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Giving mirth: for todays women writers, balancing work and family is agony. For Jean Kerr, it was an art form
Washington Monthly, March, 2003 by Elizabeth Austin
JEAN KERR WAS THE EPITOME OF THE GREAT gal, back in an era of great gals. With her best-selling book, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, she created a persona that was competent, funny, self-assured, calm in the face of domestic emergency, unapologetically competitive on the tennis court, and tremendously gifted when it came to keeping a houseful of youngsters happily occupied on a rainy afternoon. Even in the `50s and early `60s, during Kerr's heyday, that image of the harried but happy mom occasionally smacked of the emotional airbrush. But with Kerr's death in January, we have lost not only a great author, but also a sunny (if wry) view of motherhood that now appears extinct.
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Kerr was an essayist and hugely successful Broadway playwright, wife of The New York Time' Pulitzer Prize-winning theater critic Walter Kerr, and mother of six lively children. Now that almost all of her books are out of print, however, she may be best known as the Doris Day character in the treacly 1960 film version of Please Don't Eat the Daisies, which erases Kerr's extraordinary literary career and morphs her into a home remodeling-obsessed, suburban stay-at-home mom. While the movie's producers may have been trying to streamline Kerr's discursive collection of essays into a standard-issue Hollywood plotline, the result completely misses the point of Kerr's work: She wrote about combining work and family at a time when that was still an unusual choice for an upper-middle-class mother. And unlike so many of today's literary moms, whose prose is blanketed in a perpetual fog of maternal self-righteousness, Kerr was blessedly unsmarmy and unsmug.
In reading Kerr, I always imagined her as the ideal next-door neighbor, someone who--armed only with a teapot, a couple of macaroons, and a medicinal bottle of Scotch--could transform your backed-up sewer drain from a heart- and budget-breaking disaster into prime anecdotal material. When Kerr wrote about homemaking, childrearing, and writing (and that sometimes thorny point in the Venn diagram where all three intersect), she always sounded like a smart, funny woman who was enjoying herself enormously. Although her best-known essays are now almost 50 years old, they still strike a deep chord with anyone who's ever sat huddled on the playground sidelines, keeping a weather eye on the teeter-totter crowd while scribbling furiously on a big yellow pad.
Bemused Spouses
I was a freshman in high school when I discovered Jean Kerr. To say her books changed my life is an understatement; I embraced them as a design for living. For an adolescent struggling with the apparent conundrum of being funny, smart, and female, Kerr's books were clear, convincing evidence that it was possible to combine effortless intelligence (you've got to love a writer who opens a book of essays on family life with a joke about Kierkegaard) with the nitty-gritty details of domesticity. Her 1961 play Mary, Mary spoke directly to my teen anxieties about the unlikelihood that a wisecracking bookworm might ever find true love. (Dorothy Parker, whom I discovered at around the same time, had not been reassuring on this point.) In the play, Mary's sharp-edged wit has driven her husband, Bob, into the arms of a more curvaceous, less challenging rival. As he explains to a friend, "I married Mary because she was so direct and straightforward and said just exactly what she meant." When asked why they divorced, he explains: "Because she was so direct and straightforward and said just exactly what she meant."
In the end, Mary learns to hold her tongue--at least long enough for a big clinch or two--and true love prevails. This plot was calculated to bring hope to the lovelorn, which explains why Mary, Mary ran for more than 1,500 performances on Broadway and remains a perennial choice in community theatre. But what I found most encouraging was the story behind the story: All of Mary's witty lines (and everyone else's, for that matter) had sprung from the fertile brain of Jean Kerr--who had a swell husband, lots of great kids, and lived in a castle right on Long Island Sound, with a full-time housekeeper, no less.
Although Please Don't Eat the Dairies was published in 1957, before I was born, Kerr's effortless ability to straddle the whole career-versus-motherhood divide seemed as timely as (and far more lively than) the long shelves full of the "I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar" genre I devoured as a teen. Kerr offers no explanation, much less apology, for including a chapter on "The Care and Feeding of Producers" alongside "How to Get the Best of Your Children" and "Aunt Jean's Marshmallow Fudge Diet."
The book takes its overly whimsical title from a characteristic Kerr passage, in which she translates her children's unexpected misconduct into bemusing anecdote:
"My real problem with children is that I haven't any imagination. I'm always warning them against the common-place defections while they are planning the bizarre and unusual. Christopher gets up ahead of the rest of us on Sunday mornings and he has long since been given a list of clear directives: `Don't wake the baby,' `Don't go outside in your pajamas,' `Don't eat cookies before breakfast.' But I never told him, `Don't make flour paste and glue together all the pages of the magazine section of the Sunday Times.' Now I tell him, of course.
