Cheaper by the Dozen

Here's my old copy of Cheaper by the Dozen right here. The bright orange binding is worn through to the cardboard, there are grape juice stains all through Chapter 3, and a couple of pages are stuck together with what still, incredibly, smells like peanut butter. God, I loved that book. I read it over and over again as pure escapism. I was an only child curled up at the end of the sofa, imagining what it would be like to have 11 brothers and sisters.

Cheaper by the Dozen was a best-seller in the 1940s, and inspired a 1950 movie starring Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy as Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who raised 12 kids with ingenuity and precision.

Now here is the 2003 version, with Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt. It isn't my purpose to use the old movie to hammer the new one, because they're both sweet and zany, but to notice how much our ideas have changed in 53 years; especially our ideas about fathers.

Frank Gilbreth was a real man, and the original book was co-written by two of his children. He was, they explained, a Time and Motion Expert, who broke down every task into its essential elements and then studied them to see how they could be done more quickly and easily. At work, he improved assembly lines. At home, he applied his theories to his family, believing that 12 children were as easy to raise as two, if you analyzed the daily family routine and assigned part of it to every kid -- even very small parts for very small kids. The unspoken assumption was that the father was the center of authority, he knew best, and his wife was his loyal co-pilot.

We know now that this model is a case of sexist chauvinism. Gilbreth's view of fathers is long out of date, and American men survive in the movies only as examples of incompetence, unrealistic ambition and foolish pride. Gene Siskel once started a list of movies with fathers in them, to demonstrate that Hollywood preferred whenever possible to have single mothers and avoid fathers altogether. If there had to be a father, he was (a) in a comedy, the butt of the joke, and (b) in a drama, a child abuser, an alcoholic, an adulterer, an abandoner of families, or preferably, all of the above. At some point during a half century of Hollywood fathering, "father knows best" was replaced by "shut your pie hole."

Tom Baker, the Steve Martin character in "Cheaper by the Dozen," has a good heart and loves his wife and kids, but that leaves him with a few promising character flaws. He is incapable of inspiring discipline, for example, and would sacrifice his family to his ambition. He's a football coach for a cow college in Midland, Ill., but is offered the head coaching job at Lincoln University in Evanston. We're supposed to think of Northwestern.

Well, of course, fool that Tom is, he takes the job and steps up to national prominence and a big salary, even though this means his kids will have to switch schools and find new boyfriends and girlfriends, and they will have to move out of the overcrowded bungalow where they all lived in one another's pockets, and into a sprawling two-story corner home in a $1 million neighborhood. One of those houses with a circular drive and balconies and garrets and a garden.