading man in several plays that toured the country for many years. Like the Ted Hughes who seemed both talented and willing to be a house husband, West not only enjoyed life as a homemaker, he embraced wholeheartedly the three children Arden adopted, and a fourth she gave birth to in her forties.Arden accomplished what Plath yearned for: A happy home, a big family, and a successful devotion to her art. Arden even created her version of Plath’s Fulbright years abroad, taking off in mid-career with her whole family to live in Europe for eighteen months. West painted, Arden sculpted, and both shared childcare, with West sometimes shouldering much of the responsibility during periods when Arden was consumed with a hectic radio, television, and motion picture career.The Arden-Brooks marriage lasted for more than three decades and only ended with his death. The couple had their quarrels and at times West broke down, subject to a recurrent alcoholism. Such a long-lasting marriage, no matter its upsets, is what Plath wanted and Hughes escaped as a stifling of his own creativity. Plath, unaware of an example like Arden’s, became increasingly isolated, disappointed, and enraged that the marriage that had seemed so perfect had come to grief, largely because of a husband who could not conceive of his own liberty to be himself within the marital bond.Who can say what Plath’s earliest concern about the dichotomy between career and marriage contributed to her final fatal days? What did her culture have to offer by way of positive examples? If Plath had watched what is perhaps Arden’s most famous film, “Mildred Pierce” (1945), starring Joan Crawford, she would have seen in Mildred the mother who gives her daughter everything that only makes the daughter feel as Plath did about her hovering mother: stifled. To whom in this film could Plath have turned for consolation and uplift? Not to Eve Arden alas, who says to Crawford, “Alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.”Mr. Rollyson’s biography, ‘Our Eve Arden,’ will be published this fall.

Did Eve Arden Live the Life Sylvia Plath Desired?

Did Eve Arden Live the Life Sylvia Plath Desired?

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