Vows, spouse optional

Little more than a decade ago, a national debate erupted over the fact that the popular TV character Murphy Brown was going to have a child out of wedlock and raise the baby on her own. Then-Vice President Dan Quayle famously got involved in the maelstrom, saying the positive TV portrayal of a baby born out of wedlock threatened the sanctity of the traditional family.

But illegitimacy has become legit in movies and television: No eyebrows are raised and no political feathers are ruffled.

In the recently released comedy “What a Girl Wants,” geared toward preteen girls, the film’s 17-year-old heroine is born out of wedlock. Such popular network TV series as “Friends,” “The Gilmore Girls” and “Frasier” feature lead female characters who are raising children they had out of wedlock.

Sociologist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead was one of those who became involved in the “Murphy Brown” debate, writing an opinion piece for Atlantic Monthly, “Dan Quayle Was Right.”

“There was this big debate, then it seemed that, having had the debate, we got it out of our system and from then on, far from turning back the clock to pre-’Murphy Brown’ days, it became acceptable,” Dafoe Whitehead says. She notes that instead of being a “moralistic tragic mistake of teenage passion gone wrong,” today unwed parents “exist pretty much as something taken in stride, just a fact of life. It reflects probably the change in social mores and changes in the structure of families. There are a lot of people who have children now, and they never get married.”

Still, Melissa Caldwell, director of research and publications for Parents Television Council, says the conservative organization doesn’t believe that having unwed mothers on TV and in movies is a good thing, “especially when you look at, for example, how the program ‘Friends’ has treated this issue. Not only was it an insignificant [issue] when it was announced that this character would have a child out of wedlock and would be raising it on her own, no one was talking about it at the time. The message ... to kids is ‘oh yeah, raising a baby on your own is a piece of cake.’ ” (No one from the show was available for comment.)

“What a Girl Wants” is based on “The Reluctant Debutante,” a moderately successful Broadway play from the mid-’50s and a 1958 Vincente Minnelli movie hit starring Sandra Dee in the title role and Rex Harrison as her father. In that version, Dee’s parents divorced when she was young. In “What a Girl Wants,” the parents (Kelly Preston and Colin Firth) marry in an unofficial ceremony in Morocco, and have every intention of making it legal until his snobby family intervenes.

Amanda Bynes’ Daphne has pined all her life to meet her father, an up-and-coming politician, and sets out on her 17th birthday to London to introduce herself to him. Director Dennie Gordon says that she strove to update “The Reluctant Debutante” to reflect today’s changing family situations.

“These days, so many parents share a child and choose not to wed,” Gordon said. “So many kids come from single-parent homes.” The film’s producer, Denise Di Novi, says things have changed since “Murphy Brown.” “I think we are ... kinder and gentler about the human condition and a little less judgmental. The kid is as valid a child as another child. They shouldn’t have to bear any stigma for it. It’s not their fault. I think in certain parts of the country, that [stigma] still exists. We certainly thought about it. That’s why we had the Moroccan wedding ceremony, so they had that kind of commitment and felt married.”

Gordon says that though Daphne was born out of wedlock, “she’s adored and cared for. She wants for nothing. She just wants to know the other half. We live in a different time now. We were realistic. My theory was when I went to the studio that wedding vows are becoming less relevant. What is really important is the true bond between two people. The message that I wanted to deliver is all happy endings don’t have to take place at the altar.”

Gordon admits she was a bit taken aback that there was “zero fuss” from Warner Bros. and the Motion Picture Assn. of America over the film’s content. “I have had my head bumps with the ratings and we skated through this, I think because we deal with it honestly.”

‘Big moral lessons’

That’s a far cry from how the topic was handled in the past by Hollywood, where it has long been a favorite dramatic subject. Examples include Shelley Winters’ pregnant, unwed factory worker, who meets a tragic end in 1951’s “A Place in the Sun” and Natalie Wood’s wide-eyed Macy’s salesgirl, who discovers she’s pregnant after a fling with a jazz musician in 1963’s “Love with the Proper Stranger.”

When Dafoe Whitehead went to movies as a teenager in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, “the idea of having a child out of wedlock was a very big theme....Then there were big moral lessons. Usually the female character suffered. That was supposed to instruct teenage girls and boys that if you go all the way, you are going to be stigmatized and shameful.”

The unwed-mother roles were catnip for Oscar voters. Helen Hayes won her first Oscar for 1931’s “The Sin of Madelon Claudet,” playing a French girl who falls for an artist. He flies the coop after she becomes pregnant, and Madelon ends up spending time in prison; in order to make money for her son to go to medical school -- of course, he doesn’t know she’s his mother -- she turns to prostitution. In 1940’s “Kitty Foyle,” Ginger Rogers won an Oscar as a working-class woman who has her marriage to a richer man annulled only to discover that she is pregnant.

Six years later, Olivia de Havilland picked up her first Oscar for the melodramatic “To Each His Own,” as the long-suffering mother of an out-of-wedlock child who watches her son grow up with another family.

“In those really early films, they always took the position that the unwed mother was the heroic person,” says Rick Jewell, associate dean of USC’s School of Cinema and Television. “It was the society who were the evil characters because of the way they disrespected people like that. In all of those films, from ‘Madame X,’ ‘The Sin of Madelon Claudet’ [to] ‘The Life of Virgie Winters,’ the women are saintly.

“Then you have films like ‘The Old Maid,’ in which the woman has to suffer because she can’t tell her child she is [the] mother. They do everything they can to help their kids grow up, but they never tell them.”

Jewell believes the shift away from these moralistic diatribes (in movies anyway) began in 1963 with the comedy “Tom Jones,” based on Henry Fielding’s picaresque 18th century novel about a rapscallion, supposedly born out of wedlock, who eventually is discovered to be the heir to a wealthy British family. “Tom Jones” not only was a big hit at the box office, it won several Oscars, including best film and best director (Tony Richardson).

“The whole business of illegitimacy is handled quite differently than the way it had been before,” says Jewell. “It was still a little bit early yet, but it still sort of paved the way for the hippie movement and the sexual revolution and the fact it is not such a shameful thing anymore to have an illegitimate child or live together out of wedlock.”