Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1947)

p of counsel always use lam pat! How could she lead the active life she does if she didn’t have Tampax to depend on during NO BELTS NO PINS NO PADS NO ODOR those miserable days each month?... Tampax is that different kind of monthly protection you have heard about — worn internally without any belts, pins or external pads whatever! It’s a very modern product indeed, invented by a doctor and now sold at practically all drug and notion counters in city or country wherever you live. And that’s a fact! Accepted for Advertising by the Journal of the American Medical Association There is plenty to tell about Tampax! It is fashioned of pure surgical cotton compressed in those slim white applicators for dainty insertion. Your hands need not touch the Tampax and you don’t feel it when in place. It cannot cause bulges or ridges under a dress. And when disposal time comes, Tampax has only 1/15 the bulk of the "other kind.’’ No chafing. No odor. Quick to change. Wear it in your tub or shower. Millions of women depend upon Tampax every month. The Economy Box holds four months’ average supply. Three absorbency-sizes to choose from — Regular, Super, Junior. Tampax Incorporated, Palmer, Mass. I Can't ( Continued from page 51) and I reported each one faithfully. And each time, one of his “leg-men” would come to me with, “Really, Erskine, Mr. Sinatra didn’t know it was you on the ‘Anchors Aweigh’ set.” But nothing came in person from Frankie until the day he sent me this wire from New York: “Just continue to print lies about me and my temper, not my temperament, will see that you get a belt in your vicious and stupid mouth.” Lies, he called them. My reply was simply, “I’ll be in my office any morning. Don’t bother to open the door, Frankie, come through the crack.” Then after three years of beefing with me, Frank Sinatra takes a poke at another columnist, Lee Mortimer. When that tempest hit the headlines, a certain newspaper chain started accusing Sinatra of being a Communist. That was too thick for me. I don’t mind a private scrap but fair play is fair play. In my column and on the air, I came to Sinatra’s defense. I didn’t believe he was a Communist and said so. That evening at home we were at the dinner table when the phone rang. My nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter answered. She is a Sinatra fan and she had that pale purple swooner’s color when she rushed back to me gushing. “Daddy, oh Daddy, Sancfrinatra’s on the phone . . . I mean . . . Oh, it’s Frankie,” and she swooned. My six-year-old son, reared in strict anti-Sinatraism, rushed upstairs for his baseball bat as I went to the phone. Sure enough, after three years, it was The Voice which said, “Hello, Erskine . . . this is Sinatra. Heard your program while driving home this afternoon and I almost fell out of the car. I want to thank you for coming to my defense.” Well, that was that ... it is a memorable moment to have a love crooner offer to poke you in the nose. It’s completely out of character. I autographed my picture and sent it to Frank Sinatra for future identification purposes, and am continuing to fill out my collection of Crosby records. I HAD an air show five times a week and no giveaways. This, mind you, when most any woman could get up and make a fool of herself for three minutes on the air and walk out with a refrigerator on her back. I wanted a good clean prize, and no fumadidles needed to win it. So I picked Bob Cummings, wrapped him in cellophane tied with a big blue bow and bid the ladies write me letters. Mrs. Joe Public could write a letter explaining what she would do with Bob Cummings for a full day, if she won him, and the best letter would win the prize. The runners-up would get wrist watches. Joan Leslie, Irene Rich and Gracie Allen, the judges, spent weeks reading the 50,000 letters received. Bob Cummings read the letters, too. He grunted and groaned, laughed and protested. “I hope this gal doesn’t win,” he said of one. “There’s a limit to how far this thing can go, prize or no prize.” Some of those women really had right bright ideas. Mrs. Edith Hudson Vincent of Delmar, Delaware, was the winner. Her letter said: “If I had Robert Cummings for a day, I would ask him to come and help clerk in my husband’s grocery store, because I would like to see how a movie star acts when he gets with folks in a small town in a real life situation. In the evening, we could show him a little local night life.” Gracie Allen brought me the winning letter . . . “Tell Bob to take his corn plasters with him,” she said. Forget Bob and his wife, Mary, flew to New York and the next morning hopped over to a field near Delmar, Delaware. Just before their early morning take-off, Bob sent me a wire from New York. “This is the day Stop I’m scared to death Stop how did you get me mixed up in this anyway Stop” I waited and wondered all day, then Bob called me in Hollywood that night from Delmar. This is what he said: “The Vincents are swell people and I’ve had a whale of a day. OUCH! Mrs. Vincent, that’s Edith, the winner, met us at the airport, took us to her college, then WBOC, the Mutual station where she heard about your contest. OUCH!, we went to the grocery store and met Bob, her husband. Did you know that peas are not just peas? There are small peas, large peas, medium grade, dry and canned in No. 2 or No. 31/2 tins or frozen. And why didn’t you tell me about those infernal cash registers? I’m $2.21 short for the day. “I ran my legs off, and so did Mary. Big rush at the store. There ought to be a Society for the Prevention of, OUCH!, Cruelty to Grocery Clerks . . . I’ll be president. After work, went to a good homecooked dinner at Edith and Bob’s. What a meal, the Derby couldn’t touch it. Fried chicken and all the trimmings. “Later, at a local night spot, we found out it was Edith’s birthday . . . and the whole town turned out to help celebrate it. Mary and I haven’t had so much fun in years. OUCH! I wish Edith had won me for a week, we’d like to know these people better.” Before I hung up, I asked Bob what all the ouching was about. “I’m soaking my feet in Epsom Salts and Mary’s pouring boiling water on them . . . OUCH! I’m scalded.” The contest was a success, Bob and Mary Cummings had the time of their lives and Edith had her movie star for the day. But the reason she entered the contest was to win a wrist watch as a runner-up! FOR nine months in Hollywood, between columns, I was a press agent for a couple of mad men named Gene Towne and Graham Baker. Our job was to push motion pictures with anything we could think up along the publicity line. I was stuck with a picture called “Little Men,” a picture no one would want to see if they gave away a gross of bubble-gum with each admission. One morning I sat at my desk swearing at Towne, Baker and the whole bloody business, when I spied a picture on the back of a magazine. It was Elsie, The Borden Cow, shown in her boudoir at the Chicago World’s Fair. Brain storms hit suddenly in Hollywood. I remembered that in the picture “Little Men,” Kay Francis had to milk a cow. I wired the Borden Milk Company an offer for Elsie to be that cow. Borden wired right back . . . “Great, don’t worry about a thing, we’ll take care of all expenses and plug your picture in our ads.” I was a genius, I thought. Elsie completed her engagement at the Chicago Fair, climbed aboard her special car on the Santa Fe Chief with her nurse, her vet and the President of the Borden Company. I released the story of “Elsie Goes to Hollywood to Be a MOO-vie Star.” We paraded The Milk through Los Angeles streets in a special truck with a white picket fence around it down to the Ambassador Hotel where she entertained the Press at a “Pasture Luncheon.” Elsie took up residence on the RKO lot to await her call to the cameras. It was getting to be Elsie’s picture by now. She 88