And reasonably priced too! Sure, I have other copies, and I’m not a big fan of Rosamond Du Jardin’s Toby Heydon series (the coy, first-person, faux teenager voice grates on me) although Du Jardin’s mastery of the bland exerts a certain fascination, but that cover! What’s not to like? The bolero with the white collar and piping, the plaid string purse, that headband, the gloves; and then the surreal way the male torso grows out of a pile of suitcases and the disappearing train. Is she coming or going? Is it a dream, or is it indeed the real thing?

The Golden Cage

“Miss Torres is a very naughty Aphrodite presiding over a multitude of libidinous extravaganzas.” (Parade of Books)

Some pulps are meant to be skimmed, and the works of Tereska Torrès belong to that category. She favors the Grand Hotel approach to fiction: a group of disparate people are brought together by unusual circumstances and Tereska tells us a series of colorful, unrelated stories about them. She used this technique in Women’s Barracks (1950), the ground-breaking pulp that started the craze for paperback lesbians, and she uses it in The Golden Cage, one result being that you have to search for the lesbian content in the midst of the mostly heterosexual shenanigans. The set-up in Women’s Barracks is that a group of women are brought together when they join the Free French troops during WWII. In the Golden Cage it’s a group of WWII refugees, killing time on the beaches of Portugal while waiting for their exit visas. Think of the opening lines of Casablanca as the hopeful couple turn their eyes to the sky to watch the plane go by: “but others wait in Casablanca, and wait…and wait…and wait…” In The Golden Cage, they distract themselves while they wait with lots of sex.

The Plot: I started off conscientiously reading every word, the poetic reflections on exile, the precocious musings of Janka, the Polish doctor’s daughter and putative source of all the stories; I read all about teenaged Emmanuel, his crush on the actress, his parents backstory; flagging a little, I duly noted Odile, another teenager, her pretty mom, Pascale, and her annoying father, Antoine, who’s obsessed with joining the Free French. And then, inevitably, I began skimming. Faster and faster I skimmed; past Janka’s parents’ marital troubles, past the strange digression into Emmanuel’s father’s conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, past Pascale’s history of bad-housekeeping and general domestic indifference, past bisexual Rodrigo’s fling with the actress, slowing down only slightly at the references to Pascale’s unhealthy desires and curiosities.

Finally I got to the content (page 40, but it seemed much later): Debby, the baby butch who wears her cowboy boots everywhere. She’s not a refugee, but simply on vacation, an English girl, taking her regular holiday with her divorced mom and hot-to-trot big sis, Kiki. Debby develops a big crush on Pascale, and that’s pretty much it for lesbianism. While the other teens are deflowered all around her, Debby moons over Pascale, who’s deep in an affair with Rodrigo. Mid-crush, she happens upon a copy of The Well of Loneliness, reads it,  and gets all depressed (as who wouldn’t in those circumstances). Life is not kind to Debby–Pascale’s husband Antoine suspects Pascale is up to something and blames Debby, and Odile doesn’t like her either. Even the refugee kids who don’t dislike her think she’s odd. And I couldn’t help thinking how hot and uncomfortable those cowboy boots would be in the sand!

Pascale eggs Debby on (she uses her as a cover for her affair) and even thinks of experimenting with her, but decadent and full of unhealthy desires as Pascale is, she draws the line at that. Instead she falls into a reverie about the time she once went to a lesbian bar in Paris and made a date with a good-looking butch girl, but then, in an extreme case of homosexual panic, stood her up and married her husband Antoine, whom she’d known for all of three days.

Meanwhile, Antoine keeps trying to join the Free French; Janka’s dad is performing abortions to keep the family finances afloat, and also finds time to make a pass at Odile; Odile loses her virginity to Rodrigo; Emmanuel loses his virginity to the actress, Ariane, and becomes her little boy-toy, although Ariane is also sleeping with Rodrigo and Ludovic. Janka reads a dirty book at Rodrigo’s and cries. Debby’s sister Kiki is followed around by a swarm of Portuguese locals, and Rodrigo proposes to her.

The book concludes with a big party at Rodrigo’s for all the characters before they go their separate ways with their newly acquired exit visas. It’s a kind of bizarre “happy ending” wrap-up to all the sordid goings-on: Pascale recommits to Antoine, and Debby is described in passing, as looking very pretty in a white dress and enjoying the attention of boys. Apparently it was all just a phase–not only Debby’s cowboy boots but everything that happened the whole rest of the book.

Drinking: Very little–Europeans apparently didn’t have the same obsession with alcohol that mid-century American fiction displays. Emmanuel goes to a cafe with his actress and she buys him a lemonade. They drink wine with dinner. That’s about it.

Homo Psychology: Debby analyzes her crush and blames it (again) on her mother, the divorcée party girl who lives off her alimony: “It’s only because I never had a mother, a real mother.” she tells herself, pondering her feelings for Pascale. There’s a nod to the Radclyffe Hall short story “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” in the explanation that Debby gets away with cross-dressing because it’s wartime and the world is topsy-turvy. As for Pascale, I noticed that this is the second instance in two books of domestic incompetence being used as a marker of lesbianism. This then, is why Jane Rule in her lesbian novels of the 60s and 70s always seemed obsessed with making her lesbian characters competent cooks and good housekeepers. I’d always wondered what was behind those perfectly fried eggs and tidy picnics, and now I know.

About the Author: Both Women’s Barracks and Golden Cage are autobiographical; like Janka, Tereska Torrès fled Poland for England via Lisbon; in London she joined the Free French doing secretarial work. She wrote in French, and her books were translated by her second husband, Meyer Levin, whose other connection to homo lit is the novel Compulsion, based on the Leopold-Loeb case. Torrès’s last novel is Le Choix (The Choice), about her parents’ secret conversion to Catholicism. Fans of French Socialism will be interested to know that her first husband, Georges Torrès, was Léon Blum’s step-son.

