The Body Beautiful

I'll lay you 8 to 5 that God Almighty holds modern females in low contempt.

You would, too, if you were the Almighty and saw these dames rebuilding themselves so feverishly. They pad their bosoms, or raise them with uplifts, or have them whacked smaller by surgery. They reduce their buttocks with torture instruments which, after rubbing their posteriors 10,000 times, may take off as much as 1/10,000th of an inch. They refashion their noses till all female noses look almost alike, and for this privilege they forego the right to blow their noses for months. They take the excess lard off their legs with machinery. Or, if their legs are scrawny, they put synthetic lard on them by use of wool padding. With ingenious make-up contrivances, any lady can quickly make herself look whorish, and when she has done this, she is ready to go out. Look at her! Her gut is held in by a girdle. Her painted toes stick out of her open shoes. She hobbles on shoes that are so high and so pinched that she is in danger of falling on her face which, by the way, probably would improve it. And then at this point so help me, she puts on what passes for a hat.

One afternoon, just to see what goes on, I waddled over to Fifth Avenue's "Beauty Row" and into Madame Helena Rubenstein's.

I announced to the publicity lady, "I would like to lie in an individual bed of snow-white sand."

She looked at me curiously, so I quickly added, "Alone, of course."

I'd been reading about Madame having individual beds of snow-white sand--"you lie there and let the ultraviolet rays stream down their health and energy upon you," it said.

So very soon I was being led through the Body Department, where, if one had dropped in at the right time, he might meet up with the bodies of Gypsy Rose Lee, Ilka Chase, Mrs. Robert Sherwood, Luise Rainer, the Duchess de Talleyrand, and others. There were no other prominent bodies there that day when I called.

"You will find your individual bed of snow-white sand in here," the publicity lady said as she showed me into one big room equipped with sun lamps.

The female nurse handed me a towel to get into and she got out.

Here was a pretty problem. How are girls wearing their towels this season? Off-the-face, off-the-chest, longways, or sideways? I've interviewed many girls in towels but had frankly never noticed how they wore them. I finally got into it any old way, took twenty minutes of ultraviolet rays lying in the snow-white sand which, by the way, was yellowish and imported from Long Island. There was one slight crisis. The nurse told me some woman would come in at the end of ten minutes and turn me over. "I'll thank her to let me turn myself over," I snapped. She merely meant that a woman would adjust the lamp. And sure enough a woman did come in, and I tried to turn over under the towel and--well, did you ever try to turn over under a towel? I wriggled and the towel began sliding and I managed to grab it just before I did a masculine Lili St. Cyr. But this wasn't enough for me, and I demanded I also be allowed to bathe in the Apple-Blossom Foam Bath. This threw Madame Rubenstein (cont. on next page) Body Beautiful (continued from preceding page) and her whole emporium into a nervous spell. She felt that if I took an Apple-Blossom Foam Bath in the same tubs where the fashionable Park Avenue ladies took them, I might cause talk. But she consented to let me take an Apple-Blossom Foam Bath at home in my own tub, and even sent me the Apple-Blossom Foam Bath. So pretty soon I splashed happily in my own tub, creamy, sweet, and fragrant, with epaulets of foam on my shoulders, and looking, in brief, like the inside of a wash boiler. After these two experiences I smelled beautiful and, I must say, felt like a new woman.

Later I met John Frederics, "the mad milliner." He creates, to use his own word, many of the preposterous hats worn by prominent females. Of course there are many other such milliners; Walter Florell, for example, once fixed up Miss Mary Alice Rice with a hat decorated principally with fresh radishes. I know they were radishes because I tasted one. I didn't feel so good afterward, and mentioned this to Miss Rice, who squealed, "Oooooh! I should have told you! I put nail-polish lacquer on those radishes to make them look prettier!"

I got to know Frederics because I won a $37.50 gift certificate on a radio quiz program. I gave it to my Beautiful Wife with the witty remark, "Never look a gift certificate in the mouth," and she waggled home afterward with such a terrifying report that I went back with her.

"That, my dear," she said, "is the looniest hat store I've ever been in. The pay phone in the lobby wears a snood. They have coats of armor standing around, and flowers are growing out of them. One saleswoman wanted to sell me a hat she didn't have in stock. So she grabbed a purse and stuck it on my head ..."

