Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1938)

PLAIN GIRL H It's the garden variety "girl from back home — a bit of organdy in a sea of satin and sequins— who gets the rush from Hollywood males BY DIANA DRAWING BY JOHN FLOHERTY, JR. PUT it down to luck. Nice, dumb luck. Someone happened to say, with the easy nonchalance of not being taken seriously: "If you are so curious about Hollywood, why don't you go there?" So I went. Just like that. I consoled myself that I'd see the studios anyway, and all that California scenery. Well, I saw the studios. And the Pacific beating against the sandy shore of Santa Monica was as impressive as its brother Atlantic at Jones Beach on a cloudless day. But it wasn't what I saw that counted. It's what I was. For three weeks, lacking two days, no debutante on Park Avenue, no most popular girl at college, not even Loretta Young herself had a madder, gladder, more joyously rushed schedule. All the scenes leading up to the "boy gets girl" scene of a movie were enacted — for me. Not under Klieg lights, but under that bigger and better sun of Hollywood, those starrierthan-any-other Hollywood skies. I was — in the jargon of movieland — a "hit." I "wowed" them. Though no one looking at me from the true perspective of the rest of the United States would have recognized it, I was "a glamour girl." And why? Simply because I had plenty of beaux. Luncheon, cocktails, dinner, supper — yes, even a couple of breakfasts at drive-in hamburger stands; night clubbing, swimming, riding, basking in the desert sun; previews at Grauman's Chinese, jam sessions at the Famous Door — all to the exhilarating accompaniment of pleasant masculine voices murmuring in my ear. Voices speaking animatedly, intimately, persuasively. Voices lowered so the words would be for me, and me alone. The voices of Hollywood's legion of woman-starved males, lonesome men, men who appreciate more than anything else the common garden variety of girl who isn't seeking anything in Hollywood but a gay vacation — the girl who hasn't come to Hollywood to go into the movies. True, they weren't the men whose names make the neon lights — although I did lunch, casually and impersonally, with Tyrone Power. But they were men connected with that fascinating business of movie-making: the assistant directors, photographers, scenario writers, publicity men, agents — all the hordes of free and unattached men whose daily contacts with the great of Hollywood have given them an enormous ennui with Exceptional Ones. Hollywood is overpopulated with attractive, discontented males longing for feminine companionship of the sort they remember having "back home." Girls who aren't struggling, like the men themselves, to "get the breaks" in that crowded, competitive field of pictures. Girls who aren't coping with masseuses, hairdressers, dressmakers, publicity experts, day after day, week after week, until their life is so full of moviedom there is no room for simple, everyday existence. Plain girls, unprotected by the brittle armor of too-perfect attention to their faces and figures, nice girls — neither remarkably talented nor breathtakingly beautiful — are at a premium in Hollywood. They stand out like a bit of organdy in a sea of satin and sequins. HOLLYWOOD is the happiest hunting ground in this country for the normal American girl who wants to be popular with men for the sake of being popular. It's a wondrous oversight on the part of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, usually so vigilant in pointing out the advantages of a California holiday, that this condition never has been publicized. When I went to Hollywood, I didn't even have a small red-leather date book in my possession. After two days, I bought one and thereafter was busy jotting down engagements until the pearlgray evening when I broke the traffic laws to make the outgoing Super-Chief at Pasadena. I was the belle of the ball — I, who never thought I looked like Myrna Loy or Norma Shearer, until a publicity man told me I resembled one in character and the other in appearance. (And that, only after he was reasonably sure I nourished no ambition to emulate either!) And I'm certain my allure, like 100,000 other girls' who simply haven't gone to Hollywood to prove it, was my contrast to the sleek, slim-hipped, perfectly-groomed, beautifully-coiffed, anxiouslyalert damsels who are, or would like to be, in pictures. Hollywood is full of beautiful women, as you I wowed them — all the scenes leading up to a "boy gets girl" finale were enacted for me, while filmtown's glamour gals gazed on, green with envy have often heard. It is true. You see them everywhere, behind the department-store counters, in the lunchrooms, in beauty parlors and hat-check cubicles. Girls who firmly believe, if they were given the chance, they could outdo Garbo, shame Lombard, beat Colbert at her stuff. But these girls aren't setting the male population of Hollywood by its ears. Reason: they are all part of the same thing. To stand out, you must be different. In Hollywood, that's being natural. No girl who is seriously concerned with getting along in the movies can be "herself." She is too busy. She has to give her life to her career — or lose it. Probably she thinks it is worth while. Maybe it is. But breathes there the man who doesn't enjoy feeling he — and not a career — is more important to the girl of the moment? There is a surplus of conventional Hollywood types in Hollywood. The girl who would draw your eyes on Fifth Avenue or Michigan Boulevard merges into background on Hollywood Boulevard. She may know all the tricks of looking dramatic, dynamic, but so does everyone else — and even perfection gets monotonous. When one more perfect girl appears on the hori 16