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Big Blonde (1980) (TV)
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0207336/

 Sally Kellerman ...  Hazel 
 Victor Griffin ...  The Escort 
 Harris Laskawy ...  A Businessman 
 Trey Wilson ...  The Playboy 
 Jess Osuna ...  The Gambler 
 James Gallery ...  Joe, the Bartender 
 Donna Mitchell ...  The Model 
 Richard Dow ...  The Model's Boyfriend 
 Anita Morris ...  Bootsie 
 Michael Lombard ...  Ben Wade 
 Peggy Lowe ...  Ladies Room Attendant 
 John Lithgow ...  Herbie Morse 
 Peg Murray ...  Mrs. Martin 
 George Coe ...  Ed 
 Bert Michaels ...  Sidney 
 
First Broadcast on Great Performances on PBS

Author, critic, and celebrated wit Dorothy Parker first published Big Blonde in a popular magazine in 1929, at the end of the decade with which she is closely associated. The story presents a sad and biting view of a woman's life in the 1920s, an era often considered both fun and liberating for women. Big Blonde received a warm critical and popular reception and was honored as the best short story of the year in the prestigious O. Henry competition for 1929. A year later it appeared in a collection of stories by Parker entitled Laments for the Living, and has since been reprinted in many anthologies and readers. Big Blonde is considered Parker's most significant literary accomplishment and also her most autobiographical piece of writing. For this reason, it has continued to command the fascination and respect of readers.

In this adaptation, sally Kellerman plays a dress model. During this period she worked to be popular, especially with men. This entailed going out, being fun and a good sport.  She meets Herbie Morse, played by John Lithgow, when she is nearly thirty and marries him six weeks later. He is a hard drinker and a charmer. Mrs. Morse had had a couple thousand evenings of being a good sport when she met him and she was nearly thirty, so she was eager to get married and make a change. For Mrs. Morse marriage is a welcomed alternative to the life she had known. But Herbie's expectations of married life are different. He apparently was attracted to her for the same reasons other men were—because she was fun and indulgent of his drinking and passive in the face of his desires. When Mrs. Morse—at last wedded and relaxed—begins to cry and to want to stay home, Herbie soon becomes impatient with her. In an attempt to save their relationship she begins to drink with him, but to no avail. Despite the fact that the institution of marriage appears superficially to have little in common with the more informal social, sexual, and financial relationships Mrs. Morse has later, Herbie sees her and treats her in a way that is strikingly similar to the way her later lovers do.

Perched between World War I and the Great Depression, the 1920s are mythologized as a time when Americans—especially American women—were independent and carefree. However, there is, of course, another side to women's experience during this decade. Parker was certainly among the most socially adventurous and professionally successful women of her era, and she is remembered as spirited and self-possessed—the quintessential woman of the roaring twenties. Thus it is interesting to note that Parker chose to reflect some of her most intimate and traumatic personal experiences through the character of Mrs. Morse, a sad and ineffectual woman whose fading, out-dated style of beauty marks her as a creature of a bygone era.  In Big Blonde Parker deflates a romanticized idea of the 1920s according to which women enjoyed a new freedom to both enjoy and assert themselves without negative consequences. Mrs. Morse reflects the fact that many women were left behind and consigned to more traditional female roles even as standards for gender-related behavior changed radically. And, furthermore, while Mrs. Morse might be seen as enjoying the freedoms of a less socially and sexually restricted culture, Parker makes it clear that she must also pay a heavy price