The Girls of New York

New york has more girls than any other city in the land. It probably has more of just about everything – and consequently so do they. It is the temple of communications and the image makers, the vault of high finance, the haven of live theatre, the clothes closet of fashion, the nation's link with Europe by plane and by boat – and every one of these activities in which it excels brims with girls: career girls and clericals, callgirls and floozies, shop girls and waitresses, mannequins and mimes.

Heterogeneous they may be – un-like the girls of such one-industry towns as Hollywood and Vegas – but they do share attributes which make them in certain recognizable ways more alike than they are different. Among these are their quality and mettle – evidences that they've found elbow room in the country's most competitive milieu; the fact that, in proportion to the girls of most other cities, virtually none of them live with their families; the undeniable fact that they share an exhilarating sense of playing in the big league, where average intelligence, average ambition, average ability and average looks scarcely stand a chance. Indomitable, articulate, well-groomed, wheeling-and-dealing, and appar-ently innumerable, they converge on an island of 14,272 tightly packed acres – all seeking freedom, status, individuality, fame and fortune.

Swept into a maelstrom of (continued on page 94) twelve million private hopes and fears, swimming for dear life, and loving every minute of it, they are unique products of the time and the city in which they live – like the clothes they wear, the apartments they live in, the vehicles they ride in, the places they work, and the goals they pursue. Like the city itself, they are as kaleidoscopic in mind, heart and body, in means and ends, as the countless commercial, artistic and intellectual tributaries which commingle in the exciting and terrifying wilderness once innocently known as New Amsterdam.

From Texas and Ohio, Sweden and Germany, North Dakota and South Carolina, even from legendary Brooklyn, they pour into Manhattan by the thousands every year, chic as (continued on page 117) Girls Of New York (continued from page 94) Paris mannequins, and hell-bent on carving out in the commercial and residential world a niche to which they cling with a tenacity unrivaled by the women of any other city, large or small. Theirs is a restless and unabating quest for Room at the Top: a name in lights or block letters on some marquee, penthouse register, office door or marriage license. A few thousand more – nurtured like mutation orchids in the hothouse of New York's high society – already have it made. Their only remaining task – often a difficult one – is the addition of another hyphen to their patrician surnames, along with another string of zeros on the credit side of their well-fed bank balances.

With few exceptions, the girls are drawn to New York by the siren call of the symbol-manipulators. They unsuspectingly enter a kingdom in which words and pictures transcend and often replace the things they represent. Like Moslems to Mecca, they come nourishing the dream that Manhattan is the home of all that is new, meaningful and good in art, music and literature; in theatre and "live" television; in food, fashion and decor; and even in love. It doesn't take them long, however – happily involved in the mechanics of their chosen crafts – to adapt their dream to the specifications of the commercial world. Art, music and literature become metamorphosed to layout, jingle and copy. Theatre and live television they find to be a maelstrom of hard-boiled economics, of spot sales, Nielsen charts, cost-per-thousand and run-of-show contracts. They find themselves caught up in a headlong and heady competition with a hundred or more experienced gladiatrixes for every part on Broadway, every secretarial and receptionist's job, every position of humble or vaunted influence – and most of all, for every available male. They find themselves torn by an ambivalence that is peculiar to New Yorkers: the fear of isolation and the fear of contact. Aswirl in a sea of mass consumption, rapid transit and self-seeking humanity, they feel the loneliness and anonymity of a one-line listing in the 1800-page Manhattan telephone directory. And so they feel the need of companionship – particularly male – with an intensity that approaches desperation. But Manhattan – beneath its slick facade – is also a world of ferocious struggle to succeed; a world of sickness, brutality and perversion that seems to stalk every subway platform and darkened side street. And so the girls of New York tend to wear a shell of understandable withdrawal – however fragile – that draws them away from the very contacts they so passionately require, and constantly seek.

