The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture
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The APARTmenT PloT Pamela Robertson Wojcik The APARTmenT PloT Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 Duke univeRsiT y PRess DuRhAm AnD lonDon 2010 © 2010 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Bembo by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. frontispiece illustration: Christoph Niemann Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame, which provided funds toward the production of this book. conTenTs List of Illustrations vii Preface ix Introduction: A Philosophy of Urbanism 1 Chapter 1. A Primer in Urbanism: Rear Window’s Archetypal Apartment Plot 47 Chapter 2. “We Like Our Apartment”: The Playboy Indoors 88 Chapter 3. The Great Reprieve: Modernity, Femininity, and the Apartment 139 Chapter 4. The Suburbs in the City: The Housewife and the Apartment 180 Chapter 5. Movin’ On Up: The African American Apartment 220 Epilogue: A New Philosophy for a New Century 267 Notes 279 Bibliography 289 Index 303 illusTRATions Plates (between pages 50 and 51) PLATE 1. New Yorker cover, 31 July 1954 PLATE 2. Image from Th e Fantastic Four PLATE 3. Image from Daredevil PLATE 4. Frame grab, Pillow Talk PLATE 5. Frame grab, Pillow Talk PLATE 6. Frame grab, Th at Funny Feeling PLATE 7. Frame grab, Th at Funny Feeling PLATE 8. Frame grab, Th at Funny Feeling PLATE 9. Frame grab, Th e Boys in the Band PLATE 10. Frame grab, Th e Boys in the Band PLATE 11. Frame grab, Th at Funny Feeling PLATE 12. Frame grab, How to Marry a Millionaire PLATE 13. Frame grab, Cactus Flower PLATE 14. Frame grab, Cactus Flower PLATE 15. Frame grab, Designing Woman PLATE 16. Frame grab, Under the Yum Yum Tree PLATE 17. Frame grab, Under the Yum Yum Tree PLATES 18.1 and 18.2. Frame grabs, Barefoot in the Park PLATE 19. Frame grab, Rosemary’s Baby PLATE 20. Frame grab, For Love of Ivy PLATES 21.1 and 21.2. Frame grabs, Claudine Figures 1. Architectural rendering of Rear Window courtyard 48 2. Frame grab, Rear Window 52 3. Frame grab, Rosemary’s Baby 52 viii lis T of illusTRATions 4. Frame grab, Rear Window 79 5. Frame grab, Barefoot in the Park 79 6. Frame grab, Breakfast at Tiffany’s 80 7.1 and 7.2. Frame grab, Pushover 82 8. Frame grab, Pillow Talk 83 9. Frame grab, Rear Window 84 10. Frontispiece for “Playboy’s Penthouse Apartment,” October 1956 89 11.1 and 11.2. Excerpts from “Playboy’s Progress” 102–3 12. Excerpt from “The Playboy Coloring Book” 104 13.1 and 13.2. Claude Smith cartoon from Playboy 106 14. Image from Batman 108 15. Frame grab, The Boys in the Band 136 16. European press pack for Any Wednesday, retitled Bachelor Girl Apartment 140 17. Frame grab, Breakfast at Tiffany’s 141 18. Image from Apartment 3-G 150 19. Frame grab, Klute 173 20. Frame grab, Sex and the Single Girl 178 21. Press kit image, Diary of a Mad Housewife 181 22. Frame grab, Barefoot in the Park 194 23. Frame grab, Wait Until Dark 209 24. Frame grab, The Jeffersons 221 25. Frame grab, A Raisin in the Sun 238 26. Frame grab, No Way Out 251 27.1 and 27.2. Frame grabs, No Way Out 254 28. Frame grab, A Patch of Blue 255 PRefAce Some years ago, more than I care to count, when I was not quite thirty years old, I got my fi rst academic job, in Australia at the University of Newcastle. As part of the laborious paperwork required to secure a resi- dential permit to live and work in Australia, I had to obtain a document from the sheriff of Chicago stating that, to the best of his knowledge, I was not a criminal (an ironic requirement for a nation founded as a penal colony). In order to obtain this document, I had to provide the sher- iff with a list of my addresses from the previous ten years. A history of my twenties, this produced, not surprisingly, a history of apartments. Mine was a long list, but probably not an unusual one. My apartments included a two-bedroom in Earl’s Court, London, which I shared with four roommates during a semester’s study abroad my junior year. This was a very bohemian apartment. Here, I kept my clothing in the kitchen cupboard (where the mice lived), experimented with black hair dye, and got avant-garde haircuts at the Vidal Sassoon school. From the bathroom window, we could hear announcements from the tube station below, as well as the shouts of rioting soccer fans returning home from a game. After graduating