It's a Wonderful Life

This is the real story of It's A Wonderful Life, a remake of She's A Sexual Wife. Because this story is so long and the length of it necessitates that it has chapters and therefore under the new rules is not allowed in the Winter Contest, this is my unofficial Winter Contest entry.

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Every Christmas holiday like most American families, we'd gather around the television and watch, It's A Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. That was such a great movie, a classic right up there with the Judy Garland's Wizard of Oz, Maureen O'Hara's Miracle on 34th Street with Natalie Wood playing the little girl, and Bing Crosby's White Christmas. I could watch those movies a thousand times and never tire of them. A time when life was simpler then, before television appeared in every home, before DVD's, cell phones, home computers, and the Internet, those were the days of innocence and fairy tales.

Hollywood could tell a good story back then, albeit a censored one. Back then, it wasn't like it is today. Then, everything was censored before it was shown to the public. They thought they were protecting us from ourselves. Back then, they would have censored a Disney movie. I can imagine the hard time they must have given Walt Disney over his movie, Bambi, a movie made in 1942.

"Uhm, you'll have to change the doe's name from Bambi to something more appropriate. What about Dorothy? The deer's name sounds too much like a stripper I used to know, I mean, it just sounds too much like a stripper's name. If you keep this name, soon we'll have strip joints all across America. And you can't name a rabbit, Thumper. Rabbits are known for having sex and by naming the rabbit Thumper, well, it gives the wrong image. It will make every man and woman in America want to have sex with one another. Then, the next thing you know is we'll have a baby boomer generation where everyone is having babies after World War II."

In hindsight, maybe the censor had a point about the names Bambi and Thumper. All this time I thought the baby boomer generation was a natural occurrence from the end of World War II, when it was all Walt Disney's fault.

"Zippity Doo Dah..." Now, we know why Jiminy Cricket likes to watch and Pinocchio's nose grows.

For some inexplicable reason, my Dad had a problem with the movie, It's A Wonderful Life. He hated that movie. Every year, we shushed him from trying to give us his reasons why he hated the movie so. We didn't want to hear the real story and know about the behind the scenes glimpse and the true information about the movie. We didn't want one of our favorite movies ruined. Besides, we thought he was kidding. We thought he was making it all up. As it turned out, he was no fan of Donna Reed or Jimmy Stewart, perhaps the real reason why he hated the movie so and the reason for this story.

He told us that we don't know the real story behind the movie and if we did, we would feel differently about the movie and not like it either. He told us that if we knew about the lack of morals of Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed that we wouldn't like them either. Moreover, he told us that once we knew what really happened, we'd view the movie and Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart with a different perspective and without the tears that well up our eyes throughout the movie.

"That slut, Donna Reed, is hardly innocent," he'd say between sips of his whiskey and water. "Look at her with her white gloves. They make her look so pure. They make her look so innocent," he'd say every time he watched a rerun of the Donna Reed Show and he watched them over and again.

If you asked me, I think my Dad had a thing for Donna Reed. I know that I did. You couldn't blame him. She was a good looking woman. Back in the fifties, we all had a thing for Donna Reed. Only, none of us could understand why he insisted she was a slut. It didn't make any sense. It was Donna Reed for God's sake. It wasn't like she was Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doran, Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, Sophia Loren, or Zsa Zsa Gabor. She wasn't a sex siren.

Certainly, when talking about Donna Reed, we weren't talking about a sex symbol. We weren't talking about a beautiful, blonde bombshell with big boobs and low morals. We were talking about a movie star who played the girl next door and who played a woman who was wholesome and good. We were talking about Donna Reed who played Mary Hatch Bailey, George Bailey's wife in the movie, It's A Wonderful Life. I always hated it when my Dad acted so smugly smart acting like he knew something about her, about Jimmy Stewart, and about the movie that we didn't know. We just wanted to enjoy the comfort of our ignorance and watch one of our favorite movies, It's A Wonderful Life.

He told us that when they first made the movie, the original movie, the one made prior to making It's A Wonderful Life, that they reedited it over for the censors of the time. He told us that they couldn't tell the real story and sell the real movie to the American public, otherwise. We had no idea what he was talking about. It was the same spiel every year. Every time we tried to watch the movie, as a family, my Dad would start grumbling about the film.

"The real movie was scandalous," he'd say shaking his head before taking another sip of his whiskey and water. "Pre-dating even Bette Page, the first pin-up queen of the fifties, back then, if there were Paparazzi and evening celebrity magazines, Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart would have been exposed for the porn stars that they were."