Barbara’s take: “Novel of the entagled [sic] relationships within a group of refugees caught for a summer in Portugal in 1940. Pascale, near 40, has a Lesbian affair in her past; her marriage is an empty shell, and life is precarious. An English Divorcee’s 15-year-old daughter, Debby, who is so conspicuously masculine that the rest of the cast speaks of her as a burgeoning Lesbian, falls in love with Pascale. The interludes between them and the sections telling of Pascale’s past occupy over one-fifth of the book. The authoress is very sympathetic, but that is to be expected when one recalls that out of her four novels, Miss Torres has treated Lesbianism three times and variance once for a batting average of 1000.”

Comment: Batting averages aside, Tereska Torrès got lucky with Women’s Barracks. It was censured in congress, got a generous amount of free press and became a best-seller. She was the first, in the right spot at the right time, but I find her pulps quite dull. They read as if they were written by an English speaker who was trying to sound foreign (maybe hubby/translator Meyer is to blame). The ratio of pseudo-Freudian-flowery musings to action is unbearably high. The elegiac tone about the teens’ loss of innocence is incredibly tedious. Rodrigo’s decadence–he sleeps with three women, has a porn collection, and decorates with lots of velvet and melted candles–is unconvincing. It all made me think of Emma Donoghue, who wrote in her introduction to Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature, about the occasional tedium of researching lesbian lit: “I have had moments of boredom, too, huddled over a microfilm reader in the dark, cranking at speed through yet another dreary three volume novel to see if what the female characters felt for each other had even a flicker of interest to it.”

This is what happened the other night when I was presented with the works of Joe Bonomo. I caught my breath when I first saw the little gold box. My eyes grew round as I opened it up and extracted the twelve little booklets. My jaw dropped as I began to read. I knew that hours of amusement lay ahead.

Who is Joe? I don’t know, except that he is an international authority on all sorts of subjects and has provided in these booklets all the information I need to lead a healthful, energetic, and glamorous life. With diagrams, charts, and illustrations!

It was hard to choose, but I was strangely drawn to “How to Become Lovelier After Forty.” Perhaps it was that encouraging assumption that I am already lovely?

“If your present life seems untenable, change it!” says Joe. On a more practical level, Joe thinks I should invest in a good neck cream, and maybe “youthify” my hair, by which he means dye it. He also advised me to cut down on my bridge and canasta, and he even covered the “cessation of the menstrual function.” That is only the tip of the iceberg.

“Riding a hobby horse is one of the easiest ways to perk up and live. Develop your interest in ceramics or electric trains…a doll collection or a dancing course…tennis, painting, weaving, jewelry design…”

All ellipses are Joe’s by the way, not my edits. The man…likes his …ellipses…more than Barbara Cartland did.

“If the mood is gay…and you’re inclined to “rough it”…promote a Skid Row Party. The men will love it…” This is where Amy Sedaris got the material for her hospitality guide. I’m sure she would agree with Joe: “A party is not a party without cheese.”

“Now is the time for long discussions about religion, money, in-law relationships and children.” Joe covers protestants, catholics, jews, and even references the quakers.

“In every one of my health books…and to every man, woman or child who has enlisted my aid in health improvement…I have singled out one subject for particular emphasis: constipation.”

For mature woman Joe says, “Regardless of the popular hair style trend of the moment, never let your hair trail down your neck and onto your shoulders.” I basked in the satisfying knowledge that my hair did nothing of the sort, but then I read on: “This does not mean a mannish shingle.” Darn!

“Let me begin by saying that no one is more anxious to help you than I. My greatest happiness is derived from work with friends who anxiously seek self-improvement. Very few men realize the misery and self-consciousness suffered by a woman who possesses an unattractive bosom…”

“Have a bulletin board for instructions to the mate and small fry near your desk. It is strangely less irritating for them to read what you want them to do…then have you tell them!” Oh, and “If you don’t have a desk…and don’t want to spend the money for even a second-hand one…persuade your husband to improvise by nailing a large board to two orange crates.”

The sample schedule for “two alone” has you up at 6:30am and cleaning until 7pm, so I’m not sure when you sit down at your orange crates and board.

“As you become more adept, grace and poise become yours; all feeling of inferiority and social embarrassment will disappear like magic.”

“Before applying mascara, comb your lashes carefully. Then use an eyelash curler so that your lashes will curve upward. This will give you a young, wide-eyed and wondering look.

“As an underweight, you have one thing in your favor…that insurance statistics show that your lifeline will be longer and that you are less inclined to suffer from many of the diseases associated with fat persons. But, you represent a nutritional problem often more difficult to cope with than with overweights. As you read through my pocket manual, you will see what I mean.”

I felt like Joe was getting a little lazy with this one, and he recycled not only the face shape chart (which he uses in practically every pamphlet) but also the cross-section of the hair diagram. I guess he felt the need to update his earlier pamphlet, and he did pull in Ern Westmore (of the Hollywood makeup and hair dynasty) as co-author. Note the similarity to the hairstyle on the cover of McCall’s Guide to Teenage Beauty and Glamour

What will I do to thank my benefactors? Will it be the Skid Row party? The Sunday brunch? (“it doesn’t call for liquor and therefore lessens the strain on your pocketbook.”) Or perhaps just one of the tasty “weight gain” menus: “Tomato Soup, 1 cup; Cheeseburger on Sweet Roll; Butter, 1 pat, mixed with Hash Browned Potatoes; Apple Pie, 1 wedge; Milk, 1 glass.”

Something which says, this was the best present. Ever.

The Lion House

“A shockingly candid tale of misbegotten sexuality…” (New York Herald Tribune) “the probable successor to Lolita…you might say Marjorie Lee has dramatized the Kinsey Report” (Hartford Times).

Would that were so! Here’s the shocking truth about this lesbian pulp: no lesbian sex. None. Not even some groping. It’s all come on (look at that cover!) and no delivery. I should have suspected something was amiss, when even Lucy Freeman (author of Fight Against Fears) told me in the forward that I was in for something juicy. “The reader will feel like gasping in shock as starkly written sexual scenes surge up from the pages,” claims Lucy. No such luck.

The Plot: Elizabeth “Jo” Bradford meets Frannie Browne on parents night at the progressive suburban day school where Jo works and Frannie sends her kids. Jo is drawn to Frannie (as is Jo’s womanizing, alcoholic husband, Brad) and soon Frannie and Jo are spending all their time together,  whiling away empty afternoons drinking and confiding.

