Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert)’s Timeline and Summary
- Ellie marries King Westley before the film begins but is kidnapped by her father before the marriage can be consummated.
- Ellie's father holds her captive on a ship that he says is headed to South America.
- Ellie goes on hunger strike, refusing to eat until she's let off the ship, but her father won't budge. She's stuck, her father says, unless she gets her marriage to King Westley annulled.
- Ellie dives off the ship and swims to shore, determined to get back to New York.
- Ellie buys a bus ticket, then meets Peter Warne, whose seat she takes.
- Ellie's bag is stolen, which means her money's lost.
- At another rest stop, Ellie gets off the bus and assumes that it will wait for her; this is her entitlement speaking.
- The bus leaves without Ellie, but Peter Warne waits for her, and they ride the next bus together, which leaves twelve hours later.
- More complications await poor Ellie, who sits right next to a major weirdo in order to avoid Peter. In the end, Peter has to intervene, pretending to be her husband, so that the pervy bus-rider Shapeley will leave Ellie alone.
- Ellie finds herself pretending to be Peter's wife when she shares a cabin in an auto camp with him after her bus breaks down.
- After several more misadventures, Ellie realizes that she loves Peter and tells him so. She says she doesn't want her fancy life anymore; she only wants to be with him, jumping "into the surf" (his code phrase for adventure).
- Ellie's distraught when Peter doesn't say anything in return, and then she's kicked out of the hotel that he's left in the middle of the night. (He's gone to borrow the money that he thinks he needs in order to propose. But Ellie doesn't know this.)
- Kicked to the curb, Ellie breaks down and calls her father, who's been trying to get her to return of her own free will ever since it became clear that she had evaded the detectives he'd sent out for her.
- Back at her father's place, Ellie pretends to be happy to be going through with a proper marriage ceremony with King Westley (even though she's already married to him, technically). But really, she's distraught and distracted, as her father notes.
- Ellie tells her father that she loves Peter but is enraged to find a letter from Peter to her father that she thinks proves he only ever cared about money.
- Ellie scoffs at Peter when he visits her father's office.
- At the altar, though, Ellie finally realizes that she can't go through with the marriage to King Westley.
- Ellie runs away, finds Peter, and lives happily ever after with him after her marriage to King is annulled and "the Walls of Jericho" separating her from Peter finally topple.