If the newcomer can weather this early period of strain, and most of them have the mettle to do it, she will find herself a functioning part of any one of a hundred microcosmic milieus – depending on her predilections – which coexist, separately but equally, in the patchwork quilt of professional, residential, artistic and intellectual communities that constitute the 121/2-mile stretch of high-rent real estate known as Manhattan.

She will discover a way of life only slightly less zestful, variegated and urbane than the impossible daydream she once envisioned. The very immensity of the city which initially imbued her with a sense of anonymity will now bestow upon her a privacy and an elbow room for far-out self-expression that would have gotten her jailed or disowned, or both, back in East Overshoe. She will have plenty to write home about – but much more, happily, not to write home about. The particular ingroup of which she becomes a member will be determined by the alacrity with which she fulfills three fundamental needs: a well-paid, preferably stimulating job; a well-located, preferably charming apartment; and a coterie of wellheeled, preferably unattached young men.

The most easily attained of these goals is, of course, suitable employment. One riffle through the Help Wanted pages of The New York Times will titillate her with come-ons like, "Receptionist, beautiful, able to meet celebs and movie stars, lots of excitement and no pressure, $70"; or "Secretary – right hand to young PR exec; go right to top with him, $100." To be sure, these romanticsounding jobs are no more than precarious perches on the ladder to recognition. But with a hipness remarkable even for her resourceful sex, the New York girl parlays that perch for all it's worth. A showroom secretary in the garment district often winds up doubling as a lingerie model before her first day on the job is over. What she does on her first night, of course, is up to her, and to the well-heeled out-of-town buyers who happen to catch her debut.

The girl in bobby socks and club jacket who graduated from Lincoln High in Brooklyn last year and now commutes in a black sheath from a West Fourth Street walk-up to a receptionist's desk at a Broadway booking agency, can catch the eye – and maybe even the coattails – of the Great and Near-Great whose autographs she wouldn't have been able to beg, borrow or steal a year before. Or take the twenty-one-year-old journalism major from the University of Texas who sidles into a research job in the story department of some TV-packaging emporium on Madison. With any luck, she'll be a production assistant by the time she's twenty-three; at twenty-five, a full-fledged producer's wife – or at least his Girl Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The Sarah Lawrence graduate from an upper-case family in Winston-Salem will find another milieu. She arrives in town with her sights trained on a secretarial job at Vogue – where even the receptionists, fully aware of their status as employees of publishing's most "in" magazine for upthrusting career girls, look and dress exactly like the ghostly mannequins pictured in its impeccably proper pages. Big-eyed, angular and mysterious-looking, she fits the image to her 32A cup. But finally, unable to master the peculiar speech impediment that Vogue seems to require of all its functionaries – an accent that sounds not unlike Katharine Hepburn talking with a dime between her teeth – she becomes the eleventh-floor receptionist at Look – where she gets to meet a lot more eligible men anyway.

Between 666 Fifth and 45 Wall Street, there are thousands of jobs like these, thousands of bright girls filling them, and thousands more waiting in line for them to get married or canned. The courageous New York male, standing on the sidewalk between twelve and one before any one of a hundred commercial lodestones in the mid-town area, will be joyously inundated in a gurgling floodtide of female forms issuing from every available aperture. They come from publishing houses, and agencies, literary and theatrical offices, dental clinics, life insurance firms, brokerage houses, network publicity departments, fancy Park Avenue corporations, cosmetic companies, high-priced women's shops – each with its own set of specialized preoccupations and intramural liaisons.