Frannie is a “bohemian.” She wears jeans, short hair, and glasses, after all; she’s a bad housekeeper and the way she raises her kids scandalizes the neighborhood; she works as a freelance writer, she’s jewish and she listens to jazz. What does it matter if she’s married to a lawyer and lives in the suburbs?

Jo, who narrates the novel, is less bohemian, although she does cook “lasagna, chicken cacciatore…and various other specialties I’d picked up along my travels through Bohemia.” She and Brad have moved around a lot, due to his drinking, womanizing and tendency to lose jobs. Nonetheless, Jo has stubbornly stuck with Brad for 27 years (she’s forty-six to Frannie’s thirty), making the best of a bad bargain.

Frannie sleeps with Brad (“How’s for suburban switchies?” Brad leers) and Jo feels betrayed–by Frannie, rather than Brad. “Are you queer or something?” jeers Brad. The lesbian content doesn’t get more explicit than that, until page 146 of this 160 page book. By that time, Jo has finally left the loathsome Brad and moved in with Frannie and her husband Marc, even though they all admit it’s a little weird for the betrayed wife to move in with the other woman. Jo loves living with Frannie, but realizes Marc is less than enthused (“For Christ’s sake, go home Jo–to Brad where you belong!”), so she finds a new job, moves to the Village, and sleeps with a guy named Gordon, writing a graphic account of the affair to Frannie who’s vacationing in Bermuda.

When Frannie returns from vacation, Jo is so eager to see her that she leaps in the car and drives to Connecticut . She’s waiting in the driveway when Frannie, Marc and the kids pull up. In the den, Frannie confronts Jo with the truth of their relationship: they’re in love with each other. While Jo sputters, “What are you talking about?” Frannie explains that she only slept with Brad as a substitute, something I’d figured out back on page 44, and that Jo has written all about Gordon to pull Frannie into the affair. Jo denies this nonsense, and tells Frannie “You’ve got to get some help.” Just a few pages later, however, Jo admits to herself that Frannie is right, that they are in love with each other, and Frannie’s the braver of the two for admitting it.

Alas, this acknowledgement does not lead to a romantic reunion followed by a slow dissolve. Instead, it’s analysis for everyone! Frannie writes Jo a letter telling her that she (Frannie) is seeing an analyst five times a week, and advises Jo to do the same. Later Jo runs into some mutual friends who tell her that Frannie is growing her hair long and making cookies–analysis works! Jo realizes it’s her turn now, to recommit to happy housewifery. So she meets with Brad, who been hanging around the whole time. The implication is that they’re going to get back together.

This was where I “gasped in shock” just as Lucy Freeman promised. I could live with Jo renouncing lesbianism, but returning to slimey Brad? Ugh, ugh, ugh!

Sex: Jo masturbates after she finds out about Frannie and Brad (affair part 1). She eavesdrops on Frannie and Marc having sex while she’s living with them. She reads an account of Frannie has written about having sex with Brad in a car (affair part 2) and is relieved to discover that Brad prematurely ejaculates before penetration (a real winner that Brad). Brad tries to persuade Jo to have sex with him, saying “we’ll do it your way”–guesses on what that means, anyone?  Jo has lots of sex with Gordon, but he turns out to be another sicko in need of analysis–he gets turned on by being a peeping tom, spying on Jo from her fire escape.

Homo Psychology: Frannie has been abandoned by her father and has a beautiful, domineering mother. Jo’s maternal instinct has been frustrated because Brad would never agree to have kids. The title is a reference to a recurring dream Frannie has about a lion. Big revelation when Frannie realizes her dream lion doesn’t have a mane and must be female.

Drinking: “She pulled a bottle out of the cabinet and I got the ice and soda.” They don’t even need words, do they? Massive drinking before, during and after dinner parties; driving into the city for “liquid lunches at 21,” followed by more drinks at a jazz club. Alcoholic Brad pours a quart of gin into the pitcher of OJ at breakfast and then moves on to “twelve-ounce martinis.” Cue cirrhosis of the liver–maybe Jo can still get rid of him.

Barbara’s take: In her “Lesbiana” column in The Ladder, Grier wrote this: “Major Lesbian novel for 1959. Jo, 46, the narrator, tells of the abortive but beautiful love affair between herself and Frannie, aged 30. Both are married women caught in conventional suburbia; both are repressed Lesbians until they meet and the fireworks begin. Beautiful writing and excellent psychological analysis enhance this first novel.”

Major Books 1978 republication

My take: Sure, this is better written than the average pulp. There are shades of Salinger in the book, not just in Frannie’s name and use of italics, but in the whole bored-wives-in-the-’burbs ambiance (see Salinger’s “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” from 1948). But beautiful love affair? Fireworks? Grier was either reading a different edition than the one I had, or else she’s capable of reading all sorts of lesbian subtext into the narrative that I am too literal-minded or too distant from those desperate times, when any crumb of Content was pounced on, to spot. Or was it just the way the hets seem more messed up than the homos that made the novel praiseworthy? Stranger still, the book was reprinted in 1978–well into the era of gay liberation–with a new title, Two Women, and a new misleading cover. How many lesbians thought this was another fun read in the just-born genre of lesbian romances and got nothing but 50s-style angst for their two bucks?

In her youth, Deming dated Lotte Lenya and had a long-term relationship with Mary Meigs, If you’re thinking she was part of the triangle that Meigs wrote about in Medusa Head, no, she was in the earlier triangle, the one that ended with Deming and Meigs splitting up and Meigs going off with Marie-Claire Blais to have the second triangle, the one where each point in the triangle wrote a book containing her version of events after it fell apart. Got that?

Barbara Deming, second from left

Later Deming became an out lesbian-feminist peace activist. Martin Duberman wrote about her in A Cause for Living, and there’s a fund in her name that gives small grants to feminist women in the arts.

But what I envy Deming is not the glamorous girlfriends, the literary circles she traveled in, or her admirable activism. It’s that job–getting paid to go to the movies! And by the Library of Congress, no less. A high point for the US government, in my book.

