Dear Darryl:
You still looking for a movie with a "real" woman's lead part? Well, if you are, I've got just what you're after. The heroine is a pretty feminist who becomes a college president at 29—with her husband working for her as an administrator. No book or script yet, but if you check this month's Esquire, it's all right there in Nora Ephron's piece called "The Bennington Affair," a wicked cross between Updike's Couples and McCarthy's The Groves of Academe.
You probably remember that in 1972, Bennington College hired Gail Parker, an assistant professor of history and literature at Harvard, and her husband Tom (she at $22,500, he at $18,000) and then last January fired them. Ephron has filled in the details and provided a rare glimpse of the inner workings of a small elite college, with marvelous dialogue and excellent bit parts. As Ephron tells it, Bennington (600 students) is full of articulate, liberated eccentrics isolated in Vermont's Green Mountains. Sounds fun, huh?
Opening scene: the trustees are interviewing the Parkers in Artist Helen Frankenthaler's Manhattan digs. The Parkers are bemused by the Volvo station wagon in the middle of Frankenthaler's studio, virtually speechless, and slowly beginning to realize that Bennington is serious about them as candidates. A month later, the couple is chosen and introduced to the students at commencement as "Gail and Tom." Scene fades as the commencement "speaker," a black jazz musician (obviously either sloshed or stoned) gets up to play a bass solo. Close-up of Gail: a look of amazement. "What have we done?" she asks herself.
The feisty faculty gives her a grace period. Said one teacher: "She had areas of what one would call, in a pinch, charm." But Parker becomes impatient with endless faculty meetings, such as five sessions to discuss whether or not to install a toilet in the watchman's booth. At Harvard, they typed her as basically hostile, "a female Mencken." Her Cambridge curt speaking manner bugs the Bennington artsies; her demeanor comes across as aloof, cynical and supercilious. She says she wants to be "queen of the hop on a larger scale."
Enter Rush Welter, 52. A wiry, white-haired American civilization professor, Welter is, at first, Gail's chief opponent on the faculty. He puns about her in Old English, lamenting that "A summa is icumen in," but he is unimpressed with her scholarship, and he is furious at her for getting an affirmative action resolution to hire women passed. They confer often, he giving her a tutorial on the politics of the place; then their intellectual flirtation turns into an affair. They teach a course together. When the students read Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Parker and Welter wear twin T shirts, hers labeled ZENOBIA (the romantic feminist who kills herself), and his COVERDALE (the narrator). Nothing sneaky about their relationship. Hell, the whole school knows about it. All they have to do is walk past the Parkers' kitchen window to see Gail, Tom and Rush breakfasting together (exit your G rating). Tom, according to one trustee, is "mature" about it.