Damon Runyon

St. Joseph Gazette/February 9, 1937

We note that a Long Island lady got legal separation from her husband the other day on the grounds of mental cruelty. She said her husband stays out all night playing cards. 

We are willing to concede that this practice may be developed to a degree where it constitutes mental cruelty to a wife, all right, but our own experience teaches us that it is apt to be just as cruel mentally to the husband. 

We mean the staying out all night playing cards. We know of nothing crueler, mentally, than the cold, gray morning light coming up on an all-night card game in which a husband is a bad loser, with the additionally cruel prospect before him of confronting the good wife later on.

However, that isn’t the point of our lecture. We often run into items of news about legal separations and divorces on the grounds of mental cruelty, and we are struck by the fact that on this particular ground, the wife is generally the plaintiff. 

We don’t know why husbands do not avail themselves more of this plea. It may be that they have not yet been properly advised as to some of the things that constitute mental cruelty. For instance, mud packs, when used in the home. 

Our legal department assures us that the mud pack, when used in the home, is without a doubt mental cruelty to a brutal and inhuman degree, and would be so held by any fair and impartial court of married men.

The mud pack is a species of facial treatment that has become rather popular among the ladies in recent years. It consists of the application to the features of a thick layer of a gooey substance that they call mud. 

It probably isn’t actually mud, at least not the kind of mud that sends a fellow to a form chart to see if there is anything to indicate that a steed ought to run in that kind of going. But it looks like mud, and it feels like mud, and just between all of us over here in the corner, it tastes like mud. 

It is an oily, olive-green substance in the beginning, not greatly dissimilar to the mud we used to have in the alley on rainy days back of the soap factory in Peppersauce Bottoms. But when applied to the features, and permitted to dry, it turns grayish color, lending a slightly ghastly aspect to the wearer, especially as she usually pins her hair well back so the mud will not get mixed up with it. 

At first, the ladies underwent this facial treatment somewhat surreptitiously in the cloisters of the beauty parlors, and the gentlemen knew of it only by vague rumor. 

As a completely secret practice, the mud pack could scarcely be deemed a cause for action, of course. But then the ladies got to mudding it up at home. The first disclosures of this fact being made public when a gentleman on Morningside Heights went home unexpectedly one afternoon, and, finding his good wife with her features packed in mud, took a shot at her, thinking she was a ghost. 

The gentleman might have been acquitted if he hadn’t taken two more shots after she had confessed her identity, although fortunately none of the shots took effect. The gentleman got two years, and some hinted afterwards that the jury of married men were themselves aware of the mud pack and were sore at him because he missed. 

Anyway, the ladies no longer exercise any restraint or secrecy with reference to the mud pack, and it is said to be a medical fact that cardiac cases among married men have materially increased as the result of the shock that invariably ensues when a gentleman sees his good wife in a mud pack for the first time, or even the second or third time. 

This shock reacts on the mind and becomes mental cruelty.

The mental cruelty is all the greater, our legal department advises, because the avowed purpose of the mud pack is to beautify the face, yet after the mud pack is peeled off the face revealed is invariably the same old face. 

Our legal department says that the mud pack takes its place as mental cruelty, along with the fiendish practice of wives compelling husbands who have reached the stage where they are wearing cantaloupes under their vests to attend movies in which Mr. Clark Gable is depicted taking a bath. 

If not Mr. Clark Gable, then Mr. Tyrone Power, or Mr. Robert Taylor, or Mr. Franchot Tone. It is very strange, our legal department ruminated, that the movies never depict Mr. Guy Kibbee taking a bath.

Our legal department thinks the frowner is also mental cruelty, but it isn’t sure. They said they would look it up and let us know. 

The frowner is a device that the ladies paste between their eyes to prevent frowns from turning into permanent wrinkles. Our legal department said it sounds like plenty of mental cruelty to them.

We then asked what the legal department thought of the practice of mature married ladies leaving off their stockings when they put on evening dress, tinting their toenails a bright vermilion, and forcing their husbands to escort them, in this array, before the public gaze. 

We wanted to know if that isn’t mental cruelty to the husband. Our legal department hasn’t given us a formal answer as yet, but we hear it has six of its best lawyers hurriedly preparing an advance defense to charges of disturbing the peace, just in case.