Wraith-like and Rubensesque, meek and mighty, U and non-U, they are all about to perform the convulsive New York ritual known as Grabbing Lunch. The intrepid observer can follow them into the chintz-draped recesses of that watercress victory garden known as Schrafft's; onto the leatherette toadstools of Chock Full O'Nuts – that monument to the discoverer of cream cheese on date-and-nut bread; into the maddeningly efficient and faceless impersonality of the Brass Rail at Fifth and Forty-third; even into the clattering charybdis of plastic trays, gushing spigots and peekaboo snapping windows known as Horn and Hardart's. In twittering phalanxes large and small, they march to countless drugstore counters, side-street delicatessens and glorified charcoal pits – of which Hamburger Heaven, next door to Saks Fifth, was the once-chic progenitor. A few renegades, incognito behind their sunglasses, even skulk into one of those ubiquitous short-order temples of fluorescence called Riker's. The lucky and, resourceful ones, of course, will have shanghaied some ardent junior executive or upstart copy writer – it doesn't really matter which, as long as he dresses the part and pays the freight – into the more refined and digestible atmosphere of Michael's Pub or Louis and Armand's – both hangouts for ad men, TV-radio execs and their respective flacks. An hour later, loins girded, the girls will all stream back into their cubbyholes for the last hard lap in the race for five o'clock.

A few hundred yards west, beyond the dividing line of Fifth Avenue, stretch the sooty vastnesses of an entirely different world of New York girls: those involved directly or indirectly, humbly or influentially, in the pursuit of Thespis. Broadway ingenue, TV extra, operatic maid-in-waiting, pavement-pounding hopeful–all crisscross and intermingle in an ever-circling pavan of hope and heartbreak. Even if she sings, dances, does impressions, and measures 36-22-36, the girl with designs on showbiz courts the spectre of disenchantment every day. The supply of willing and largely able talent – even in the capital of year-round theatre; of a hundred hits and misses on and off Broadway; of countless intimate but short-lived revues; of scores of nightclub and theatrical stage shows – simply exceeds the demand.

Not long ago, chorus lines pranced endlessly on dozens of weekly TV series, and live television gobbled up acts, actors and actresses as fast as they could get an AFTRA card. Today, the eager girls who would display face, figure and maybe even a little talent must send out their press glossies with a list of credits pasted to the back, cataloging everything from an off-screen bark in a Mother Hubbard Dog Food commercial and a six-week stand as The Other Woman on a daytime soaper, to a brief but glorious tenure as Miss Rubber Goods at a national druggists' convention. For better or worse, richer or poorer, they are wedded to this life, and they wouldn't change it for the world. The dream of The Big Break continues to shimmer mistily before their carefully-penciled eyes – and the dream comes true just often enough to keep them coming back for more.

Amid this whirl, more languorous and usually less talented, moves the long-stemmed beauty whose theatric function – on nightclub floor or musical stage – is to just stand there in filmy costumes and towering ostrich plumes and look superb while the smaller, bouncier types exert themselves in the chorus line. The combination of breath-taking beauty and heroic stature demanded of the showgirl by the entrepreneurs of such spangled boites as the Copa and the Latin Quarter has produced a small but exclusive species of glittering Amazon – and a species of stage-door charlies who don't mind the climb. The girl's hours may be long, but she can sleep as late as she likes – even in splendor, if she's not too particular where she wakes up. Her audience is a checkered cross-section of joy-buzzing conventioneers, the expense-account set, the sporting fraternity, and assorted others of more dubious pursuits. But whatever the clientele demands in worldly appetites, it makes up for in worldly goods.

Like a thin veneer of pancake makeup spread across the face of the city, the models of New York peddle their perishable but portable wares on the fringes of all the major industries, from the lingerie showrooms in the Seventh Avenue garment district to the glass-brick fashion studios on upper Madison. Thanks to the whim and bounty of nature, they can parlay the various parts of their body, and various degrees of its exposure, into a living which sometimes outstrips that of their well-padded employers. Adorning the faces and figures of the several thousand–strong legion of New York models who pace the city's canyons armed only with a hatbox, are the perfectly formed eyes, noses, ears, lips, hair, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, breasts, hips, legs and feet familiar to every reader and viewer of the medusa-headed mass media. Whether she models the skins of fur-bearing animals imported from Saskatchewan at great expense, or the pelt imparted to her by nature at no expense at all, the New York model imagines herself to be achieving the same kind of identity and recognition as her less narcissistic but more intellectual sisters. More than one Ohio lass has arrived in town consumed with visions of a Suzy Parker—like career in high fashion, and turned with equanimity to the less heady but more realistic satisfaction of seeing herself – all of herself – preserved for time immemorial in the salon section of a big-circulation photography magazine. So the dream survives, and the girls keep posing, swaddled and unswaddled, unshakeable in the conviction that they will finally reach high enough to grab the Golden Apple. The amazing thing is that so many of them actually do.