Donna Reed and Jimmy Steward porn stars, how could he say such a thing about America's sweet hearts? We'd let him talk without really listening to him, while we tried to watch the movie. It was the same dialogue every year and every year, he repeated the same monologue. He really had an issue with this movie.

"Unfortunately, there was only Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, the queens of celebrity gossip at the time, and the movie studio paid them plenty to be quiet about what was going on behind closed doors with out of work Hollywood movie stars during World War II. That's why you never heard anything about it. They kept their image and the image of others, Judy Garland, Maureen O'Hara, and Bing Crosby squeaky clean. And those who watched the real movie weren't going to talk about it either. Then, it wasn't like it is now today. Back then, watching porn was a bad thing. Now, everything is smeared across the Internet and we're all so desensitized that we can hardly tell porn from a G rated movie."

My Dad insisted that the real story and the original movie was taken from an X-rated story and developed from an adult porn movie that was called She's A Sexual Wife. We thought he was drunk. We thought he was crazy. Not for one second did we ever think that he was right and what he said was the truth.

My Dad had a lot of stories that he told me over the years and I didn't believe any of them. I thought he was lying. I thought he was making it up and telling tall tales in the way that fathers talk to their sons. I never believed my Dad, only I should have and I'm saddened that I didn't. Now, I do.

Maybe, next time, I'll tell you the real truth and give you the behind the scenes view of The Wizard of Oz and about all those little, Asian Munchins. Yeah, I bet you didn't know that many of the Munchins were Asian. The movie was made in 1939 before World War II and before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, don't forget, when we didn't have anything against Japan and the Japanese. Why do you think they coined the term, "Follow the yellow brick road?" In the original movie, by the same name, The Wizard of Oz, it was shot in Australia and not Kansas. Instead of follow the yellow brick road, it was "Follow the yellow prick road."

Then, again, there's always the real story of The Miracle on 34th Street with Maureen O'Hara. The original movie was called The Orgasm on 44th street. It had no children in the movie and didn't even mention anything about Kris Kringle. It was just another porn movie with another out of work Hollywood movie star, Maureen O'Hara, playing the naked woman who had an orgasm on 44th Street. And, of course, how could we forget Bing Crosby's movie, the original and real White Christmas movie, if you know what I mean?

My Dad told us that the original movie, She's A Sexual Wife, was made just before the end of World War II. It was a time just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, coincidentally, a day that coincides with the end of the Winter Contest that Literotica is hosting, only as I wrote previously, I'm unable to enter this story there, as it has chapters and is much too long to post as one story. No one would read through it.

Back then, Pearl Harbor is what motivated America to war against Germany and Japan. At the time, some thought the world was coming to an end, ergo the need for such a film that would assuage the fears and calm the uneasiness of those too old to fight in a world war. Sex, especially for those who were too old to cut the mustard but who weren't too old to lick the jar, was always a heeling aphrodisiac. After all, Orson Welles's War of the Worlds of 1938 was still fresh in everyone's mind and some viewed World War II as Orson Welles's prophesy.

Now that I finally heard my Dad's story, I understand that originally the movie She's A Sexual Wife that spawned It's A Wonderful Life was made for rich, older, white men who could afford to pay for such a stag movie during a world war when nothing was available to the masses. For fear of being bombed, cinemas with their bright neon lights and drive-ins with their huge screens and that held the interest of a crowd of people in one place and at one time were closed during the war. Before VCR's and DVD's, certainly, it was only the rich who could afford to pay to watch such a porn movie in the privacy of their home. The average person couldn't afford a projector and a screen, not to mention all that popcorn.

"Indeed," so said my Dad, "It's A Wonderful Life is a remake of the original movie, She's A Sexual Wife, made so as to appease the strict censorship and to sell it to the puritanical American public."

My Dad passed away a few years ago. He was 90-years-old. He lived a good life. It was on his deathbed that he told me the real story about It's A Wonderful Life and about Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed and about what happened when they originally made the movie, She's A Sexual Wife. I'd like to share it with you, if you have a mind to read it.

In the next chapter Freddie tells his Dad's story about She's A Sexual Wife.

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Thank you for reading my story. I sincerely hope you enjoyed it. Please take a moment to vote, make a public comment, and/or give me feedback. Your support is why I write. Your feedback will motivate me to write a better story the next time.

If you haven't already, please take moment to add me and/or this story or any other of my stories to your list of favorites. Thanks, Freddie, Bostonfictionwriter.

To be continued...