Peter Laurence writes to recommend Isabel Scott Rorick’s Mr. and Mrs. Cugat (1940), a collection of comic sketches about Mr. and Mrs. George Cugat, a happily if comically married couple that was a huge best-seller in its time. For a book about a couple with no children it managed to spawn an impressive number of offspring: Hollywood filmed it as Are Husbands Necessary? starring Ray Milland and Betty Fields in 1942; CBS broadcast it on radio as My Favorite Husband with Lucille Ball and Richard Denning from 1948 to 1951; CBS then put it on television as the landmark sitcom I Love Lucy from 1951 to 1957; and finally, CBS milked the cow one more time, running My Favorite Husband for two-and-a-half seasons on television with Barry Nelson and Joan Caulfield.
I recognized Mr. and Mrs. Cugat when Peter recommended it, but had assumed that it was about Latin bandleader Xavier Cugat and one of his five wives. Instead, George Cugat is Fourth Vice President of the Tri-State Bank in some nameless Ohio city and Mary Elizabeth (Liz) is his superficially addle-brained (but ultimately smarter) wife. Rorick structures the book around phrases from the traditional wedding vows (“… to have and to hold …”, “… for richer or poorer …”), but this is still just a collection of anecdotes. Unlike in I Love Lucy, however, George is the comic goat just as often as Liz. This synopsis of one of the episodes gives a taste of that:
The year that the big annual social function, the Bal Masque of the Coronet, turned to an African version, Mrs. Cugat wasn’t a bit astonished that Mr. Cugat put off getting his costume to the last minute. But she was certainly surprised when he turned up in a complete suit of armor, completely cock-eyed, and managed to steal the show — and also to set himself on fire inside his iron suit.
Mr. and Mrs. Cugat is out of print, except from print-on-demand publishers, but you can read it for free from the Open Library (Link), along with its 1945 sequel, Outside Eden