Woven along with the other subtle and obvious threads into the fabric that clothes the girl of New York, of course, is a somewhat warped woof of commercial sex. Aside from the wretched chippies who stalk the Times Square jungle with their opalescent pumps and transparent plastic purses, it is rather difficult to spot a professional. She is expensively, often tastefully, coiffed and gowned, well-mannered and sometimes college-educated – a custom-made product for the slick metropolitan market. Some of these metered courtesans even hold jobs of status and respectability during their "off" hours. New Yorkers still chuckle about the schoolteacher who lectured by day and lechered by night. Not infrequently these same New Yorkers pick up their morning tabloid to learn that the lovely girl next door who lends them ice cubes has been slapped into the cooler herself. The majority of the city's higher-bracketed houris – impelled by the same status drive as their legitimate sisters – have gravitated to the tony East Side town houses, despite iron-clad references demanded by many wised-up real estate agents. So the tumbrils sometimes roll down even the tree-lined mid-town side streets off Park and Madison, as some unfrocked off-Broadway stand-in or freelance photographer's model is hauled off to Night Court.

Thanks to modern communications, New York has outgrown its need for out-and-out, iron-gated, mirror-lined, red-velvet brothels. The impersonal telephone answering services now do most of the work. There are twelve pages of answering services in the Manhattan classified, among them those which specialize in callgirls. The newly-arrived visitor, unversed in the pursuit and apprehension of amateur talent, can find out which answering services simply by crossing with silver the outstretched palm of a likely-looking servitor in almost any of New York's better transient hotels – the better the hotel, the better the service, in most cases. The customer has only to leave name, number and reference; the twenty- or thirty-minute wait that follows will be climaxed by a discreet knock at the door, and an introduction to a companion so charming, well-dressed and lovely looking that he'll find it difficult to remember the commercial basis for the friendship. The fare is almost always the same: $20 a trick, $100 a night – no. checks, no big bills, no credit cards.

In an atmosphere of permissiveness rivaled only by the sloe-eyed capitals of Europe, in a town where the Big Break is often a long time coming, it isn't surprising that many of the no-tickee-no-trickee set have drifted into the business – just as in Hollywood – from the swirling periphery of show-business and the modeling world. It's not always for keeps, and if it is – well, an articulate, affluent town like New York can provide plenty of rationalizations, and compensations.

The vast majority of New York girls, of course, guard their amateur standing with the avidity of Olympic decathlon champs. They are perfectly willing to take part in all the events, but a certain homage – if only in name – must be paid to the ingrained shibboleths of their low-, middle- or upper-brow upbringing. Most of them beat this path all the way to the altar. But quite a few girls in their mid-twenties – too old to go steady, too young to throw in the towel – turn toward an informal liaison requiring no change in status, known locally as An Arrangement. It is a grati- fyingly simple situation for both parties and, though it may not be the realization of a Rona Jaffe dream for the best of everything, it's still a fairly enjoyable and possibly even constructive preliminary to the main event.

Wherever she comes from, in whatever bastion of fashion, finance or communications she chooses to spend her daytime hours, the New York girl fits her domestic needs as well to the specifications of her master plan. The newly arrived chick often tarries briefly at the Barbizon or the Allerton – two Females Only mid-town hostelries. These forbidding fortresses are monuments to the vulnerability of their inmates – and to the resourcefulness of the determined males who continually attempt, sometimes with exhilarating success, to invade the sanctuary by masquerading as doctors and TV repair men. The girl who really wants to join the swim takes the hint early and strikes out on her own.

