Her brother's keeper (season 7) - why this episode is important
As I mentioned in a post a while ago, the relationship Ben-Marie fascinates me more than almost anything else in Bonanza, perhaps, because it also influences the relationship Ben-Little Joe. It is also interesting to look Adam-Marie, because it has an influence on Adam-Little Joe.
Joe’s mother gets more mentions on Bonanza than Elizabeth or Inger.
Right in the first episode “A Rose for Lotta” Adam mentions Joe’s “French Quarter mother”, an insult which defines Adam’s difficult relationship with Marie, but also with Joe. (Who would insult a person he likes just to wind up somebody else?) So Marie (then Felicia) is from New Orleans.
In “The Julia Bulette Story” we find out more: the people in town talked about her, Adam and Ben couldn’t go certain places, do certain things, because Marie - so Ben tells Joe -was part creole and had ways and spoke a strange language, that must have been so different from what the average person (who all had different backgrounds) in the area knew, that people were prejudiced against her. All this was apparently also another reason why Adam resented her.
In “The Stranger” we find out, that there is something about Marie’s past bad enough that Ben gives up his candidacy for Governor of Nevada to avoid it being made public and that she could be blackmailed over, while she was still alive. Something so bad that she wanted to forget it, and there is a possible connection to her coming from a certain notorious section of New Orleans, a place sailors referred to as The Flats.
In “The First Born” her first born son appears, and we hear that she was married before she met Ben and that she had a child who she thought was dead, after her mother-in-law, who hated her, had taken the boy away from her and told her he had died.
Then, finally, she makes an appearance herself in “Marie My Love”. I like this episode, even if I think that the actress was miscast and despite the fact that it tries to put right some of the negative things that have been said about her past in those previous episodes. We learn, that Marie is the innocent victim of deceit, and that apparently she didn’t do anything bad in the past. Rather, a stranger attempted to rape her and when her husband walked in on them in the bedroom, he thought she was cheating on him, when, in fact she wasn’t. But her reputation was ruined nonetheless. Still, she seemed to be popular enough and wealthy enough to live a decent life. (It didn’t look to me like she lived in a notorious section of New Orleans where sailors spent their time, though essentially she was a kind of saloon girl in a posh saloon-type of establishment.) But, we already know that continuity and Bonanza are two different things.
Still, it’s awful enough if you think about it: she falls in love, gets pregnant, gets married (perhaps in a different order, who knows). Then the drama begins: the stranger in her bed, her husband leaving her, all of New Orleans thinking she is an adulteress. There we have a pregnant woman with a ruined reputation who loses her child after birth. Within a year she apparently begins to lead a good life and then loses everything.
Quite some time apparently passes between these events and her meeting Ben. She gets her act together and makes most of her situation. She is a well educated, self-confident woman, who knows what she wants and what she doesn’t want, who has strong opinions and convictions.
She certainly is quite different from Elizabeth and Inger. But in my opinion the episode “Marie My Love” fails to show the viewer, why Ben fell in love with her. So, I - just like many fan fiction writers - construct my own picture of her in which I combine the given facts with my own ideas into the image of a lovable person.
So we had the three flash back episodes with the wives, and, as I showed, the many mentions of Marie. And then we get to season 7, there is the episode “The Strange One” in which Ben talks about Marie, and the episode “Her brother’s keeper”. In this episode, Ben falls in love - which he didn’t do very often.
Claire, the sister of one of the Cartwright’s neighbours, makes an appearance, and Ben immediately likes her. He enthusiastically shows her the Ponderosa, takes her to the most beautiful places. In one place, he tells her Indian stories about the lake and rock and mountains. When Claire asks him if he comes there very often, he immediately becomes sad and thoughtfully says that he hadn’t been there fore quite some time. She notices the sudden change in his mood and asks him why he says it like that and asks him who he used to bring there before. When Ben answers “Little Joe’s mother”, Claire suddenly becomes uncomfortable and says “It’s getting colder”, expressing her wish to leave.
Later, after a trip to the countryside, Ben takes her to the Cartwright house to get warm. She comes in and looks around, and when Ben asks her if she likes it, she says yes and “It’s you, Ben, you… And someone else.” We see Claire, and in front of her Marie’s music box on the table. While Ben goes to the kitchen to get coffee, Claire walks around and looks at the house. On Ben’s desk, she finds Marie’s portrait. (Elizabeth and Inger are not there.) She asks Little Joe about it. Then, Ben returns and says to her “The house is yours”. She immediately contradicts: “Oh no. Not mine. It’s yours Ben Cartwright, it could never be mine, really.” And a while later she adds: “Loving you, being anything meaningful in your life, that’s impossible.”
Almost at the end, we see Ben sitting at his desk, looking at Marie’s picture, lost in thought, sighing with sadness.
After 3 marriages and more than ten years since his last wife’s death, he still loves her so much and cannot let her go, that another woman felt he could never really love her enough or even just as much. She knew, that she would have to share his heart, and she felt inadequate, perhaps also not more than a replacement. And all that, despite of all the problems and difficulties that Marie had brought to the Ponderosa and Ben…
I think Ben & Marie deserve a movie to themselves)) if this isn’t material for the most epic love story, then I don’t know what is.
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