My Fair Lady (1964)

directed by George Cukor

Jenn Montooth

For the first few years of my life, I was raised in a trailer park outside of Ellicott City, Maryland. As a child, I did not have any awareness that I might be in a much lower class than my peers. The most I realized was that our trailer looked less “pretty” than some of the other ones I had been to. Still, I enjoyed the strong sense of community in our trailer park, where I knew everyone and they in turn looked after me. I loved being close to a nearby farm where I would pet the local horses and take wistful walks in the woods and play in the cool-ass mud puddles. Things didn’t seem so bad!

When I was eight, we moved to a house in the suburbs of Hanover, Pennsylvania. Coming slightly out of poverty still felt terrifying when going into a suburb where the next door neighbors had a light-up, homemade sign that read “CHRIST IS CHRISTMAS” (it was originally for Christmas, but I think they were so moved by their own sign that they decided to keep it up year-round). Our house was still smaller than any of my peers’, but it was the biggest house I had ever lived in. When I walked into the house for the first time and saw we had a finished basement, I had similar vibes as bb small-town Iris walking into Amanda Wood’s L.A. mansion in The Holiday. A much shorter scene in a much smaller house, but every room made me squeal.

It’s hard and painful to grow into awareness of class. As soon as it happened, it felt like my life turned into finding ways to blend into the middle-class world. I started working when I was 14 so I could afford better clothes to fit in and find a social life. American Eagle sweatshirt on clearance? Perfect. Cheap peace sign necklace from Pac-Sun? Ring it up.

I watched romantic comedies and listened to indie music that made me dream of having the liberal-arts-indie-girl lifestyle of so many cool women. Soon enough, I was the first person in my family to go to college, and there started the next decade of my life where I experienced the purgatory of feeling stuck between classes.

It was always hard to find the right words to that feeling, and it’s never depicted very well in movies. I did, however, feel very connected to Audrey Hepburn’s depiction of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. The role of Eliza is still one of the best roles written for a woman, even today.

The opening scene shows a sea of ridiculously boring-looking wealthy people in eccentric hats walking outside of the Covent Opera House in London and frantically dodging the rain. We then see Eliza selling flowers in the nearby garden. She is instantly the most interesting person in a sea of boring rich people, with a Cockney accent that could give Monty Python a run for their money. It is an instant joy to see Audrey Hepburn, who is known as a fashion icon and indie darling, to be a dirty, haggard, loud, poor flower seller. There is no way that a modern Netflix depiction would be anything other than someone from the cast of Euphoria looking hot with a basket of flowers.

While Eliza is trying to sell flowers at the garden for money, she overhears the extremely arrogant phonetics professor Henry Higgins casually say he could easily train her to speak “proper” English and present her in high society.

Though Eliza knows she is being judged and mocked, she can’t help but see this as an opportunity to reach her goal of working in a flower shop. This is something that anyone from lower means can relate to. The horrible feeling of giving up your pride to get help from someone who looks down on you. What choice do you have in a system that wants you to fail without the resources to grow? Go ahead, take the risk on someone who thinks so little of you that they want to change you! Everyone that makes it out of poverty and successfully survives capitalism does it entirely with luck. And I do appreciate how much the words “luck” and  “lucky” are said and sung in this movie.

In college and the dreaded initial post-college phase, I was struggling to support myself but surrounded by people who did not have the same financial worries. I lived in a city where most people were well off or had parents who were. I felt lucky to be there, and I tried desperately to fit into their world. I spent weekdays skipping meals and taking sad cans of soup to work so I could use what little money I had to go to bars with my friends on the weekend. I really lived it up. I liked how I felt on the weekends, but I did wonder what would happen if anyone found out I was a “fraud,” and what it would take to actually be able to live in this world full-time.

The best thing to come out of this time was absolutely the attention! When you come off as someone who blends in except they have a mysterious, fascinating way about them, you can become a zoo animal. I had no problem getting laid in this era of my life. I have found that if you go through literally anything in your life during or before your twenties, you are suddenly the most interesting person alive.

One of the best scenes in My Fair Lady happens at the horse race. It starts off by showing the hilariously lavish people in eccentric hats singing a musical number in unison. Everyone is singing in the same tone with an expressionless look on their face, unable to break from the boring prison that is the 1%. Eliza shows up in an elegant dress that I imagine Fran Fine would have rocked (in fact, Fran Drescher is probably the only person I’d want to see in a My Fair Lady remake). She wows everyone with her politeness, and dazzles the rich dumb boy Freddy with her story of how she believes her aunt died of poisoning, not of influenza. He later sings a song of love with a hilarious opening line: “When she mentioned how her aunt bit off the spoon, she completely done me in.” No notes.

The most powerful scene is near the end, when Eliza successfully attends the fancy ball and impresses all of Higgins’ fancy friends. Everyone is praising Higgins for his amazing work to change Eliza, but everyone is ignoring Eliza herself, the one that put in all of the work (this isn’t an ‘80s movie where she just takes off her glasses and is instantly hot; she put the WORK in). Eliza is heartbroken and tries to return to her old life where she used to sell flowers, but no one recognizes her, and even she realizes she doesn’t fit in there any more. She then has the difficult task of trying to find a life for herself, which is surprisingly returning to Higgins for a relationship that I still don’t quite understand.

After trying to blend into different lifestyles, I had luck of my own in finding my way into a comfortable life, which I never take for granted. While writing this essay, my wife walked in as I was watching the scene where Eliza is singing in her comfy bed in a lavish bedroom. Without knowing what the theme of this essay was, she said, “This is you happy in bed and watching Gilmore Girls.” It sounds cliche, but it rings true. Years after crashing in friends’ bedrooms and keeping all of my possessions in the back of my car, I now share an apartment with my wife and cat with a comfortable life I never thought I would have, and one that everyone deserves to have. All thanks to a little bit of luck.

Jenn Montooth is a DC-based public historian, science communicator, and founder of the storytelling show Health's Angels: Personal Stories about Women's Health. She received her MA in Historical Studies at UMBC, where she focused on Black Power in 1970s America. Follow her on Twitter and send her a joke @jenn_montooth.