She was part of the LOC’s early attempt to establish a film library. In the days when film viewing was a chancier and more ephemeral experience (few revival houses, DVDs far in the future), and while they were waiting for congress to give them money to buy actual prints, these “film analysts” were some crazy effort to collect, at least in anecdotal form, some of America’s film output. The LOC finally gave up the film library idea in 1945 after spending three years trying to get funding from Congress (a low point for the US government). Am I correct in thinking the idea wasn’t revived until the National Film Registry of 1988?

Deming wrote about her filmgoing experiences in a book of essays called Running Away From Myself: A dream portrait of America drawn from the films of the forties (the original title was A Long Way From Home: Some film nightmares of the forties). She wrote it in 1950, but the book wasn’t published until 1969, when she revisited the post-WWII era in the midst of her anti-war activism.

She writes in the first chapter that  movies reveal the dreams and nightmares of their times. “In unison they yield up their secrets. If one stares long enough at film after film, the distracting individual aspects of each film begin to fade and certain obsessive patterns that underlie them all take on definition.”

I’ve always loved that idea, and wanted to replicate Deming’s experience. What would today’s obsessive patterns be? Alas, no one is paying me to go to the movies, and I fear that these days the ringing of cellphones and glowing lights of “viewers” texting would prove a fatal distraction from those elusive obsessive patterns.

Donna McBride and Barbara Grier

However there is another mass of work waiting to be explored: the library’s Barbara Grier and Donna McBride pulp collection. At 1,393 items it’s a Mount Everest of pulp, right at my doorstep, waiting to be climbed. For a long time I’ve wandered in its foothills, but Deming’s example gives me a plan of attack.

If I do like Barbara and stick to three years worth of books, I’m down to a more manageable 206. And some of those are pseudo-science nonfiction (The Call Girl: A Social and Psychoanalytic Study) or literary works, like Durrell’s Justine, which I can skip if I want to (hmmm–will I want to?). I’m going to start with 1959 (the year Lois Lenz was set) and go through 1961.

And after all, what kind of a blog would this be without some numerically-based project or goal?

I love the fact that reading these books, which I have to do on-site, makes the reading experience the equivalent of Deming’s movie-going. Scratching notes (in pencil–no pens allowed) about something that will be taken away from me when the library closes. I wonder if Deming had to go to movies twice sometimes?

Obsessive lesbian patterns, here we come!

Paula Christian’s books are an exception. The career is always part of the story, whether the heroine is a stewardess, a writer, or a photographer as in the novel below.

Love Is Where You Find It (1961, Paula Christian)

The Story: Dee Sanders is a successful photographer with a prestigious job at Photo World (is it a magazine? A press agency? I never was sure) and her own secretary. And despite her perpetual attitude of world-weary been-there-done-that jadedness, she’s only twenty-seven! Did people get promoted more quickly back in 1961? Anyway, the only problem in Dee’s life is that she really hasn’t come to terms with her lesbianism—she’s a self-loathing closet-case if ever there was one, especially at the beginning of the book. Of course her girlfriend, the vulgar, two-timing, gold-digging Rita, would be enough to make anyone question their sexual preference. Dee knows Rita’s no good, yet she’s helpless against her attraction—helpless, I tell you! This is made clear in a series of titillating scenes of the you-bitch-I-can’t-live-without-you variety.

Dee does finally ditch Rita in one of my all time favorite pulp scenes: Looking for Rita at a lesbian bar, Dee tracks her down in the bathroom, where Rita is making out, shirt unbuttoned, lipstick smeared, with a handsome butch. Talk about sordid!

Dee takes her broken heart to Paris, where she’s supposed to judge a photo contest. There she runs into out lesbian singer Martie, who is not only ready and willing, but smart, together, and basically perfect. Martie takes Dee to an old-school Parisian homo bar where they have boeuf bourguignon, onion soup, and a pitcher of six martinis. Despite this perfect date, Dee can’t commit, and returns home to make herself miserable with her straight secretary Karen, who has always had a little crush on Dee, and throws herself at her boss as soon as she finds out she’s gay (Dee has Karen house sit while she’s away, and forgets to hide her collection of pulps. Oops!). But Dee can’t be happy with Karen because she feels too guilty about pulling her into the miserable gay underworld. After many more martinis and drunken scenes, it’s out with Karen and back to Martie, who knows what she’s getting into and can take it.

Crises: Nothing but. Dee seems perpetually on the verge of a breakdown, subjected to fits of depression at parties, almost crying over lunch at the Plaza with her friend Jerry (“What’s wrong with us? Why can’t we be like other people? Happy in our married misery?”), and stalking Karen at the Algonquin where she’s gone on a business date. None of it seems to affect her work, however. What is her work? I never did quite figure that out. Is she a photo editor or is she a photographer? She works in the darkroom and at one point Karen brings her some proofs. Does it matter? Not to the author.

Industrial Credibility: The author throws photographic terminology around like a farm girl feeding the hens. Dee is calculating F-stops in the first chapter, constantly working in the darkroom, and her romance with Martie develops under the excuse of giving Martie photography lessons (she uses a Leica but buys Martie a Petri 2:8, whatever that is). In fact, they’re developing photos one night in the darkroom when Dee suggests they take a break before making contact prints and Martie invites Dee up to her hotel room for some cognac.

Career Advice: In classic lesbian pulp fashion, the advice Dee gives aspiring camera bug Karen is not to have a career, because she might miss out on marriage and kids. Oh the hypocrisy! Dee has already escaped from a thoroughly unpleasant marriage, yet repeats this classic piece of mid-century advice like a brainwashed zombie. Karen calls her on it: “You’re always telling me about security, babies, and the good, solid life. If it’s so great why haven’t you done it?”

Drinking: Martinis, martinis, martinis. Cognac. Scotch. Wine. More martinis. In the first chapter Dee comes home, pours “a healthy drink for herself” and puts a jigger of scotch into the cat’s bowl. This sets the tone for the rest of the book.

Sex: Dee sleeps with three people in the course of the book, Rita a couple times, Martie once, and then Karen a bunch. And she pretty much always has a good time, which is why she keeps coming back for more, despite despising the gay life. “Dee wished to God she were eighty so that she would never have to think of love or sex again.” Oh, quit kidding yourself, Dee.