My B. W., who mimics everybody, then illustrated how the saleswoman stood back gravely and looked at the purse sticking up on her head and said, "There, dear! Don't you like it? That's the way it would look. Isn't it the chicest thing you ever saw?"

Well, if anybody would look good wearing a purse on their head, my wife would, but she's of the old-fashioned shopping school that would like to see a hat on her head if she's buying a hat. She's just odd that way. If she wanted to buy a purse, say, she's the type that probably wouldn't be able to judge what it looked like if somebody handed her a hat and said, "There, dear! Hold that in your hand! That's what your purse would look like." Just an old-fashioned girl.

Pretty soon we both descended upon Mr. Frederics' place and at length "Mr. John" came out to greet me. He sat down and talked and talked.

"I'm not mad," he immediately assured me.

He meant, he said, that he wasn't nuts. He sat on a sort of balcony above a large dropped room full of show-cases and flung off Big Names who had him create hats. Garbo had wanted a red sweater. She wanted it to match a red chair in her home. He shrugged off excuses as to why, but I figured out why. Because Gee-Gee is flat-chested. Let's face it. Garbo in a sweater would look like a bag of bones, like a whirling windmill in a burlap sack. That established John Frederics' complete sanity to me.

Suddenly he grumbled something about all the women who forced him to sell them bad hats.

"Bad hats!" I said. "You have bad hats here?" I was startled. After all, this was about the most chi chi hat joint in the world.

"Certainly," said John Frederics, a little proudly. "Show me a bad hat!" he called to one of the saleswomen. "One of our very worst bad hats. Hurry up, angel!"

Angel betrayed no astonishment, and so I watched her as she toddled off. I pictured her going out to their shelf marked "bad hats" and pawing around there till she found one marked "Extra bad," but probably it didn't really happen that way. In a minute she came in a bit wearily and handed him two hats. He held one of them out toward us and let us study it.

"Isn't that a foolish hat?" he said. "Too bad for the woman who gets that."

However, he said, some screwy dame would insist upon it and he would be practically powerless to refuse her money. I looked at the price tags on the two hats and they were each $49.75. So when he began explaining how bad the hats were, I spoke up and asked him kindly not to knock them in my presence, inasmuch as I wanted to go on feeling that $49.75 hats were perfect.

"No, no!" he said, looking at me a little crossly, as though he resented me bringing up the subject of money. "The price doesn't matter. I pay no attention to the price. But if a hat destroys a mental picture you have of yourself, it's a bad hat."

"Would you say that over?" I said, suddenly seeing spots before my eyes.

"A hat is only a mental thing," he said, or at least that's the way these notes read, anyway. "A hat's not a hat."

"Some of them aren't certainly," I thought, but it didn't seem the place to say it.

"A hat," he said, "is the fulfillment of a dream and an illusion."

Frederics, a moody genius, sometimes chases out females who have bad taste and try to get him to follow it in his creations for them. He performs colorfully when the mood to create grips him. Surrounded by milliners, measurers, trimmers, et cetera, he surges through his place, creating--thinking up new hat designs. An ex-milliner, he can make a hat himself if he wants to, but at this point in his career, when millions are waiting for his ideas, he merely creates. He believes that an individual customer's personality should broadcast a sort of "message" to his personality when he is creating. One day he was trying to create for Markova, the ballerina. They made no progress.

Finally Frederics bluntly announced, "I don't think I'll make you a hat today."

"What have I done now?" asked the frightened customer.

He told her regretfully that he just got no message from her personality to his personality, and it was all so futile. Sadly, she left. She came back later and her personality broadcast to his personality that she would look good in hats like Pavlova wore. That was an ideal broadcast, with perfect reception and no static, and he created her some Pavlova hats. After that they were terribly contented.

Frederics finished this tale and said to me, "But I guess I'm just an old gas pipe."

He meant he liked to gas, I suppose. Well, one man's gas is as good as another's.

