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The Girl Who Was
left: No girl was ever more conscious or concerned with her beauty than Wilma. The only love she had ever felt was for her face. Below: The greatest thing that ever happened to Wilma was when she met little Dirk.
The untold story of a beauty-conscious screen star, who mothered the little son of a young millionaire and for it was pitilessly misunderstood
By Elizabeth Benneche Peterson
The doctors said the boy had less than a fifty-fifty chance of living. He kept calling for Wilma, as if she were his own mother.
THE man who happens to be my husband this year took me stepping the other day to celebrate the raise that had come in the family pay envelope that morning.
Since he said the sky was the hmit. I steered him down to one of my old haunts where I used to go to pick up snappy little items for the gossip page. In those days, I told myself, it was part of a fan writer's work getting around to all the right places and seeing the stars and finding out which ones were romancing and which ones separating and who was fooling about it and who was serious. But now I can see my work was just an excuse for play.
No wide-eyed fan could have been more jittery than I was coming into the Troc and seeing everybody again. It must have been honeymoon night for all the newlyweds were there, Annabella and Tyrone holding hands utterly shamelessly and who could blame them when you looked at either one of them. Adrian and the little Gaynor; Andrea Leeds and her handsorne millionaire husband; Hedy Lamarr and Gene Markey.
Hedy's star had risen since I left Hollywood for our little ranch out in the sticks, and it was the first time I had seen her. And for once I felt Hollywood hadn't outcolossaled itself in adjectives. She's all the things everyone says she is, so beautiful that there aren't enough synonyms for glamour to describe her. so lovely that you know her charm begins in her heart and that her face has only been lucky enough to catch some of the overflow.
And I thought of Wilma, who had been called the most beautiful girl in Hollywood, too, and of how different she was from Hedy.
It wasn't only that Wilma 's hair was the color of sage honey to Hedy's smooth black or that she was small and vivacious and had none of the languorous dignity that is so devastating in the Viennese star. The difference went deeper than that. Didn't I tell you Hedy's loveliness begins in her heart?
I don't think I've ever known a girl more concerned with her looks than Wilma. She was always whipping out her compact and fixing up her make-up. It got to be a Hollywood joke and after that it got to be a bore, seeing her smiling at herself in a mirror while everyone else was engrossed in conversation or having fun.
They called her "the girl who was too beautiful," and at first the name amused me. As if any girl could be too beautiful! But after I'd known her awhile. I understood. For it was as if Wilma's beauty, or rather her consciousness of it and concern for it, took away everything else that makes being alive worth
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Silver Screen