Comment: Dee has two things in common with Sharon James — the bad girlfriend who complains about her working in the darkroom, and the excess of drama (although with Dee it’s all relationship drama). I only wish Dee got the same satisfaction out of her successful career that Sharon does. Rereading this I was mostly struck by the amount of gay-bashing Dee does — complaining about swish boys and butch lesbians at the parties she goes to, and how awful the bars are, and how awful gay people are in general, and how she wishes she didn’t have this uncontrollable passion for women. Standard lesbian pulp stuff, but when Dee and another woman at a party complain about how swish and campy the guy getting them their second round of martinis is, I couldn’t help thinking that self-hating is one thing but bad manners really crosses a line. I’m sure Miss Manners would back me up: you don’t criticize the guy fetching you your drinks while you sit on your arse wallowing in self-pity. We can only hope that Martie, who is much more self-accepting, will set Dee straight, so to speak.

The Story: Dad has died and Katie has to get a job in order to finish college (a weak or absent patriarch is always a good excuse for a career). Inexperienced Katie applies for a part-time job as assistant to photographer Rolfe Esperson, who not only hires her but proceeds to teach her everything he knows, loans her his equipment, and pays her to boot. At one point he says she looks worn out and gives her a hundred dollars with instructions to go on a shopping spree.

My kind of boss!

Katie takes to photography like a duck to water and by mid-book has set up a darkroom in her basement and sold a bunch of photos to Life Magazine. After graduation she gets a job on a small-town newspaper because, despite having only a minor in journalism and no newspaper experience, she has her camera and that Life credit under her belt. Again, she becomes experienced in an incredibly short time, impressing her new editor and his daughter: “Dad says it usually takes months for a cub reporter to take hold and really become useful, and you were learning the ropes in a matter of weeks.” The moral of this book seems to be that if you’re smart and work hard you can do anything.

Romantic Interest: Paul Serrill, introduced to her by her perfect boss, natch. He’s an established journalist who Katie believes is out of her league, and he spends most of the book dishing out good career advice before suddenly realizing he’s in love with her. This changes little, their dates continue to be career counseling sessions: “Remember, you don’t make a living in photography by concentrating on major markets!” All goes swimmingly until he sends sophisticated Diana Caldwell to pick up Katie from the train station. Katie is instantly suspicious and jealous: why hasn’t he mentioned Diana? Has he been seeing her all along? Always insecure about her naivete, she’s convinced Paul has thrown her over for glamor-girl Diana.

Oh, Katie, of course not. Diana’s just been helping Paul and Rolfe on an investigative story about drug rings, which Katie discovers when she finds Rolfe unconscious in his studio, with all his negatives tossed about. However, she still feels too mad and hurt by Paul’s insensitivity to apologize, and she and Paul break up. No worries; a chapter’s worth of time to think and Katie is ready to make up. Paul produces his mother’s opal ring, the end. They will clearly be one of those complementary working couples who read and critique each other’s work. Once they’ve paid their small town dues, they will head for Chicago, or New York, “since it’s a publishing center” and move from success to success.

Income: Katie is paid $25 a week for five afternoons, 1pm-5:30. That is equivalent to $205, or about $9/hour, in today’s dollars. When Mom asks how much she’ll get for the Life photos, Katie replies: “Goodness, I don’t even know. But a good price I would think, one hundred dollars or one hundred and fifty dollars a page, and this is always a two-page feature.” So a total of $1600-$2400 in today’s terms.

Career Crisis: Katie only has the romantic crisis, she has been the recipient of too much good advice to make a mistake in her career. At one point she notices some smudges on a print and chides herself for not dusting the negative.

Career Advice: That’s what this book is all about—the plot is secondary. Rolfe is writing a book about photography and large chunks of it make their way into the story. Learn different cameras. Keep your negatives organized and tidy. Don’t make duplicate submissions. My favorite: remember the secondary markets, i.e. recaption, regroup, and resell your photos to non-competitive publications. I was just reading the same advice (directed at writers) in the ASJA Guide to Freelance Writing, 2003.

Industrial Credibility: Lots. Cameras are named and discussed (I now know the Rolleiflex viewfinder reverses the image, although I’m still not sure what a Speed Graphic is); The pros and cons of natural light, flashes, and strobe lights are weighed; Steichen and Brodovitch (I don’t even know who the second guy is) are mentioned. One chapter describes the developing and printing process in excruciating detail.

Comment: This is one of my favorite career girl books. It’s not just boss-from-heaven Rolfe, or the wish-fulfillment of getting published in Life Magazine the very first time you submit a photo story. Hobart gets away with these delightful fantasies because she describes Katie’s ideas and work process so thoroughly, capturing the moment Katie falls in love with her new vocation—the excitement and joy of finding something you really like to do. Most books in this genre start when the heroine has finished her schooling (in home economics, or physical therapy, or architecture) and has to find a job. Those books sometimes overdo the de-glamorization of a career, and emphasize the disappointments and hardships. Katie doesn’t undergo any of the humiliations career romance authors often put their heroines through. Sure, she has her moments of insecurity and doubt, but even the one real crisis, her sudden jealousy and distrust of Paul, has its positive side. Just as well to test the relationship, she thinks, and dates a series of other fellows before deciding that yes, Paul was pretty great, and she screwed up. She writes him a letter apologizing (mostly because it will help her move forward and get on with life), and he comes running. This is one level-headed girl who has her priorities straight.

Sharon James, Free-lance Photographer (1956, Elizabeth Wesley)

The Story: Like Katie, Sharon is working her way through college, this time because Dad had a heart attack and can’t work. Unlike Katie, she already has the dark room in the basement and a thriving freelance clientele, an exhausting schedule of scurrying around takng pictures of school pageants, birthday parties, family portraits. The career excitement in the book is that she sells herself as a fashion photographer to Nina Paxton, owner of an exclusive dress shop. However, this is dwarfed by the mystery plot, a fairly common feature in career girl books–too many authors share the widespread view of work as boring and feel they need to spice things up by dragging in drug rings and kidnappings, or at the very least a little corporate spying. While Katie’s connection to the drug ring investigation is fleeting and beside the point, the mystery in Sharon James takes over the book.

