How To Avoid Making Out in Hollywood

Funny thing happened to me on the way up with the window shade the other morning. I flapped around up there a few times, telling myself, "This cannot go on, Young Man, this can not go on!"

Now I've been riding window shades for a long, long time and I'm certainly not knocking it, but I am exhausted!

You see, in Hollywood we have a problem that is rather special and, I'm sure, not to be duplicated anywhere else in the country. The women here suffer from a very rare speech disorder. They cannot negotiate the word "no." The closest they come to it is a somewhat similar word, "now."

This puts an enormous strain on the men, who are outnumbered by single women 3.7 to 1.

The very air in Hollywood seems laden with sensuality, and the golden rule here is "Do unto others ... they like it." Obviously something had to be done about this. A group of the more sensitive bachelors who were still functioning rather well put on snorkels and held a secret meeting at the bottom of the Hollywood Knickerbocker pool. I was elected chairman of the broad -- oops -- board, and we worked out a modus operandi for handling this exacerbating situation.

The severer cases would be moved east, behind the beaded curtain. Those of us who were left drew up a Manual for Survival, some excerpts from which I am passing on to you now:

Case A. The Beautiful Type. A girl you once met casually comes to Hollywood to test for a movie contract. Granted she is a Great Beauty and an Exciting Creature, but she's also extremely nervous and high-strung and she "just has to get it out of her system" but she's a "nice girl" and she's not going to get into the movies "that way," so you are elected. After a week of this you're crawling on your knees and begging for some time off.

How to Avoid Making out with case A.

(1.) Feign a fatal illness. Try gargling with warm tomato juice and then coughing on her. She will get the point quickly.

(2.) Use the lost weekend approach. Keep all your liquor bottles filled with weak tea or apple juice. This, of course, requires great acting, for you drink heavily and steadily until you seemingly pass out. The girl may become a problem here by being a boozer herself, in which case you'd better run down to the liquor store; get some real sauce and belt away until you really pass out.

(3.) Employ the cuisine technique. Invite her over for dinner and serve the following menu: vichyssoise sprinkled lightly with mustache trimmings; chicken breasts served in brassieres; and for dessert, fresh strawberry shortcake topped by a mound of Rapid Shave (89 cents in the Aerosol can).

Case B. You will, at one time or another during a Hollywood stay, run across an Old Type. Perfectly nice girl but she's just ten years older, that's all. Ten years older than anybody.

How to avoid making out with case b.

(1.) Take her for extremely long walks in the hills (always walk uphill) and be careful to state many times beforehand how well her legs look in those spike-heeled, open-toed shoes.

(2.) If this doesn't do it, take her back to your digs, excuse yourself, step to the bedroom and don a long red satin negligee. As you return to the living room, tell her how much you enjoyed Copenhagen.

Case C. A singularly dangerous type is the Name Digger. She digs making it with names. This is the next step after autograph collecting (where she just collects people). You are thinking, "Well, that doesn't bother me, I'm not a celebrity." Ah, but you may know a celebrity, friend, and there's the rub. You may have been entertained by Bob Hope in the army, you may have flown to Los Angeles on the same plane with Gary Cooper's barber or gone up in the elevator at The Alcatraz Hilton with Yogi Berra's mitt stitcher, or you may have even gone to school with Rochelle Hudson's chiropractor. This makes you immediately vulnerable.

How to avoid making out with case c.

(1.) When she says, "But, you said you knew Tyrone Power," you deny it. If she threatens to produce witnesses, your only out then is to say, "No, no, dear, I said I knew Pyrone Tower ... Tower." To make this more convincing, you break into several sentences which should make her doubt her hearing. For instance, "What time is sinner being derved?" or "You're a gice nirl and I leally rike you."

(2.) There is no 2. You'd better make the worst one ferk -- uh -- first one work.

Case D. The woman with a Child. This classification is extremely desperate. Her personal need for a man is only superseded by the child's need to rubfreshly whitened buckskin shoes on a man's dark suit which has just come back from the cleaners.

How to avoid making out with case d.

(1.) Crush a few benzedrine tablets in the child's glass of milk at dinner. If you can keep him out of bed, he'll do the same for you.

(2.) Get in touch with your family doctor at once and ask him for a list of children's diseases which you've had. Then go to the contagious ward of the nearest children's hospital and hug several of the worst that you are immune to. Go straight to the woman's home, call her child to you and envelope it in a warm embrace.

(3.) There is a probability that your family doctor gave you the wrong information. Apply calamine lotion generously to the itchy areas and avoid contact, which is what you were trying to do in the first place.

Case E. The Young and Innocent Type. There is no Young and Innocent Type.

Final thought: should any or all of these fail, there is but one recourse -- weak window shades.