Some Like it Hot in the Context of the 1950s

           What do you think of when you think of 1950s America?  Mom and apple pie.  Baseball.  Guys with greased-back hair and girls wearing poodle skirts.  Women wearing pearls while doing housework.  Men coming home from work to their houses in the suburbs where their wives wait with martini in hand.  Donna Reed.  June Cleaver.  Or maybe the atomic bomb.  Cold War.  Red Scare.  McCarthyism. 

            These elements and many others work together to create our nostalgic view of the 1950s.  When modern commentators call for a return to traditional American values, this is the period of time they are mostly referring to.  So a film like Some Like it Hot, released in 1959 (IMDB), that does not seem to fit in the narrative of the era, is seen as an anachronism, something that would have shocked audiences at the time.  But was it really that shocking? 

            An analysis of context will help reveal the place of Some Like it Hot in the social culture of the 1950s.  First, I will examine the realities of gender in comparison with the “perfect housewife” image that is popular in the media and nostalgic memory.  Second, I will place the film within a tradition of transgender performance.  Finally, I will end with an examination of the realities of transgender life during the 1950s.  This analysis will reveal that the film would not have been as shocking to a contemporary audience as common wisdom would perceive it to be.

Gender in the 1950s

            Society in the 1950s is generally described in terms of “social conservatism, sexual repression, and conformist culture” (Stansell 186).  The idealized separation of social life into the public sphere as the space for men and the private sphere as the space for women was reinforced during this time as a reaction to the employment gains made by women during World War II.  While this separation was created through top-down policies that forced women to relinquish their jobs to returning veterans, it was also created from a bottom-up process that came “from men’s and women’s desires for a bountiful private life freed from the demands of sacrifice for the nation” (183).  “This was a family time that took for granted the democracy, prosperity, and invincibility that allowed many to relish the good life they could now afford” (Breines 5).

            Breines describes the 1950s as “a paradox” (11).  Beneath the optimism for America’s place in the world and bright future, anxiety and discontent stirred over the atomic threat, sex and youth culture and continued discrimination against women and racial and ethnic minorities.  The U.S. sought to present itself as the bright, shining light of freedom fighting against the despotism and tyranny of the Soviet Union while ignoring the limited freedoms experienced by its own citizens.

            Even the dominant narrative of women’s place in society during the 1950s can be questioned.  The story goes that the Fifties were characterized by a mass exodus of people, namely white people, from the cities to the surrounding suburbs.  There they were able to purchase larger houses to support their ever-growing families, which wives were expected to stay home and care for while their husbands commuted into the city for work.  In order to take on the job of caring for their families, women were forced to give up the jobs outside the home that they had acquired during World War II.

            In actuality, “by the mid-1950s, rates of women’s employment matched the artificially high levels attained during World War II.  Most striking was the rising employment of married women, which grew by 42 percent during the 1950s” (Hartmann 86).  The dominant narrative of the happy housewife is untrue as large numbers of women continued to enter the workforce but as Stansell notes, the jobs women entered into during this period were much lower in status and wages, “60 percent of men’s, on average” (184),  than those held by men.  This disparity conflicted with the American ideal of individualism, and the dominant ideology sought a way to reconcile it.

The reigning ideology tried to reconcile the contradiction between the female ghetto and the American faith in meritocracy by casting women’s underpaid work as an emanation of special feminine choices.  Teachers weren’t in it for the money, but because they loved children; secretaries took pleasure in waiting on their bosses; waitresses enjoyed the sociability of meeting people and serving them; maids liked tidying up for others. ( 184-185)

Stole argues that advertisers continued to address women according to the dominant view by “addressing women in roles as homemakers, mothers, and consumers” (67) in spite of the growing number of women entering the workforce and the number of families who began to depend on the income of both parents.

            Simone de Beauvoir recognized the difference in status between men and women in The Second Sex when she argues that woman is the Other of man.  This unequal relationship does not offer many options for women.

To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal – this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste.  Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her existence . . . When man makes of woman the Other, he may, then, expect her to manifest deep-seated tendencies to complicity.  Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other. (16-17)

            Among the many anxiety-causing components of life in the 1950s, youth culture faced many attacks and was among the most limiting in terms of gender.  Prominent among these concerns was the interest in sex.  “Sex was commercialized, glorified in movies, advertising, and movie magazines” (Breines 86).  While young people were being taught to desire sex through popular culture, “the growing significance of sexuality in the youth culture and the sexualization of popular culture unfolded amid prudish families and narrow, even cruel, sexual norms” (87).  The norms, of course, differed for girls and boys.  While “sexual exploits became a defining marker of masculinity” (Dorr 31) for boys, girls were “encouraged to pursue the sexual cues that assailed them but were threatened with the loss of respectability (and acceptable futures) if they did so” (Breines 87).  Even marriage was attacked during this time for constraining masculinity.  “The paradox was that American society needed strong, manly men and needed them in traditional marriages, but it seemed uncertain whether men could be truly manly within marriage” (Dorr 30).  

