Glamour of Hollywood (Apr 1939 - May 1941 (assorted issues))

SOMETHING has happened to all the sweet young girls one used to see around. Maybe I've grown out of the age bracket where they abound, but look¬ ing back over the memoirs I’ve kept for the past five years, man and boy, I come to the conclusion that sweet young things are as rare as Ben Jonson, who is now dead. Idly thumbing through, I find there have been a lot of clever girls, a few brilliant ones, some ambitious firebrands who would do anything to get ahead (some day I must publish these memoirs) . But the sweet girl — the kind father used to make — -went out with the perfumed garter. What’s taken her place is the Mean Girl. She’s someone with plenty in the middle of her forehead with which she could be very, very good but she prefers to be horrid. When she’s horrid she thinks she’s terrific. I don’t know if Clare Luce or Mar¬ garet Mitchell is to blame, but the germ of the horrid idea has spread into an epidemic — a sort of Scarlett O’Hara fever. Girls sit up late at night thinking up new ways of being nasty in the belief that it will make them interesting. They want to keep people guessing. After a while people don’t guess anymore. They know — most of them with a feeling of infinite boredom — it will be the worst. IT would be all right with me if women practised this disposition only on women, but they’ve taken to inflicting it on men too. And the shameful part of it is that some male pin-cushions profess to like it. They’ll swear on a stack of Glamours, walling their eyes around, that no woman can be attractive unless she’s a witch on wheels. Their idea of a dream girl is a slip of a colleen who used to pull the legs off flies when she was a little girl and then gradu¬ ated to bigger game. A fellow who was a friend of mine until he told me this recounted how he once clasped his beloved in his arms and heard her mur¬ mur, “I wonder how it would be to run over an old man.” He proposed to her that very night. Another friend — I had a lot of free theater tickets in those days — was engaged to a girl who never had the slightest intention of marrying him. She kept putting off the wedding date from time to time just to see his flesh quiver. I like them sweet. I like girls who can be amusing without being libelous. I like girls who can pique your curiosity without cutting your throat. I like girls who say what they mean half the time, like ordinary people. I like girls with a good stock of tranquillity. Most of them are afraid that if they don't keep things in a turmoil, nobody will find them interesting. Turmoil is all right up to a point and then a man loses interest instead of sleep. Incidentally I like girls who like me. The coldshoulder technique can be overdone. Some French¬ man (all authorities on such matters are Gallic) once observed that a woman could become so en¬ grossed in the subtleties of the chase that she would fail to notice nobody was following her. THE Theory of the Chase, or the n’yah, n’yah, you-can’t-catch-me school of thought has been carried past the courtship stage right into mar¬ riage. Wives who have read too many popular novels disappear for an evening and just smile when their husbands ask them where they’ve been, even if they only paid a visit to the Public Library. This is bound to exasperate some husbands to the point where they turn the theory of the chase into rather rough practice. The real reason I like them sweet — and every¬ body else does, too, after a while — goes right to the root of the old subconscious. A girl may be dazzling and witty but after she has stood you on your head for the nth time, you pick yourself up, take a look at your ego sporting a shiner and your black and blue emotions, and say, “What the hell for!” The line: “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever” was written by a Cavalier poet. And he wasn’t a Cavalier for nothing. 19