Wellesley College, I moved into a single-family home on Magazine Street in Central Square, Cambridge, owned by a friend of my sister’s. My sister and I each rented a room, and shared space in the kitchen and bathroom. I was a paralegal and she was in law school. We went to aerobics class together and cooked curries. Eventually, the owner married and had two children, while still renting out rooms, add- ing to the boarding-house eff ect. When I moved away from Cambridge to go to graduate school at the University of Chicago, my fi rst apart- ment was a shabby one-bedroom apartment in Hyde Park assigned to me by the university. This was like a return to dorm life, and a regression. x prfe e Ac I shared it with a library student who enjoyed listening to music on the radio and watching football games on TV, at the same time. After that, I moved to a two-bedroom in a gorgeous courtyard building I shared with a fellow female Eng lish graduate student. After house sitting at a condo for a faculty member who spent half of every year in New Jersey, I finally moved into my first solo apartment, a large one-bedroom in a building where a former boyfriend had lived before he moved to the East Coast. My best friend moved into the same building, across the courtyard. This was great fun, until one night I watched a sometimes boyfriend of mine sneak over to her apartment after leaving mine. Eventually, I moved to the North Side, swapping apartments with another graduate student, taking her tiny studio in posh Lincoln Park. My last Chicago apartment was a one-bedroom in Lakeview in a building much favored by single women because it was close to public transportation and in the heart of Boys’ Town, a gay neighborhood that was always lively and safe—a model for Jane Jacobs’s ideals of urbanism. Once I got to Australia, I added two more apartments. The first was a furnished flat in a prefab building. The second was a much more roman- tic apartment—a twisted warren of oddly shaped rooms in a rambling beach house. From my bedroom window, I could see and hear the ocean, dotted with tankers and surfers. While living in that apartment, but visiting Chicago, I fell in love with my now husband. He visited me in my Australian flat a few times, adding to its romance. Returning to Chi- cago, and working at the Chicago International Film Festival, we lived in his condo, the basement duplex in an attractive brick three-flat in Chi- cago’s Ukrainian Village. Shortly after we got married, and after I started working at the University of Notre Dame, we moved to a single-family home a few blocks away. Or, rather, we moved to a three-flat and rented two apartments to tenants until we could afford to convert it to a single- family home. One tenant was a single woman and medical student, the other a gay male writer and friend. As they each moved on to new phases of their lives, and their own home ownership, we took over their space, converting the three-flat to a single-family home. The conversion was completed just before the arrival of our second child. I begin with this history because my movements are typical, I think, of the movements that many of us make from shared apartments to solo apartments to “living together” to home ownership, with these moves often but not always reflecting changes in status—including not only marital status, but also career and financial status. My movements also prfe e Ac xi reverse the conversion process begun when apartments were introduced to America, when four-story row houses, like mine, were viewed as too inefficient and costly and were, therefore, often turned into apartments. Long before I lived in apartments, I envisioned my future through images of apartments, especially those I’d seen on TV or in movies. As a young girl, I imagined my life as a single woman as some mishmash of Mary Richards’s, or, more likely, Rhoda’s apartment, in The Mary Tyler Moore show, and the somewhat more glamorous high-rise Manhattan apartment inhabited by Ann Marie in That Girl. (Following the logic of the shows, either scenario led to dating Ted Bessel.) In due course, I fig- ured I’d have a fancier career girl apartment, like one of the Doris Day apartments in a Rock&Doris movie. And eventually, I’d settle into a Bob Newhart building, where I’d wear chic maxi dresses and have charm- ing and affable neighbors dropping in at all times.