We went partly because Tippi Hedron was appearing in person, with talks before the movie and during intermission and autographing photos and posters. And we went because when I was ten years old I saw Marnie from the back seat of our family car at the local drive-in movie theater. I was supposed to be asleep. Just like when I was supposed to be asleep during The Birds and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Each movie left me with bad dreams, but it was Marnie that left me struggling to understand it.
So when at a local book sale I saw a battered paperback of Winston Graham's novel Marnie, released in conjunction with Hitchcock's movie, I spent my quarter and picked it up. Perhaps the book would help me to peg down the story.
Graham is best known for the Poldark series which inspired the Masterpiece Theater series of that name, which my husband has been reading. Marnie is set in England not long after WWII, and is told in the first person. We learn that Marnie grew up in a tough neighborhood with a dad lost in the war and a strict but distant mother. Marnie gets into fights and steals and lies. Her mother insists her daughter avoid men.
When Marnie buys a horse she must find a way to support him, and being a smart gal, she plans and executes a series of thefts, assuming false identities to obtain jobs where she can get her hands on money. She is twenty-three when she has finished another heist and her employer Mark Rutland tracks her down.
Mark has fallen in love with the beautiful Marnie. She warns him that she is a liar and thief, but Mark insists he can't control his heart. He offers her an ultimatum: he can turn her in and she will be imprisoned for her crimes, or she can marry him and he will cover for her.
Marnie can't stand to be close to anyone, is unable to love, and hates the thought of men and sex. Her horse is the only creature in the world she cares for. Forced to marry Mark, she won't submit to him as a wife should. Frustrated, he forces himself on her once, then they learn to live together in distant animosity and distrust.
Mark forces Marnie into counseling, but she is too clever for even the psychologist, continuing her habit of lies and false stories. Over time, men recognize Marnie from her past lives. And at the death of her mother, Marnie learns her mother's secret history and double life.
Different from Hitchcock's version, Graham's version of the mother's crisis is not of Marnie's doing. And Graham includes a co-worker of Mark's who tries to cozy up to Marnie, and ends up betraying her.
Marnie is one messed up girl, but Mark is perhaps even sicker. He marries Marnie for her physical beauty in spite of her inability to feel emotion that allows her to plot crimes without a sense of wrongdoing. He entraps Marnie and even rapes her when she is not complicit. He is willing to cover up her crimes and endeavors to even enlist the help of a retired judge to figure out how Marnie can avoid the consequences of her crimes.
Marnie returns to her mother's house to discover she has died. She finds a newspaper clipping telling that her mother had murdered her newborn baby, which had been kept from Marnie.
Graham offers a moment of hope for Marnie near the end of the book. At a fox hunt, she feels revulsion of the cruelty of those around her, questioning why their killing for pleasure was legal when her crimes would merit jail. She turns from the death scene of the fox, allowing her horse his head, Mark chasing after her. Unfamiliar with the landscape, her horse jumps over a hedge and onto a riverbank, suffering a fatal injury. Marnie also falls, and so does Mark, his face in the mud. Marnie leaves her suffering horse to save Mark, lifting him from the mud and wiping it from his nose. There is a glimmer of morality and compassion in her choice.
She later meets a bereft boy who has lost his mother and she holds him.
"I thought, that's right, be a mother for a change. Bite on somebody else's grief instead of your own. Stop being to heartbroken for yourself and take a look round. Because maybe everybody's griefs arent'that much different after all. I thought, there's only one loneliness, and that's the loneliness of all the world."
Just before the twisted ending, Marnie, feeling all 'emotional and female and hopeless,' wonders if she was in love with Mark.
Marnie is the story of trauma, mental illness, crime, deception, and a man's sick obsession with a woman.
It is little wonder that I have been disturbed by this story for about fifty years. And it is little wonder that the twisted Hitchcock wanted to film it. Poor Tippi-- Hitchcock derailed her career when she rebuffed his sexual advances. Her studio contract gave her no options, including legal ones.
Fifty years later, Tippi at age 87 cheered the actresses standing up against the abuse suffered under Harvey Weinstein, as seen in her Tweet of October 2017:
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