Ann Hood - Morningstar: Growing Up With Books

WHEN MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR WAS PUBLISHED IN 1955, Time magazine referred to it as an outmoded adolescent clich. Kirkus Review wrote: It is the kind of book womenjust past the age of illusionwill read with absorbed interest, occasional ironic recognition, and ultimate critical detachment. Butdespite the ease with which the story can be criticized, it will be read. And read it was. Marjorie Morningstar sold more copies than Gone with the Wind, and in 1958 it was made into a movie starring Natalie Wood as Marjorie.

But as a teenager, I chose the books I read not by reviews or jacket copy or book sales. No, I chose by heft. I loved nothing more than the weight of a heavy book in my arms as I moved through the school hallways. In study hall, my homework finished, I fell into a fat novel that seemed to never end. That I didnt want to end. Halfway through a seven-hundred-page book, hundreds of pages still waited for me. Doctor Zhivago. Les Misrables. James Micheners Hawaii. Anything by Harold Robbins. I read indiscriminately. Highbrow. Lowbrow. Without any guidance from the librarians in my small mill town in Rhode Island. Their job seemed to be just to stamp due dates in the back of the books, not to recommend them. It was with this lack of direction, this love of novels the weight of cement, that I came upon Marjorie Morningstar.

I first read Herman Wouks novel in 1972, when I was fifteen years old. And I have reread it almost every year since. As an adult, I saw the similarities between the Morgensterns and my own family. Marjories father had come to the United States at the age of fifteen, a fleck of foam on the great wave of immigrationfrom Eastern Europe. I lived with a dizzying array of Italian immigrant relatives. In the novel, Mr. Morgenstern owned the Arnold Importing Company, awell-knowndealer in feathers, straws, and other materials for ladies hats. Like my own father, who commuted several hours every day to his job in Government Center in Boston so that we could rise above our blue-collar immigrant roots, Wouk writes of Mr. Morgenstern: Every year since his marriage he had spent every dollar he earned on the comfort of his family and the improvement of their station in life. And like Marjorie, who understood her fathers sacrificesher parents had done much to make up for their immigrant origin. She was grateful to them for this, and proud of them.I too took pride in how my parents, two high-school dropouts whod married before they were old enough to vote, had bought our family a slice of the American Dream: two cars, family vacations, T-bone steaks on the grill, and Tanqueray and Johnnie Walker in the liquor cabinet.

But at fifteen, that first time I read the novel, I thought that Herman Wouk had somehow climbed into my brain and emerged with my story. I was Marjorie Morningstar. Slightly spoiled. Boy crazy. Curious about sex. Terrified of sex. Raised by prudish, old-school parents. Although we lived far from Manhattan and an apartment on Central Park West, my life seemed a mirror image of Marjories. West Warwick, Rhode Island, my small hometown, was once famous for Fruit of the Loom manufacturing and a bustling main street with two fancy womens clothing stores and a mens shop that sold expensive suits. But by the time I was a teenager, the shops and mills were mostly boarded up and the Pawtuxet River, which had helped those factories run, was polluted. The one factory that still operated made soap, and that was the smell that filled the air on hot afternoons. At Christmas, they opened their doors and sold Jade East soap on a rope at discount prices.

My immigrant great-grandparents left Italy in the late 1800s to work in the great Natick Mill, buying a house right up the hill from it. The Natick Mill burned down in 1941, the summer before my mother turned ten. But her family stayed put, working in factories around the state. I grew up in the house my great-grandparents bought when they arrived in the United States, where my grandmother married and had ten children, where my mother at the age of eighty-five still lives. The house is small, just three bedrooms with sloping ceilings upstairs and one bathroom downstairs.

As Ive said, as a teenager I would sit at the top of the stairs, staring out the tiny window there. I could see the rooftops of three of my aunts houses. I could see a distant water tank. On a clear day I could see all the way to the next town. Someday, I would think, Ill even go beyond there. Just thinking this would thrill me. Deep inside, I had a gnawing, a yearning, for something I could not name. All I knew was that I wouldnt find it in West Warwick, or even in Rhode Island. It was beyond there. Despite my parents warnings, I threw myself into the path of everything that might take me beyond there. At fourteen, I became a Marsha Jordan Girl, one of eight teen models for Jordan Marsh, the fancy Boston department store that had opened a branch at our new mall. That job took me all over New England. My friend Beth and I went by bus and train alone to modeling jobs, landing spots in fashion shows for Brides magazine and Mademoiselle. With the money I earned, I took vacations to Bermuda and the Bahamas before I finished high school.

But that wasnt enough for me. As a junior I tried out for and won the coveted role as teen editor from Rhode Island for Seventeen magazine. I wrote dispatches from Rhode Island on fashion, pop culture, and trends. At the end of my yearlong tenure, I won a Best Teen Editor Award, which gave me another year at Seventeen and a heavy silver charm with their logo on it. All of these things were somehow going to get me wherever it was I was trying to go. And this yearning I felt was the same one that Herman Wouk expressed so perfectly in the character of Marjorie Morningstar.

Marjorie defies her parents by taking a job as an actress in a summer stock company in the Catskills. And then she defies them even more when she falls in love with and begins a sexual relationship with the director, Noel Airman. What is evident to everyoneher fellow drama club friends at Hunter College, the other summer stock actors, and Marjorie herselfis that she is special, talented, destined for great things. Before she meets Noel, Marjorie dates many boys, all of them worthy suitors. She enjoys teasing them, flirting, kissing. But her traditional Jewish parents warn her about the dangers of sex, warnings that she holds dear until the summer shes nineteen.

Marjorie falls for Noel the summer before, but he is involved with another actress. That winter, she goes downtown to Bank Street to stand acrossthe street from the shabby red brick house where he lived, staring at the windows, while snow caked her beaver coatand caught in her eyelashes. I read this as if Id made a great discovery. I sighed. I read the passage again, out loud. I remember where I wason my bed with its yellow-and-white checked bedspread and what I woremy faded Levis and red peasant blouse. In my doorway hung long strands of colorful beads that Id spent months stringing; taped to one wall was a Jules Feiffer dancer cartoon; on the stereo Simon and Garfunkel sang The Dangling Conversation. That song spoke to my yearning too, to my desire for a love in which you read your Emily Dickinson, and Imy Robert Frost...

Why did Marjorie standing on a snowy street staring at the apartment where the man she loved lived so affect me? Perhaps because sometimes at night I sat in my parents Chevy in front of Peter Hayhursts househe who had broken my tender hearthoping for a glimpse of him? Perhaps because as she longed for Noel, Marjorie let Wally Wronken court her, just as I let boys take me to the movies and kiss me in their convertibles while I longed for Peter Hayhurst? Perhaps because Marjories romanticism, bravery, idealism, and foolishness were just like mine? Marjorie Morningstar knew me. She