            It is within this context of tensions surrounding the family, employment and sexual relations that Some Like it Hot was released.  The film supports the notion of the importance of sexual exploits for men by having Joe, played by Tony Curtis, purse the ravishing Sugar Kane, played by Marilyn Monroe, even though it may jeopardize his disguise as Josephine but also subverts traditional views by having Daphne, played by Jack Lemmon, be the only female character who chooses to settle down and pursue a traditional marriage.  The film also sidestepped many of the issues of the time by setting the story in the 1920s.  According to Billy Wilder, director of the film, “we invented the fact that they had witnessed a gangland killing and had to disguise themselves to protect their lives.  Then we set the story in the Roaring Twenties, in order to make this element of the plot more believable” (qtd. in Phillips 212).  Wilder is referring to the prevalence of gangland killings during the 1920s when he says setting the film then will make that element of the plot “more believable” but he could have been talking about the plot of the entire film.  The 1920s were, and still are, seen by many people as a wild, decadent, crime-ridden period that nearly led to the collapse of American society with the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.  Especially in comparison to the conservative and prosperous 1950s, the 1920s are an anything goes time so it should not be surprising to find men disguising themselves as women to escape gangsters.  The temporal distance allowed the audience to view the actions in the film as the product of a different time and not something that should concern contemporary individuals. 

            Gender tensions in the 1950s demonstrate that Some Like it Hot was not released at a time uncomplicated by issues of gender.  As part of a history of transgender performance, Some Like it Hot was not even a type of performance that would have been unfamiliar to audiences in the 1950s.

Transgender Performance    

            Transgender performance extends back to antiquity.  Ormand notes that in Ancient Greece “male cast members donned costumes consisting of body padding and masks to play female characters” (1).  Transgender performance has been a part of performative traditions throughout history, from the comedies and tragedies of Ancient Greece to the kabuki and Noh plays of Japan to the widely known boy actors playing female parts in Shakespearean England.  Howard argues that performance of female roles by males was part of larger gender and class tensions and an antitheatricality movement in Renaissance England.  In a society where what people were allowed to wear signaled their social standing and gender, theatrical performers were often accused of deceitfulness for daring to dress above their station or as a gender different from their own.  How can a society maintain clear class and gender distinctions when anyone can dress however he/she wants? 

If a boy can successfully personate the voice, gait, and manner of a woman, how stable are those boundaries separating one sexual kind from another, and thus how secure are those powers and privileges assigned to the hierarchically superior sex, which depends upon notions of difference to justify its dominance? (435)

Sedinger argues that crossdressing on the Renaissance stage functions as a “failure of representation” (64) in which there is a breakdown between what the spectator sees when looking at the crossdressed performer and the believed perception of the “real” sex/gender of the performer.  The performance of the female role and the “real” male sex of the performer cannot be separated.      

                Vey provides a more modern example of transgender performance in the person of Ella Zoyara.  Ella was a trick horseback rider who made her American debut in a circus in New York in 1860 after wowing crowds in Europe.  Ella’s real name was Omar Kingsley who was trained to be a circus performer from a young age; his performance as Ella seems, from sources examined by Vey, to have been just that.  Ella’s performance proved to be very popular and her fame was only briefly diminished after her true gender was revealed.  Ella’s performance shifted “from gender impersonation to gender performance” (54).  Kingsley remained popular when his performance as Ella “could be fit into this category – a man who played Zoyara, as opposed to a man who deceived the public and challenged the limited role of the ideal woman of his time” (55).

            Transgender performance was also not unusual during the early days of film.  The silent film era allowed for positive explorations of crossdressing because of “the emphasis on purely visual entertainment, the relative lack of censorship, and the ludic quality of a newborn art form” (Bell-Metereau 25).  The trend toward self-censorship, in order to prevent governmental censorship, was codified in the Production Code of 1934 and to avoid any hint of sexual perversion, “female impersonators who were young, convincing, or who obviously relished such imitations became increasingly rare” (39).

The vast majority of female impersonation films produced during the era of the Production Code offered exaggerated, farcical, flat depictions in the context of narratives that encouraged eventual suppression of any aberration from the norm.  Although the comedy in such films had occasional elements of anarchic wit, the humiliation of the cross-dressing character and the ultimate resolutions of conflict subtly encourage conformity to rigid standards of manhood and womanhood. (64-65)

            I offer these examples of transgender performance to show that Some Like it Hot is part of a larger performative tradition and to refute the notion that audiences would have been shocked by seeing male-to-female crossdressing for the first time in the film.  The popularity of the film also supports the idea that audiences were not so shocked by the content; the film made $25 million when it was released and was nominated for Oscars for Best Actor and Best Director (IMDB).  The popularity of the film is also enduring; the American Film Institute named it the best comedy of the past 100 years in 2000 (AFI).

            The transgender performative tradition proves that audiences would not have been unfamiliar with crossdressing in the context of performance but events in the 1950s also prove that the audience for the film would not have been unfamiliar with transgender issues in general.

