Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1938)

most unreasonable creature alive, with the little woman striving earnestly to please him. His wife's success generally goes to his head. There is still another faction contending that men who marry women with money earn every cent of it — so take your choice. There is the average percentage of girls who are desperate at losing their man, or who want to lose him, or who want some other girl's man. It is the same in London, Shanghai and Baltimore, only you hear more about it in Hollywood. The happy marriages here do not particularly engage the attention of the press. Local and national columnists and gossip purveyors, alert to the fact that women confide in their beauty operators, regard us as one of their most reliable sources. Various advances have been made to me, attractive "propositions" which I have resisted — with a reservation. If the approacher is also a good customer, I try to keep her (or even him!) interested with harm Mrs. J. brandished the revol/er at Mr. J. and Rea — and if what happened after that had ever leaked out, there would have been another big Hollywood scandal The glamour girls of today dig in their gardens and bake cakes; but the old divorce-marriageromance cycle still spins, and the beauty parlor is its center less and well-known chatter delivered in a hush-hush tone. You can say, confidentially, "I understand Marlene Dietrich sleeps with all her windows open," and some of these gossips will actually think they are getting the low-down! UF course, like many other operators here, I do know when a lot of divorces, marriages, scandals, romances and options are going to break, before Winchell does, and frequently I have been the only outsider who did know. But I have known more that never break. Always I have felt that a woman should not be held responsible for what she says while she is having her scalp massaged and her nails manicured. She is off guard, and her revelations should be regarded as case histories. The beauty parlor compares with the doctor's office in this respect: in one, the woman has her hair down literally; in the other, figuratively. She is her true age in both places, probably the only time she ever is, after twenty -five. It defeats her purpose to lie about her age to the doctor; and in the beauty parlor she needn't say a word. She looks every minute of it. There is a saying that when a woman tells her right age, she will tell anything. It is the same when she looks it. All women are lonely, and picture stars are the loneliest women in the world. Thousands of persons in Duluth, Pittsburgh, Simla and Peiping adore them, but there never seems to be anyone at home they can talk to. Women cannot afford the luxury of a comradeship possible between two men in the same social stratum. Women do not trust each other, and perhaps with good reason. The most reserved women are often the first to tell all over a manicure, and no woman, bent on confiding, is discouraged, even when she's met with silence or a mild "Well, well." Not that I am unsympathetic or do not like people — quite the contrary — but after having been cried on at least once a day for a good many years, I have to take time occasionally to wring out my shoulder. My first two years in Hollywood were with Ianthe Lafleur (fictitious name, of course) who had seven thousand dollars a week and almost as many impulses in the same length of time. She had paused in New York, headed for a whirlwind vacation in Europe, and I met her in a smart beauty shop where she was getting the "works." An hour later, she asked me to go along. I went; it was my seventh trip. We found a world mad with wartime hysteria and tragedy. Then we came to Hollywood where it doesn't take a war to get exactly the same (Continued on page 78) 13