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| Science Class by Elina Brotherus |
How you decide to end a story, whether it is in a literary work or just a story you tell others or even yourself about your own life, makes a big difference. You can end the story at a point where the main character is happy, as in a fairy tale where the princess finally marries the prince, or you could set it sometime before or after that the happy period when things took a darker turn, as in Shakespeare’s tragedies. When the story is a literary one, the ending chosen by the author makes affects the reader’s experience of the work. But when you’re telling your own story about your life, the effect can be even more profound. According to psychologist Jonathan Adler, how you frame the stories you tell about yourself can actually shape your life. (I learned this from listening to a podcast on Hidden Brain called Healing 2.0: Change Your Story, Change Your Life. To be honest, I’m not completely convinced that this theory is true, but I found it so intriguing I decided to go with it.)
I’ve been thinking about this because my friend Lara told me she was fascinated by my non-fiction story “The Wife” (a childhood memory that I had of my parent’s friend Ruth Bass, the wife of the famous graphic designer Saul Bass, who was referred often to as the “Picasso of commercial artists,” and about the perfume Ruth wore). Lara said that she was “intrigued by your impression of her subtle rebellion against the expectations of what it was to be a ‘modern creative wife’ which she somehow expressed - intentionally or not - with an American, rather than European, perfume aimed at the everywoman rather than the sophisticate. And that she simply wore something she liked rather than something that would express cultural membership.”
After reading the story, Lara was so fascinated by the woman I portrayed that she was prompted to take a “deep dive” online to see if she could find out more about Ruth and what happened to her after her divorce from Saul. And she found some really interesting new information! So, now I’m left with a dilemma: what should I do with all the new information I have about Ruth, some of which is quite surprising? I realized that redrawing the lines between various chapters in her life would create new stories with new endings.
I then reread my original story, and I decided I liked the original ending that I had there, with my wistful last memory of Ruth and her connection to a perfume I was finally able to identify. So, I decided that instead of rewriting the original story (I do that sometimes), I would do something completely different: I would sketch out three more endings to the story so we can all see how changing where you end a story, whether it’s your own or someone else’s story, makes all the difference.
If you don’t remember The Wife or haven’t read it before, you go here now and read it and then return to this story. Or maybe you’ll enjoy just reading these other endings as mini stories?
1960: The Redemption Story
As I mentioned in The Wife, Ruth was divorced from Saul Bass, and Saul soon went on to marry Elaine Makatura, who had been his assistant in his commercial art business for several years. The back story to this is that Ruth and Saul had been high school sweethearts in New York, where they both grew up. Ruth, who had graduated from Hunter College with a degree in chemistry had been planning to go to medical school (something that turned out to be more difficult than she’d imagined due to discrimination against women) so instead she married Saul and had two children with him. Then, Saul received a job offer in Los Angeles, and Ruth and their two children moved to California with him. Once there, she got a teaching credential and tried teaching for a couple of years, but she gave that up and went back to school at the University of Southern California to get first a master’s degree in biological sciences and then, in 1958, a Ph.D. in biology and biochemistry (something that was quite unusual for a woman of her generation). Two years after receiving her Ph.D., in 1960, she was divorced.
I don’t know for sure that Saul was the one who initiated the divorce from Ruth, though it is what I suspect because he married his assistant, Elaine soon after the divorce, seems to indicate that he’d been having an affair with her or at least had fallen in love with her while he was still married. So, I’d been assuming that either the romantic relationship had been discovered by Ruth, which led Ruth to divorce him, or the romantic relationship had led Saul to want to marry Elaine and therefore to divorce Ruth.
In my original story, it’s obvious I felt a bit sad on behalf of Ruth, thinking she was dumped for a younger woman after Saul became very successful, and then after the divorce she seemed to disappear from public record, almost as if she never existed. But what I didn’t know then it was because Ruth Bass changed her name that I couldn’t find anything about her! You see, five years after her divorce she married a dentist named Martin Weg, who was a few years younger than her—I like to think he loved her intoxicating Youth Dew perfume as much as I did—and changed her last name to his. And not only did she marry Martin, but she had another child with him at age 44. She also joined the faculty of the University of Southern California, where she was known as Dr. Ruth Weg, and became one of the founding members its School of Gerontology, the oldest and largest in the country.
With this outcome, Ruth’s life story becomes a classic redemption story, one of America’s favorite endings for a novel or for a life. Facing a divorce from her childhood sweetheart, for whom she’d given up becoming a doctor and for whose career she had left New York for California, she showed an amazing resilience for moving on after facing challenges. She not only was married to Martin, her “devoted” husband, for the rest of her life but she also made significant contributions to the field of gerontology.