Transgender Reality in the 1950s

            The 1950s included the publication of the first transgender newsletter, Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress, and continued surveillance of transgender individuals by government officials as part of the gender and security tensions discussed earlier (Stryker, Transgender History 46-54).  Much debate also occurred during this time over the terms used to describe transgender individuals, from Virginia Prince’s use of the term “transvestite” to designate heterosexual male crossdressers to Harry Benjamin’s coinage of the term “transsexual” to describe those who sought to surgically alter their bodies to match their gender identity (49).  The most significant and widely-known event related to transgender issues during this time was the revelation on December 1, 1952 that Christine Jorgenson had undergone a successful sex change.

            Stryker calls Christine Jorgenson’s story “a watershed event in transgender history.  It brought an unprecedented level of public awareness to transgender issues” (Transgender History 49).  From its initial publication in the New York Daily News, Christine’s story would be “one of the major news topics of the year” (Docter 108).  Christine Jorgenson was a 26-year-old ex-GI from New York who underwent a series of sex change operations in Denmark.  She instantly grabbed the public’s attention.  “Part of the intense fascination with Jorgenson undoubtedly had to do with the fact that she was young, pretty, gracious and dignified – but another part surely had to do with the mid-twentieth-century awe for scientific technology, which now could not only split atoms but also, apparently, turn a man into a woman” (Stryker, Transgender History 47).  The same forces that Americans felt made it the best country in the world also led them to question basic assumptions about sex and gender.  Intense debate, that continues to this day, began around issues of marriage and legal identity.

            Jorgenson remained a popular figure throughout the 1950s and the rest of her life.  “[U]nable to find routine work due to her notoriety and the stigma attached to transsexuality, Jorgenson developed a lucrative nightclub act that exploited the public’s fascination with her, and that earned her upwards of $5000 a week” (Stryker, “We Who Are Sexy” 80).  She would go on to be a sought-after lecturer and would make appearances on TV talk shows until her death in 1989 (80).  Jorgenson remained of interest to the public for the rest of her life.

            The prominence of Christine Jorgenson demonstrates that transgender issues were more widely known in the 1950s than is often assumed.  An anecdote from the making of Some Like it Hot also demonstrates the concern the leading actors took in their appearance as crossdressed characters.

Lemmon challenged Curtis to attempt the acid test of their disguise:  Lemmon, dragging a bewildered and somewhat shy Curtis behind him, went traipsing into the ladies’ room in the studio lobby.  They sat in front of the mirror in the lounge adjoining the women’s restroom, “where they did their make up for a good half hour.  Apparently nobody batted an eye.”  Then they went to Wilder’s office to see if they passed his inspection.  They told him of their experience in the ladies’ room, and he exclaimed, “That does it – don’t change a thing!  This is exactly the way I want you to look!”  He added humorously that Curtis resembled Joan Crawford and Lemmon resembled Mae West. (Phillips 217-218)

Why the concern over appearance if the film is merely a farce?  A prominent figure like Christine Jorgenson required more attention to detail from the actors in order to make the plot of the film believable.  Viewing a film like Some Like it Hot through the context of the time in which it was released reveals aspects of the film that may not have been seen otherwise.  The next step in this project will be a close analysis of the text to determine what actual impact the context has on the narrative and visuals of the film.  

Works Cited

“AFI’s 100 Years . . . 100 Laughs.” Afi.com. American Film Institute (AFI). 2000. 3 Oct. 2010.

Bell-Metereau, Rebecca. Hollywood Androgyny. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Breines, Wini. Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties. Boston: Beacon   Press, 1992.

de Beauvoir, Simone. “‘Introduction’ to The Second Sex.” The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1997. 11-18.

Docter, Richard F. Becoming a Woman: A Biography of Christine Jorgenson. New York: The Haworth Press, 2008.

Dorr, Linda L. “The Perils of the Back Seat: Date Rape, Race and Gender in 1950s America.” Gender & History 20.1 (2008): 27-47.

Hartmann, Susan M. “Women’s Employment and the Domestic Ideal in the Early Cold War Years.” Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960. Ed. Joanne Meyerowitz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. 84-100.

Howard, Jean E. “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England.”     Shakespeare Quarterly 39.4 (1988): 418-440.

Ormand, Kirk. “Oedipus the Queen: Cross-gendering without Drag.” Theatre Journal 55 (2003): 1-28.

Phillips, Gene D. Some Like it Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2010.

Sedinger, Tracey. “‘If Sight and Shape be True:’ The Epistemology of Crossdressing on the London Stage.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.1 (1997): 63-79.

“Some Like it Hot.” Imdb.com. Internet Movie Database (IMDB), n.d. 2 Oct. 2010.

Stansell, Christine. The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present. New York: The Modern Library, 2010.

Stole, Inger L. “Televised Consumption: Women, Advertisers and the Early Daytime Television Industry.” Consumption, Markets and Culture 6.1 (2003): 65-80.

Stryker, Susan. Transgender History. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008.

Stryker, Susan. “We Who Are Sexy: Christine Jorgenson’s Transsexual Whiteness in the Postcolonial Philippines.” Social Semiotics 19.1 (2009): 79-91.

Vey, Shauna. “The Master and the Mademoiselle: Gender Secrets in Plain Sight in Antebellum Performance.” Theatre History Studies 27 (2007): 39-59.