If she's smart – and she usually is, or she wouldn't have come to New York in the first place – she will latch onto some quaint one-and-a-half in a converted brownstone, preferably within walking distance of her job. Brooklyn Heights – a San Francisco-like literary and artistic ghetto across the East River from the Battery – is certainly picturesque, but it's still Brooklyn. Jackson Heights, out in Queens, is less expensive than Manhattan, but only airline stewardesses live there – and they're never home.

The Manhattan girl, like the city itself, seems to be in a constant state of imminent or actual flux – poised for the hoped-for jump around the corner to a better neighborhood. The competition for a roomy, well-located and preferably inexpensive apartment is as keen as for the plum jobs and peachy men. The rents are the highest in the world, but the New York girl soon learns to accept lofty land values as the price she has to pay for the excitement and adventure of the world's cosmopolitan capital. What she might have declined to use as a clothes closet back in Duluth, she will unprotestingly move into complete with hot plate in New York. Or she may choose the alternative of doubling and tripling up with a gaggle of similarly inclined girlfriends. Three hundred clams will buy some fairly lush and spacious digs, by New York standards, and divided by three, the girls can afford it. For the roving bachelor, the alternative is a happy one in either case: privacy with a solo flat-dweller, or the infinite delights of blind-dating and roommate-switching with girls who split the rent.

The acceptable neighborhoods are rather clearly defined: the middle East Side, roughly from the new Kips Bay Park development to Seventy-ninth Street; the vicinity of lower Central Park West, along with its wider and more heavily-trafficked side streets – especially in the resurgent area around the Coliseum; and Greenwich Village. The East Side girls build their nests in such storied purlieus as Murray Hill and Turtle Bay, and those with sufficient risk capital even make the Beekman and Sutton Place scenes. They pay high-ceilinged rents for low-ceilinged pads with air-conditioning, wall-to-wall carpets and a glimpse of the river – secure in the knowledge that an address in the East Fifties, Sixties and Seventies bespeaks a girl of means as well as substance. The really "in" places for dining, drinking and just being seen are all concentrated within a brownstone's throw, and it's a short jog to the vortex of their own particular daily free-for-all: Lex, Park, Madison and Fifth.

The girls of lower Central Park West and its environs choose to sleep as well as work on the West Side, commuting north by bus, IND or seventh Avenue subway from their downtown haunts in the twilight world of show business. Their flats – often forested with the comfortably unfashionable Grand Rapids bric-a-brac that comes with all furnished apartments, astir with the amiable but hair-shedding presence of a small, bright-eyed poodle called Mitzi, strewn with the artifacts of their various muses (dog-eared scripts, paperback Shake-speares, leotards, ballet slippers, cans of half-used cosmetics) – tend to take on either a kind of snug Midwestern charm, or a murky nostalgia reminiscent of Miss Havisham's shuttered drawing room in Great Expectations. But the rents are really quite low, and the world's most sophisticated village green – Central park – is quite near. If they can stick it out until 1962, they may even be able to lean out of their windows and catch the faint strains of the New York Philharmonic from the nearby Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts, a futuristic cultural nucleus now under construction.

The girls of the village are, by and large, a breed of gentle rebel who choose to live in cold-water walk-ups which abound with sweet potato vines and avocado pits planted in mason jars, bristle with decor that is a strangely charming mixture of pre-Columbian, Second Avenue Baroque, Macy's Basement and Foam Rubber City. More than likely, there is also a recorder, a bongo drum and a Siamese cat who answers to a name like Praxiteles or Etoin shrdlu. There are others, less insistent on preserving their "identity," who can afford a doorman, hot water and a self-service elevator in Washington Square Village, or one of those other faceless steel-and-glass beehives that continue to encroach upon the venerable brownstones and hallowed cobblestones of the Minetta Lanes and Washington Muses so treasured by tearful villagers. Fiercely individual or not, many of the village girls are a crossbreed of uptown non-conformists, who prefer the lingering charm of the city's old quarter to the status of its new one. Others are a downtown intellectual and artistic cadre of off-Broadway hangers-on, female artists and their models, and black-stockinged, almond-eyed purveyors of custom-baked on hand-hammered objets d'art. Transplanted or indigenous, they are an articulate, hard-working, fun-loving, self-willed and eminently realis-tic species of blossom who usually disdains the garish colors of the beatnik community with whom they live cheek-by-bearded-jowl.