Sharon accidently photographs a kidnapper while taking pictures of kids playing in the park. Soon her dark room is trashed (just like Rolfe’s), and that’s only the beginning of Sharon’s Wonder Woman style adventures. She decides to go photograph an old farmhouse in the country and guess what, it turns out that the kidnapper is keeping his victim there! Sharon gets knocked out and tied up, manages to crawl from a burning barn, dragging with her the police officer who was supposed to be guarding her. But it doesn’t stop there, even though the kidnapper has released the kid because (due to Sharon) the cops were getting too close. Wanting to revenge himself on Sharon, the villain attempts to lure her out to another deserted farm by pretending to be a potential client who wants a photograph of his prize-winning cow. “Cows were supposed to be especially photogenic” thinks Sharon, as she gets ready for her new assignment, before realizing at the last second that it’s a trap. But the kidnapper has as much stick-to-itiveness as any career girl. He breaks into the department store during a photo shoot, knocks out M. Reynaud of the French Room, and kidnaps Sharon. In the thrilling climax Sharon is left to die of exposure in a snowy woods, but is found by bloodhounds and those slow-witted police. With all her unexpected absences and destroyed negatives, it’s a wonder she manages to graduate from college, let alone keep any clients.

Romantic Interest: Sharon James features a favorite career girl trope—the bad boyfriend who resents the heroine’s career and is replaced by the good, supportive boyfriend. As the book opens, Sharon is dating Ed who complains “Don’t you think a guy gets tired of dating a camera?” when she turns down a dinner invitation to work in her dark room. He is quickly replaced by policeman Steve Winston, who sees Sharon’s dedication to her career as similar to his own. They take a walk one snowy evening and laugh about the fact that she is thinking of the picturesque qualities of snow while he is thinking about potential traffic accidents. At the end of the book, they stand together admiring her new studio and the sign “Sharon James, Photographer.” Steve doesn’t have an opal, but he suggests, “On the window Sharon James, just so she’s the same person as Mrs. Steve Winston—a deal?” Sharon gets married but keeps her own name, at least professionally.

Income: No information given. Sharon gets the Paxton job by offering to take sample fashion pictures for free, and the next thing she knows is Paxton has used them in an advertising spread in the Sunday supplement. Presumably she gets paid at some point.

Career Crisis: Again, there really isn’t one. Nina loves her pictures, she recovers her negatives in time to fill a reprint order, and doesn’t seem that unhappy over losing Ed to rich girl Linda. Especially with Steve following her about like a faithful dog, except for the couple weeks he spends on fingerprinting course in Washington D.C.

Career Advice: Again, keep your negatives organized (a sisyphean task when thugs are continually breaking into your darkroom). Get a release from the parents of that baby so you can sell his picture to an ad agency (I wondered if the parents got a cut). “They probably won’t buy it, but if you keep your name and your work before them, one of these days they will.”

Industrial Credibility: Less than Katie. Sharon uses a Speed Graphic (someday I’ll find out what that is) and reminds herself that if you make a mistake on the negative, you can’t fix it in the print. She also thinks about Matthew Brady, civil war photographer. And frets about a low ceiling with plumbing pipes in the background of a photograph.

Comment: Fascinated as I am by the world of work, those mystery plotlines seem unnecessary and tacked on. Enough with the kidnapping already! Tell me more about Nina Paxton, fashion photographer Nora Roberts (before her career as a romance author evidently), and how much you charge for photographing the Women’s Club Luncheon. My favorite details were probably the descriptions of the clothes Nina Paxton sells: “a stunning black velvet suit,” “a green and gray glen plaid skirt and a soft green cashmere cardigan” with “a scarf of the same enchanting green.” Then there’s the “pale pink wool dress with frosty collar and cuffs” which Sharon likes so much she buys (so I guess Nina did finally pay her something).

One thing I noticed about both books is how tiring photography is. Both Katie and Sharon are described as exhausted (all those late nights in the dark room) and both of them take naps (Katie falls asleep at work on Rolfe’s couch–naturally he just covers her with a blanket). Potential Camera Girls take note.

These are the books a girl might pick up if she wanted to find out, say, what it was like to work for the foreign service (Assignment in Ankara) or whether she should be a lawyer (Linda Jordan, Lawyer) or a doctor (Doctor Barbara). Or if a nurse, which of the many varieties of nurse? Navy Nurse? School Nurse? Visiting Nurse? But make no mistake, these books offer more career possibilities than Cherry Ames ever dreamed of.

I always regret that I was already well-launched on my own disorganized version of a career when I began to explore these books, frequently referred to as “Career Romances.” For me, the advice and career tips came too late.

Seems like from the forties through the sixties any juvenile publisher worth its salt was publishing this subgenre of teen lit. Julian Messner, a division of Simon and Schuster, led the field, putting out a whole slew of them under the series title “Romances for Young Moderns.” They follow a fairly standard formula. A young woman begins her professional career (“On Monday morning she was going to New York, quite on her own, to look for a position as private secretary. The thought was thrilling.”), encounters setbacks and obstacles (“The cake layers came out of the oven flat as pancakes. How was she going to save her face with the audience?”), but eventually finds a measure of success (“Oh Marcia, I always knew you’d make good!”) and romance—generally some sort of proposal from the fellow who’s been hanging around advising or distracting her for most of the book (“this is an opal ring my mother used to wear and I’d like you to have it.”).

I love these books—obviously, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. To understand why, you have to compare them to other typical teen fare of that era—A Date for Marcie, Senior Prom, and The Boy Next Door, to name just a few. Unlike the boy-obsessed teenagers (who I still have a soft spot for), the career-minded heroines of these books are not frittering their time away on dates and clothes. They have purpose. They are ambitious. They are working.

Here is Katie (Katie and her Camera) on the subject of dating: “There are so many things happening in my life, so much I want to learn about, so many people to meet, so much to do, that I’m not searching for other complications.” At least not until the end of the book, after she’s sold her photographs to magazines and gotten a job as a photo-journalist.