In my work, I have to watch women's legs a lot, until now I'm a professional leg-watcher. I'm a leg man. I report to my readers whether Betty Grable's legs are as shapely as alleged by her over-enthusiastic press agents, and also give the low-down on Mary Martin's legs. Excusing myself on the ground that after all it's my work, I sometimes ask a glamour girl to cross her legs for me and pull up her dress. When I go to night clubs, I sit there moodily contemplating the red girdle marks on the chorus girls' midriffs and eventually my eyes drop and I am seeing legs before my eyes again. I often see ten, twelve, sixteen, eighteen, or twenty legs at a time, and when I go home and try to sleep later, I frequently count legs instead of sheep. People sometimes ask me if I get bored watching legs, and my stock answer is "Hell, no."

Lately I've been pioneering for prettier legs.

Fortunately, great progress has already been made in this important crusade by a fat, taffy-haired ex-Hollywood correspondent, Mr. Frederick C. Othman of the United Press. Freddie feels as I do, that there's been too much talk about legs and not enough done about them. With Freddie covering the West Coast leg front and me handling the legs on the East Coast, we've (continued on page 37) Body Beautiful (continued from page 14) helped make women a little more leg-conscious, and before long we feel there will be very few ugly legs left. Legs will be as pretty as busts, and God will be in His Heaven and we'll be in Paradise.

I got my tip-off on the leg-beautifying business from the New York Classified Telephone Directory which this year, as always, is fascinating reading.

Leaping out at me from page 78 were two silk-sheathed legs and some seductive sentences:

"OSBORNE LEG PADS ... Beautifully shaped limbs ... CAN BE YOURS!"

I went out to 827 Bergen Street, Brooklyn, and saw the leg-pad man, Mr. William Osborne, a lean kindly man who is in this leg business just to make a living. He has a rather old brick building with an office and workshop on the second floor, and he is steeped in the business, for his father was a leg man before him.

He manufactures "symmetricals," which are padded fill-ins for women who want to make their legs look sexier, although primarily these are made for spindly legged Metropolitan Opera stars and Shakespearean actors who have to wear tights, frail Hollywood gents who wish to appear to be big he men and also for mere average men who are vain and want to look sturdier.

Osborne tossed me a woman's leg. It consisted of a stocking stuffed with some lamb's wool, to give it the perfect shape. The thin-shanked purchaser of this would put it on over her other stocking, then she would appear to be leggy.

"Feel it," invited Osborne. "It feels real, doesn't it?"

"Don't they get a little warm?" I asked.

"If they want nice-shaped legs, they put up with it," he said.

Lots of women who have bad legs read my small epic about Mr. Osborne and wrote to him, begging him to fix up their stems. Freddie Othman was deluged with mail from dames who read his pieces about a West Coast leg artist. Not to disillusion you, but he said there was one famous though skinny actress, always suspected of having toothpick legs, who suddenly blossomed out in a picture with lovely gams. Everybody ran around complimenting her and squealing, "Have you seen So-and-so's beautiful legs?" and those who hadn't seen them felt mighty left out, in fact, ostracized. But of course there had to be a dastard in the crowd, and this dastard, who was a make-up man, finally came forth and said he made the beautiful legs from rubber and that she wore them like rubber boots.

Dorothy Lamour's legs are all right, I can promise you, but she has had the distinction of wearing rubber feet.

Having heard this, I phoned Miss Lamour, who happened to be in New York, but she was out. I needed a bath, so I got into the tub, and had just settled back in it comfortably when the phone rang. I raced to answer it, and it was Miss Lamour, who was calling from the home of her friend and discoverer, Miss Dorothy Gulman, the glamorous press agent. Not the type that holds anything back from a girl like Dorothy Lamour, I told her she had got me out of the tub.

"I would like to see you with that bath towel around you," she said.

"I would like to see you with a bath towel around you too," I answered.

Dottie conversed readily about the rubber feet. Hollywood decided she had ugly feet, which seems hard to believe, considering the beauty of the other sections of Miss Lamour. She sloshed around in these rubber feet (which fit over her other feet) through mountains, jungles, and practically all the South Sea Islands in Hollywood.

"I slipped and I slid and I fell on my face and I decided the devil with it," Miss Lamour said. "I decided I was going to wear my own feet! So for eight years I've worn my own feet, and I've gotten by with them. But I still don't think they're pretty."

"I think your feet are lovely," I said.

"Aw, you've probably seen the rubber ones," said Dottie. "Now you get out of that bath towel and put some pants on! You'll catch cold!"