I googled just now and realised Daddy Long Legs was published in 1912, which makes it even less understandable why people were lapping it up in the eighties.
Me. I am the people, me and everyone else I knew. We loved the crap out of that awful book when we were teens, and when the Japanese cartoon version hit our screens (in the nineties?) we loved it even harder. We loved Judy's descriptions of life in an American all-girl college, and her obligatory letters to the mysterious Daddy Long legs- the only payment she had to make for her otherwise free college board and tuition- were the height of whimsy and love. Wuthering Heights what? Jane Eyre who? It was all about the blossoming love of teenaged orphan Jerusha nn Judy for her rich older benefactor, Daddy Long Legs, who provided her with a free college education after plucking her out of a Dickensian orphanage, and then married her.
Barf. What was wrong with us? Why did I and my little posse of schoolfriends and our moms love this gross book so much? Why did nobody tell us that it was wrong? Why was it lying around in every house that had an old bookshelf on it somewhere?
Years and years and years later, I chose to watch the Hollywood movie of the book with my Dad as he slid into dementia, thinking the singing and dancing from his favourite actors from the fifties and sixties might cheer him up or distract up. Leslie Caron was the orphaned Jerusha, Fred Astaire was the rich man falling in love with her -ahem- intelligence and personality. They twirled around and sang about their love. Some of Daddy Long Legs's fusty old rich-man friends huffed and puffed, in added scenes not from the book, suggesting that falling in love and marrying a teenaged orphan that he just put through college was just - not the done thing you know old chap.
Astaire poo-pood them, twinkling down the stairs of the orphanage, what did they know of love, boring old men! He was in love! LOOOVVVE!
Ugh. What the fuck was wrong with us?
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