One of the most charming things about these books is the clumsy way they cram useful advice into the plot. “You’re not thinking of starting in Chicago or New York, are you?” boyfriend-to-be Paul asks Katie as they discuss her job search. Katie, no fool, answers correctly, “Heavens no, with no experience? And all that competition? I think the first thing for me to do is get some experience locally.” It’s like the enriched soy flour biscuit mix that makes Patti Lewis’s reputation as a home economist. Good for you, and tasty too!

And for a fascinating view of the era when women were streaming into the work force, these books can’t be beat. Contradictory advice, mixed messages, and ambivalence, here we come!

Visit this blog tomorrow when I’ll be posting book reports on two career-minded shutterbugs in honor of my photographer friend Rebecca’s slide show at the SFPL!

First edition of Laura, Eyre & Spottiswood, cover by Bip Pares

There was a double feature playing a few nights ago, Laura and Bedelia, both based on books by Vera Caspary. I was so exhausted from the grueling Noir City Film Festival pace (four movies on Saturday) that I thought I’d skip the movie version of Laura (which I’ve seen more times than I can remember) and read the book instead.

Caspary wrote Laura in 1942, and the eponymous heroine is a curtain opener for the career girls who would later flood the fiction market. In 1943 the New York Times called this story of an advertising executive who is presumed murdered and then turns up alive and becomes a suspect “quite different from the run-of-the-mill detective story.” The book spends more time on Laura’s modernity as an “independent woman” and “bachelor girl” than the film does. Preminger followed the plot-line pretty closely (for all that he claimed that he made up everything but the basic premise himself) but he was uninterested in exploring the social problems of working women and favored the twisted relationships and necrophilia angle–all very titillating and good movie fun.

Popular Library edition, 1950, with sex-appeal now added. Cover artist Sam Cherry

Vera Caspary asked Preminger (after reading a first draft of the script) “Why don’t you give her the character she has in the book?” He said, “In the book, Laura has no character…Laura has no sex.” I guess it depends on your point of view.

In the book, Waldo tells us, much as he does in the movie, about Laura’s transformation from naive newcomer to sophisticated New Yorker, although in the book there’s more detail and again that slight change of emphasis that makes all the difference. We’re told Laura came from Colorado Springs when she was eighteen or nineteen possessed of a “magnificent will” and “willing to suffer endless rebuffs in order to prove her talents.”

In the movie, Laura says of her mother, “She listened to my dreams of a career and then taught me another recipe.” in the book, there are two mentions of Laura’s mother: Laura remembers her advice, “Never give yourself, Laura, never give yourself to a man” and recalls how her mother would lock herself in the bedroom with “a sick headache”–a hint, perhaps, as to why Laura was so eager to leave Colorado Springs.

In the movie, Laura is basically hoodwinked by Shelby Carpenter, the handsome southern cad on his way to becoming a gigolo whose ultimate destiny is Laura’s aunt, Ann Treadwell (Aunt Susie in the book). In the book, Laura thinks back on their relationship, two years of quarrels and reconciliations and reflects, “I had used him as women use men to complete the design of a full life….Going on thirty and unmarried I had become alarmed.”

In the movie, Laura excuses her weekend away by saying she needed to think. In the book, Caspary is at pains to explain that Laura’s weekend away by herself before her marriage to Shelby is the equivalent of a bachelor dinner, a last celebration of freedom before submitting to the matrimonial noose. “Owning myself, possessing all my silly and useless routines and being the sole mistress of my habits…freedom meant my privacy.”

Both movie and book do a lot of hinting at alternatives to the heterosexual pairing; hints that don’t always make sense in the context of the plot, except to add to the “sophisticated” ambiance (and believe me, if I could make something of the description of Bessie as “more than a maid to Laura” I would). In the book, Laura thinks of the “way we proud moderns have twisted and perverted love, making arguments for this and that substitute.” In both book and movie, Mark is positioned as successor to Laura, Waldo’s next protege, although it’s a lot clearer in the book. One of the lines the censors wanted cut from the movie is Mark telling Waldo, “You like your men better if they’re not a hundred percent,” which the censor said had “the unacceptable flavor of a possible pathological sex angle so far as Waldo is concerned.” Of course the movie has what is worth a thousand suggestive lines, the performance of Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker.

Which makes the whole plot unconvincing. Waldo is supposedly in love with Laura, and wants to kill her because he can’t bear the thought of her in another man’s arms. And yet in the early scenes of the movie, Waldo is practically courting Mark; Then, confusingly, he declares his love for Laura with his last breath at the film’s conclusion. It’s perhaps a case of Hollywood (and Caspary it must be said) not daring to take the titillating storyline they’ve created to its logical conclusion. The only way to make sense of this “psychothriller” as the publishers billed the book, is to suppose that Waldo’s admiration for Laura has a flip side–envy for her ability to attract men like Mark (and perhaps Shelby and Jacoby). Laura is the rival Waldo wants to eliminate, but due to a bad case of freudian transference-love-object-substitution…

I did end up seeing Laura, the movie, at least the second half, after running across the street for a bite to eat. I made sure to get back in time to watch my favorite scene (not in the book), in which Judith Anderson as Ann Treadwell makes a speech about how she’s no good and Shelby’s no good and they belong together, all while looking in the mirror, adjusting her hat and redoing her lipstick. I love it in part because the first time I saw Laura, a matinee at Theatre 80 St. Marks in New York in the late eighties, the entire audience of primarily gay men burst into applause at the speech’s conclusion.

Further Reading: Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, Foster Hirsch; The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger Chris Fujiwara

Once you learn what it is about yourself that needs improving, there's no longer any reason to feel helpless or hopeless.

I watched The Bachelor a few days ago, probably for the last time. It turns out my enjoyment of the premiere episode had more to do with being on vacation and seeing old friends than the show’s intrinsic qualities; and like the pleasure of watching HGTV every night in the hotel room, is not to be recaptured now that I’m back in my normal surroundings. On Monday night after the host advised the assembled women to make the most of whatever fleeting moments of contact they had with the bachelor, I found myself asking, “How could you ever hope to have even a semi-normal interaction in these circumstances?” — a question which I realize is very much beside the point.