1991: Refusing to Play the Game
When I wrote The Wife, I speculated about why Ruth wore Youth Dew perfume, an unconventional choice for the wife of an artist, saying, “But I suspect that Ruth wasn’t thinking about what her perfume represented or said about her—she just loved the scent.” It turns out that I was onto something. A surprising article my friend discovered in the Los Angeles Times USC Gerontologist Ruth Weg Must Retire After Turning 70, but She Says . . . : Don’t Count Her Out from 1991 portrayed Ruth in vivid detail, describing her as “a septuagenarian in denim and boots with immaculately coiffed silver hair,” and it contained several direct quotes, which really gave me a sense of what kind of woman Ruth was. My favorite quote is this one:
“There are some of us who will not keep our mouths shut. I know how they play the games, but I will not play them.” —Dr. Ruth Weg
It turns out that Ruth spent much of her life working “to dispel the idea that, at a certain calendar age, one becomes a useless human being who should apologize for taking up space on this planet,” and she was very outspoken about it.
The reason for the LA Times profile, however, was that when Ruth turned 70, her dean told her that he was planning a retirement dinner for her. And this was how she learned she was being forced to leave the faculty of the USC School of Gerontology, even though she was not ready to retire yet—she’d been planning to work until 80. She later said that it was “kind of ironic” because the center of aging that she helped to start had worked to “dispel the idea of chronological age as an indicator of worth.”
What Ruth initially did about the situation was to attend the retirement dinner with her husband. There, as she sat in the audience, it was announced that the Andrus Center Associates had selected her to receive its 1991 excellence in teaching award, and she heard various speakers praise her for being “a magic teacher” as well as a role model for women and for older people in general. They used some of the following phrases: “passion for life,” “intelligence and determination,” and “personal and professional electricity.”
But when it was Ruth’s turn to speak, as the LA Times reported, she smiled and said, “I assure you, folks, I’m not fragile. And I’m not retiring.” Although no one was surprised by her bold move, the gambit did unfortunately fail. The Dean insisted that Ruth, along with anyone on the faculty who reached the age of 70, needed to retire for financial reasons. Soon after that, the article in the Los Angeles Times reported the entire story. So, while Ruth wasn’t able to save her job, at least she got her message out into the world.
The article concluded by saying that Ruth’s new plan was to finish a book she’d been working on and to look for another teaching job elsewhere. It quoted her as say, “I’m part of the world, “and until I die I’ll remain part of it.”
With this outcome, Ruth’s life story becomes the tale of a woman who did not believe in following the rules and who stood up for what she believed in. She wore the perfume she wanted, dressed the way she wanted, and lived the way she wanted. And in her job, she took powerful stands on how older people are portrayed in the media and on age discrimination. She didn’t always win, but she never backed down.
2002: The Best Revenge
Ruth died in 2002 at the age of 82. I don’t know if she ever finished that book she mentioned in the LA Times article or whether she found another teaching job, but from her obituaries it’s clear to me that Ruth led a good life. In her personal life, she stayed married to her second husband, Martin Weg, and she had both family—three children, a stepdaughter, and a grandchild—who loved her, as well as former students and colleagues. And in her professional life, she published two books, Sexuality in the Later Years and Nutrition in the Later Years, and numerous academic articles, doing work that is still very relevant today. So, I’d say that her life turned out well after her divorce. And you know what they say, living well is the best revenge.
There’s one thing I’m puzzling over, though. In all of Ruth’s obituaries and bios, her first husband, Saul Bass, is never mentioned by name. Typically, there is just a reference either to a “high school sweetheart” or a “first husband.” That makes me wonder whether Ruth was still angry with her ex about leaving her for Elaine, and whether never mentioning him by name was her way of getting a different kind of revenge. But then I it occurred to me that maybe Ruth didn’t want the greater fame of her first husband, the Picasso of commercial artists, to detract from her own accomplishments—that she wanted to be known as Dr. Ruth Weg, not Saul Bass’s first wife. During that era (and maybe even now?) being overlooked was such a common problem for women.
After all, Elaine, Saul’s second wife, was a very talented graphic designer and filmmaker in her own right and after she married Saul, the two of them worked together as a team, with Elaine doing certain film title projects completely on her own. But her contributions were typically marginalized or even ignored, as in this quote from Quentin Tarantino:
“Saul Bass was undoubtedly the greatest title sequence maker. Brilliant – just brilliant. He has been a 'hero' for years. But, and it's a big but, I could never do what Scorsese does – give up control of the opening of my film to someone else, not even Saul Bass – I guess I should say Saul and Elaine Bass.”
I wonder what Ruth would have said about that.
NOTE: If you have thoughts about these various different endings, like a favorite one or whatever, please let me know. I’ve made it easier for everyone to comment now, even anonymously.
by Nina Zolotow
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