The Marriage Machine

by Gillian Freeman

In 1947 the Marriage Machine stood in a New York bar. For a nickel it dispensed a truncated version of the Christian marriage service, a cellophane packet of confetti and a miniature marriage certificate which dropped into a pocket like a church door. Seventeen-year-old Marion, on a visit from England, married Johnny Hartman in front of the Machine. He filled in their names on the certificate and with this warranty they went to bed, although, the reputation of GIs being what it was, Marion’s friend Angela refused to believe they had not done so before.

Twenty years later, on the voyage home to England, Marion remembers her love affair with Johnny, their real wedding in the Berkshire village church and a third ceremony (for fun, Johnny said) in a Las Vegas Instant Marriage Chapel, where a plastic corsage was included in the price of the service.

271 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1975

About the author

Born in London, daughter of Dr. Jack Freeman and his wife, she graduated in English Language and Literature from the University of Reading in 1951. She married Edward Thorpe, novelist and ballet critic of the Evening Standard, in 1955. They have two daughters. One of her best known books was the 1961 novel The Leather Boys (published under the pseudonym Eliot George, a reference to the writer George Eliot), a story of a gay relationship between two young working-class men, later turned into a film for which she wrote the screenplay, this time under her own name. The novel was commissioned by the publisher Anthony Blond, who wanted a story about a "Romeo and Romeo in the South London suburbs". Her non-fiction book The Undergrowth of Literature (1967), was a pioneering study of pornography. In 1979, on another commission from Blond, she wrote a fictional diary, Nazi Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg, 1938–48; Freeman's authorship was not at first revealed and many readers took it to be genuine. Her most recent book is But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury (2006), a fictional study of the Bloomsbury Group.