If I was a kindly Mr. Belvedere type and had money to burn during the early years of the Eisenhower administration, I would want to do what I could to improve two marriages that are hobbled by husbands who think small and need to have their horizons broadened.
I’m speaking of Stanley and Stella Kowalski of New Orleans. married in 1947 but struggling with Stanley’s primitive grease-monkey mentality as well as the traumatic after-effects of a prolonged visit to their French Quarter apartment by Stella’s mentally unstable older sister, Blanche.
I’m also speaking of Terry and Edie Malloy, a Hoboken couple who happily tied the knot in the fall of 1954 but are facing a limited future, in no small part due to Terry’s lack of education and his resultant inability to live or think beyond any place other than Hoboken, despite some terribly brutal experiences that they both endured at the hand of gangster Johnny Friendly.
Edie and Stella are good, caring, deeply spiritual women and basically fine but Terry and Stanley need a certain kind of education that might open them up and perhaps even set their souls free.
My response would be to befriend the Kowalskis and the Malloys and separately take them to Europe and show them around as best I could. Trust me, their lives would be immeasurably enriched by visits to London, the English countryside, Paris, Tuscany, Rome and the Amalfi Coast.
I would start the Malloy adventure in Dublin and Southern Ireland so Terry could appreciate his Irish heritage.
Likewise for Stanley’s benefit I would make a point of taking the Kowalskis to Poland (Warsaw, Gdańsk, Krakow).
The Malloys and the Kowalskis may or may not find domestic harmony and fulfillment after their European travels. But they would at least have felt and seen and tasted a greater, richer world, and you can bet that Terry and Stanley would emerge as men of deeper reflection and greater consequence.
And you know what? If these European jaunts work out I would arrange for the couples to meet in Manhattan in the early fall of ‘55 (suites at the Waldorf Astoria, dinner at Minetta Tavern, tickets to see a B’way musical or perhaps an Arthur Miller play).
Imagine Stanley and Terry meeting for the first time! And you know Edie and Stella would get along famously.