Pondering the show, I was struck by how closely the ladies resemble girls like Sue in The Popular Crowd (Anne Emery, 1961) Sue is determined to date a boy she’s only seen from a distance, football star Pete Carroll. “I’ve got as good a chance as anyone,” she thinks. Except for the whole sex thing — what these books refer to as “heavy petting” if they refer to it at all — the bachelor contestants are the soul sisters of all those teen heroines desperate for a date to the prom (A Date for Marcy, Senior Prom). To aid them in their quest, I rounded up some period advice on man-catching.

Pursuing a man: Emily Post (1945 edition) asks, “How far may a girl run after a man? Catlike she may do a little stalking! But ‘run’? Not a step.” This advice is universally echoed until Accent on April (Betty Cavanna, 1960) in which Kathy is perturbed because her best friend Brenda has given her (Kathy’s) obnoxious brother Jon an expensive wallet. She complains to her mother that Jon can’t even return the wallet because it has his initials on it. Kathy’s mother says,”Maybe he doesn’t want to take it back.” To which Kathy responds, “Then there’s something wrong with all the books on teen-age etiquette. He should want to!” Her mother replies: “Boys are unpredictable. Some of them actually like to be chased.” Exhibit A: the Bachelor.

Grooming: In The Unchosen (Nan Gilbert, 1963) a group of wallflowers transform themselves with the help of magazine advice columns. “She’d given up spike heels with sportswear and exchanged her near-purple lipstick for a new pink-pearl. Her hair shown with brushing. Her hems and seams didn’t so often show the silver glint of safety-pin repair.”

That girl was clearly following the advice of McCall’s Guide to Teen-Age Beauty & Glamour (Betsy Keiffer, 1959) which outlines a long list of don’ts, including smeary lipstick, charm bracelets that clank and grubby handkerchiefs. The book then sums up the ideal girl’s appearance with a somewhat vague description: “she is neat, she is sweet, she is clean, and perhaps most important she is understated.”

I must say I prefer the fashion advice in My Sister Mike (Amelia Elizabeth Walden, 1956) another tomboy-to-temptress transformational tale. “She learned the feel of a cashmere sweater, the smell of good leather, the simple elegance of a dress that was all line…she caught the knack of individualizing herself…Plain colors, stark simplicity, a bright splash of color in a Chinese gold or chartreuse scarf, these were part of the casual sophistication she strove to attain.”

I’ll leave it to regular viewers to judge where the contestants stand on the spectrum running from spike heels with sportswear to casual sophistication.

Dating: McCall’s Guide to Teen-Age Beauty and Glamour advises you to accept an invitation promptly and enthusiastically, which advice the bachelor contestants all follow to the letter. No way they’re going to be the McCall boy’s “pet peeves: the girl who tries to stall” or “the girl who won’t accept a date until she knows what the date is for, making it clear that the pleasure of having the boy’s company is not her primary interest.” Other verboten behavior on the McCall list includes correcting your date, eating the most expensive dish on the menu, and “the girl who keeps a stranglehold on her date all evening.” Watch it ladies! At least those huge group dates have the What To Do on a Date (Coronet, 1950 ) seal of approval. The narrator raptures: “A group…doing things together — pretty good idea for a first date!”

Other Girls: McCall’s says: “Girls are even more important in your life right now than boys are.” If only the Bachelor’s harem would heed that advice! But I fear that the tiny bit of lesbian titillation in the premiere is not to be repeated. Jealousy is the theme, as it was back in Double Date (Rosamond du Jardin, 1951). In that book Mike can’t decide between twin sisters Pam and Penny. First Mike dates Pam, then he dates Penny, then he dates Pam again, then he dates Penny. “Of all the double-crosses!” shouts Pam at Penny after the final switch. Penny to Pam: “It’s not as if you owned Mike or any other boy. I guess he has the right to like me best if he wants to.” Remember that ladies, as well as this from the “Popularity Plus” chapter of Hi There, High School! (Gay Head, 1960):  “Don’t wear your feelings on the outside. If they stick out like a porcupine’s needles, they’re going to bump into plenty of trouble.” And you’ll be crying in the bathroom knowing there’s a camera waiting on the other side of the door and a mike picking up your every sob.

Sex: “A kiss is not the price of a date,” McCall reminds us all, before handing out advice on how to adroitly dodge said kiss without hurting the boy’s feelings. How To Say No (Coronet, 1951) covers drinking (the Bachelor ladies could use some help there), smoking and finally the unmentionable: “Just give him half a chance alone and there’s no stopping him,” complains one girl. The solution is to distract him, in one example by peppering him with questions about the track meet. “You girls seem to think it’s always the boy who starts things,” complains one fellow. One girl admits the truth of that: “if you really like a boy, you want to be close, hold hands with him and give him a goodnight kiss.” And so the dilemma begins. How far is too far? (as the song goes).

In Make A Wish for Me (Lenora Mattingly Weber, 1956) Mary Fred tells her sister Beany, “unless it’s the real thing and you can start plans for getting married, all this amour-amour seems a little on the cheap side.” After discussing the ersatz popularity of the Hot Lips (slang for the local campus hussies) Mary Fred lowers her voice to add “Let’s face it, hon, it’s the heavy loving scenes that lead up to–well, last year one of the Hot Lips had to get married in a hurry.” Pregnancy, the medical condition that dare not speak its name. Ladies of The Bachelor, check your birth control supplies.

Sue in The Popular Crowd probably has more in common with the Bachelor contestants than Mary Fred. When her boyfriend Pete asks another girl to a dance, she decides to “make him do what she wanted–and now she knew how.” The “how” turns out to be this: “He grabbed her and kissed her with grasping violence. His hands fumbled inside her coat, reaching for her in ways he had never tried before.” Sue ends up breaking up with Pete, mostly because he’s a big jerk, even putting his inept attempt at amour-amour aside.

I have a feeling these television gals are going to ignore the lessons Sue learned the hard way in favor of single-girl guru Helen Gurley Brown. “Quite a few ‘nice’ single girls have affairs and do not suffer at all!” she says in Sex and the Single Girl–rather daringly for 1962. Gurley Brown’s remark seems quite sweet beside The Sex Life of the Career Girl (Roy Lee Sherman, MD and Lillian Preston, 1965) whose authors leave the question of sex to the individual girl, asking pragmatically, “Does the projected affair promise real help to her in her career?”

Good luck, ladies.