The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and the American Jewish Woman

The Heartbreak Kid (1972, Elaine May, Charles Grodin, Cybill Shepherd, Jeannie Berlin)

This delightful film is based on a quick piece published in the January 1966 issue of Esquire by Bruce Jay Friedman. Whereas Friedman's fast-paced piece revolves around the existential angst of being rushed into a marriage and choosing "the right one," Elaine May turns this into an American Jewish story of assimilation, in which the protagonist Leonard Cantrow (Charles Grodin) pines after his non-overbearing, non-Jewish love-interest, the daughter of Minnesota tycoon Al Corcoran, Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd).

When compared to the story, we can see how the screenwriter Neil Simon and director Elaine May remade the message as an American-Jewish narrative. First off, the story is much quicker and has a different characterization. In the story, the wife doesn’t have a name, and gets one line (And I’m supposed to just listen to that? in response to his insinuations of divorice). Furthermore, her characterization is completely different from the film: Cantrow's wife is described as pale and skinny (illuminated by Friedman's phrases his bride’s slack form, pale and angular), and contrasted with Kelly, the woman of his dreams, who is described as having a nice fleshiness, a good hundred and thirty pounds to his bride’s hundred four. In the story, the wife is a waif. However, as in the film, the story also describes her as having “loud pipes."

Compared to the film, the characterisation of Lenny's women seem like a reversal. Lila is loud-mouthed, is buxom and untowardly sexual; she is also dark-haired and of darker complexion. She represents the worst of Jewish women. Therefore, Lenny is not attracted by his overbearing Jewish wife.

In the film, it is the pale, skinny, slack-formed shiksa who attracts him. The film transferred the characterization of his wife onto the shiksa Kelly. In the story, it is his wife who sounds like Twiggy. The story and the film are the opposite.

By so doing, the film reaffirms stereotypes of Jewish women. There is another series on Netflix right now using that same theme: Nobody Wants This… (because, er, nobody wants to see more Jewish women stereotypes, but actually apparently everybody does), about a Los Angeles Reform rabbi (played by Adam Brody) who falls for a non-Jewish sex-podcast-host (played by Kristen Bell). In the words of people who were involved with the production: The stereotypes of Jewish women can sometimes lean into shtick, necessary as they are for the show’s comedic contrast between the fun, outspoken, sex-positive shiksa and the severe, withholding Jewish women who view her as a threat. But [the real-life rabbi Steve] Leder said that while their exaggerated tendencies were written for a laugh, the Jews were in on the joke.

I sure hope so, and clearly there is comedic value in The Heartbreak Kid. Whereas in Nobody Wants This, the shiksa is the sexy one, in The Heartbreak Kid, it is Lila who is buxom and sensual; the audience is supposed to find her curling Lenny's chest hair discomforting and her constant need of reassurance, "am I good enough?" disturbing. While Kelly is sensual in a vague sense (in the sense that any woman in a bikini is sensual — compare Kelly's black one-piece with Lila's two-piece polka dot bikini set and robe, preceded by her red bathrobe), Kelly represents the virginal young woman. Kelly is seen by Grodin as proceeding from the clouds, as he stares up into the sun. She is young and naive, and she plays with Grodin's emotions (seemingly changing her mind whether she wants to pursue, or be pursued by, him). She is the "little girl" to Lila's matronly, fully-grown womanly attributes. Although in terms of getting what she wants, Kelly seems much more mature than Lila, who always needs reassurance.

Ultimately, then, The Heartbreak Kid falls into the age-old trope about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. If we see Lila as the foil for Judaism, she is earthly, sensual, emotional, and unstable. Kelly is the foil for Christianity (her family is Episcopal). Kelly is light, airy, young, heavenly, and alluring. These are powerful tropes.

But in the end, Leonard finds himself in the same situation, at the end of the film rattling off his half-baked theories to two children, who leave him, and then mumbling to himself incoherently. He pursued the second beauty, but one wonders if he would have been better off with Lila. The original story (A Change of Plan) makes this point clearer, with its heading: Dedicated to any man who has ever, for one fleeting moment or more, harbored the thought that his wife was not absolutely the most wonderful woman he ever met. While portrayed through the lens of Cantrow, this is a really a tale of two women.