Day 164 - What Happened After Hopalong Cassidy Got the Girl?

William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy and Robert Mitchum
as one of the bad guys, by kndynt2099, via Flickr.com

I have been reflecting on some of the questions posed by Jill Williams in her memoir Confessions of a Love Addict regarding just where her image of relationships came from. I heard Jill speak two weeks ago at the San Diego Writers and Editors Guild on the process of getting her book published. My interest in her book was more for that process than the contents, but she has a way with words, so it was worth the read.

Jill describes what her mother used to say to her every night when tucking her into bed as laying a firm foundation for Jill's rocky relationships. When Jill used to say, "See you in the morning, Mommy," her mother's response was, "You never know." That is a pretty frightening thing for a child to hear every night. And even if Jill remembers that as having happened every night, but it only happened once, it is still a frightening thing for a child to be left wondering if the one person who is always supposed to be there for you might just disappear. Jill's conclusion is that her lack of confidence that her mother would always be there colored her expectations of other relationships, leading her into doomed relationships that she was so desperate to save that she ended up boomeranging back into them after they had failed again and again.

Well, I never had any doubts that Mom and Dad were going to be there for me the next morning, the next week, the next month, or the next year. But I fell in love with cowboys, having decided at the age of four that I was going to marry Roy Rogers. I can still remember how devastated I was to learn not simply that he was already married to Dale Evans, but that he was older than my Dad.

Hopalong Cassidy image by Movie-Fan,
via Flickr.com

So I started looking around for other cowboy heroes. One of the most available was Hopalong Cassidy. I think there was a Hopalong Cassidy movie or TV show on TV every day of the week for a couple of years in the early 50's. And I loved them all. Never mind that I think I even knew William Boyd, the actor who played Hopalong, looked older than both my Dad and Roy Rogers; at least he wasn't married. But then again, maybe that was a bigger problem than I had at first thought. . .

The plot lines were similar. Hopalong and his two sidekicks, one young and prone to get into trouble with some young lady and the other grizzled and cynical, would ride into town just as some trouble had started brewing. There was always at least one really bad guy, usually a whole gang of them, and the sherriff was inept or had just been killed or was involved with the bad guys himself. And there was some good guy with a daughter, usually living on the edge of town, who needed saving. And Hopalong and his pals were just the ones to do the saving, routing the bad guys along the way. And at the end of the show, Hopalong would ride out of town with the daughter on her own horse by his side.

I wanted to be that daughter.

But that begs the question of just what happened after Hopalong got the girl? The next week he was back again with his pals, riding into some other new town, without the girl. Where did he put her? What did he tell her? Just what did he do to her? WHERE WAS SHE THE NEXT WEEK?

I wonder how much those images formed the basis for what I expected from relationships.

For many years, my self esteem was so low that I expected to be a disappointment to any guy worth spending time with. And that meant that any guy who wanted to spend time with me must not be worth my spending time on him, right? It was a vicious circle that ensured I would never have more than fleeting happiness. After all, Hopalong never kept the girl he got from one show to the next. That must be the way it works, right?

Did the guys ever wonder what happened after Hopalong got the girl? Did they think it strange that he would show up the next week without the girl from the week before? Or did they all stop thinking about Hopalong Cassidy when they realized girls wouldn't give them cooties?

Did William Boyd realize what low expectations his character would leave for the girls in the audience? Did he care? Did anybody care?