Marjorie Morningstar

Set in New York City beginning in 1933, the novel follows Marjorie Morgenstern, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Jewish immigrants, from her adolescent dreams of theatrical stardom to her settled middle age as a suburban wife and mother. Her father, Arnold Morgenstern, is a feather importer who has worked his way up from poverty; her mother, Rose, is a shrewd, domineering former immigrant sweatshop worker. The family lives in the El Dorado, an apartment building on Central Park West.

One May morning, Marjorie experiences a sudden conviction that she is destined to become an actress. She translates her German surname into English, writes down her stage name, Marjorie Morningstar, and locks the paper in her rosewood keepsake box. Her social world soon expands when she begins dating Sandy Goldstone, the heir to Lamm's department store. Her steady boyfriend, George Drobes, a bacteriologist trapped in his father's Bronx auto accessories shop, proposes at a Long Island restaurant, but his car breaks down on the drive home, and Marjorie quietly returns the rings. George eventually finds another girl, and Marjorie enters a whirl of dates while her theatrical ambitions sharpen. She lands the title role in the Hunter College production of The Mikado, and the performance stops the show, drawing the attention of two people who reshape her life: Marsha Zelenko, a stout, sharp-tongued classmate who becomes her closest friend and most ardent champion, and Mr. Klabber, the owner of Camp Tamarack, a children's camp, who hires her as dramatic counselor for the summer.

Tamarack sits on the same lake as South Wind, a glamorous adult entertainment camp that Mrs. Morgenstern brands "Sodom." Despite the camp owner's strict rule against visits, Marsha paddles Marjorie across the lake one night. There Marjorie first sees Noel Airman, South Wind's social director: astonishingly tall, with reddish-golden hair and deep-set blue eyes, brilliant at the piano, and utterly magnetic. She also meets Wally Wronken, a teenage stagehand who falls hopelessly in love with her. Over the following winter, Marjorie becomes secretly obsessed with Noel, standing in a blizzard outside his Greenwich Village apartment and writing letters she never mails. She learns shorthand, wins a secretarial position at South Wind, and overcomes her mother's fierce opposition through a calm declaration of independence.

At South Wind the next summer, Marjorie discovers that her mother has secretly installed Uncle Samson-Aaron, the family's beloved, enormous, impoverished relative, as a camp dishwasher to keep watch over her. Noel eventually begins pursuing Marjorie, but warns her from the start that he will never marry her. He delivers long monologues about "Shirley," his generic name for respectable Jewish girls he considers interchangeable, all destined for suburban domesticity despite their youthful ambitions. He argues that Marjorie should have an affair with him as an emotional education.

When Marjorie's parents visit, her father takes her rowing and tearfully offers to finance a trip out West to separate her from Noel. Marjorie refuses. That evening, after an uproarious fiesta in which Samson-Aaron performs as a bullfighting toreador in lavender tights, and after Marjorie waltzes with her uncle to Noel's new composition, she and Noel walk across the moonlit lawn toward his cabin, on the verge of consummating their relationship. Halfway across, Marjorie notices Samson-Aaron's body in the camp fountain, dead of a heart attack. The death devastates her and ends the summer. She realizes that nothing else could have stopped her from sleeping with Noel.

In the years that follow, Marjorie graduates from Hunter and pursues a Broadway career without success. Noel takes a job at Paramount Pictures but struggles with its corporate demands. After the family Passover seder, he disappears for three days; Marjorie tracks him down and discovers his former girlfriend Imogene Normand staying in his apartment. Noel confesses he has been sleeping with Imogene, and Marjorie slaps him and storms out.

Their rupture does not last. Noel's musical comedy Princess Jones reaches Broadway, and at Marsha's wedding to Lou Michaelson, Marjorie and Noel reconnect. She attends the dress rehearsal and finds the show brilliant. That night, her resistance breaks, and she sleeps with Noel for the first time at twenty-one. Their affair continues for about a year, secretive and increasingly unhappy. Princess Jones closes in five days to devastating reviews, and Noel cycles through depression and failed stints in Hollywood and radio. He writes Marjorie a twenty-page letter declaring that she is and always will be "Shirley" and that he is sailing to Paris to study philosophy. She rushes to the pier but arrives too late, waving from behind the fence as the ship pulls away.

Marjorie works as her father's secretary, saving money to follow Noel to Europe. She briefly lands a non-speaking Broadway part, only to be fired before the out-of-town tryout. Her father insists on buying her a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary.

On the ship, she meets Michael Eden, a scarred, gray-haired man of thirty-nine who presents himself as a chemical businessman but is actually a former psychology professor whose wife was killed in a car accident. Over five days at sea, they develop an intense, chaste bond. Eden reads Noel's letter, reveals he knows Noel from travels in Italy, and helps Marjorie locate Noel's Paris address. He invites her to fly to Zurich and drive through the Swiss Alps while searching for Noel. During their travels, Eden discloses that he is involved in clandestine work smuggling Jews out of Nazi Germany, driven by a near-mystical conviction that his destiny is to save one particular child who may become a great benefactor of humanity. Marjorie tries to dissuade him from returning to Germany, but he is resolute. He delivers her to Paris and boards a train to Stuttgart.

Marjorie finds Noel on a Paris street, thinner and diminished by illness, living in a German photographer's apartment. He declares that he has changed fundamentally, ready to return to New York, take a steady job, and marry her. In a dark Montmartre bistro, he formally proposes. Marjorie, who has waited five years for these words, realizes with absolute certainty that her answer is no. She tells him it is impossible and leaves Paris the next day.

Back in New York, Marjorie endures a period of emptiness. At a dinner party at the Michaelsons' home in New Rochelle, she is seated next to Milton Schwartz, Lou's law partner. They fall in love with stunning speed. After agonizing, she confesses her affair with Noel over dinner at a roadside tavern. Milton disappears for a week, then returns with an enormous diamond ring, never mentioning Noel again.

The wedding is a lavish affair at the Pierre Hotel. As Marjorie descends the staircase in her white gown, she spots Noel in the last row, not grinning as she expected but looking baffled, his mouth slightly open, his eyes seemingly wet. She marches past him without wavering and becomes Mrs. Milton Schwartz.

In a diary entry dated July 5, 1954, Wally Wronken, now a successful playwright of thirty-nine, records a visit to Marjorie in her Mamaroneck home. She is a gray-haired mother of four, active in synagogue life and local charity. She has endured her brother Seth's death at Okinawa, a baby who died in its crib, and her father's heart attack, yet appears genuinely contented. Wally reflects that the triumph he once imagined has proved hollow, because the girl he loved no longer exists. His entry closes with the memory of their one kiss, years before, under the lilacs in the rain at the Cloisters, and the recognition that he will never have that second kiss.