Night plunges the New York girl into a multifarious social context somewhat more relaxed but no less knowing and demanding than her day.

Every area of the city has its characteristic cocktail hangouts catering to every stratum.But it's not as easy after dark to trace the girls to any particular set of them, for night brings with it a kind of musical chairs of societal and occupational milieus – with everybody playing. In the heartland of communications, the evening's preliminary joustings are conducted in such places as Michael's Pub, suddenly transformed by nightfall into a favorite of the fashion models, who are apt to arrive in full fig, feathers ruffling. The Ad Lib, the Barberry Room and Absinthe House, so recently a scene of businessmen's lunches and TV press interviews, now offer solace to the high priests of communication and their erstwhile vestal virgins. In these low-key way stations between the rigors of the day and the pleasures of the night, it is an unwritten law that the institutional drink-after-work need not be carried beyond seven – though the door, as at the U.N., is always left open for negotiation.

Whatever bargains are struck, the streets soon begin to clatter again – only now with the feet of those seeking food, culture, entertainment and company – from the spiked heels of West Forty-sixth to the alligator pumps of East Fifty-seventh, from the suede mukluks of Sheridan Square to the sequined evening slippers of the Plaza and the Sherry Netherland – all converging singly or otherwise on a thousand and one temples of Lucullus.

Lucullus usually – but not always – comes first for the New York girl. Certainly no woman in the world has the chance to tantalize her palate so voluptuously. From pâté maison to coupe marron, from beef bourguignon to veal Florentine, from brown ale to green turtle soup, from Kasha to popovers, from rijsttafel to zabaglione, from bouillabaisse marseillaise to matzo-ball soup, from saltimbocca to moo goo gai pan, from blinchiki to guacamole, New York rains delicacies of every shape, size, temperature, consistency and physical state from the world's biggest, best and most expensive cornucopia of plenty.

Duly fed, the girls now turn to Thespis, who appears in New York in more guises – theatre, movies, opera, concerts (classic, jazz and folk), stage shows, nightclub acts, live TV – than anywhere else in the world. Keenly hoping for an escort to get them there before their girlfriends, they dig Tennessee and Brendan, Mike and Elaine, Eugene and Bernard, Mary and Ethel, Kathryn and Helen, Paddy and Gore, Dick and Oscar, Tammy and Rex, Jason and Sir Larry – profoundly gratified, if not by the brittle badinage, at least by the reassuring knowledge that they are in the Presence of Greatness. When they've used up Broadway, they can always recapture at least a pale reflection of its suffusing aura – and sometimes a bright one – with José, Sean, Bertolt and the rest of the gang down at the Cherry Lane, the Circle in the Square, the Sullivan Street Playhouse, or one of the other diminutive dramaturgical dens that dot lower Manhattan like gopher holes.

Other girls, hearing the sound of different drummers, pay homage to Wagner at the Met, Cary Grant at Radio City, Bernstein at Carnegie Hall, Peter Sellers at the Sutton, Mort Sahl at Basin Street East, Mabel Mercer at the Knights of the Roundtable Room, Tallis at the Telemann Society, Zutty Singleton at the Metropole, Jack Paar at Rockefeller Center, Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard, Irwin (World's Foremost Authority) Corey at the Blue Angel, satirical sophisticates at the Upstairs at the Downstairs, sophisticated satirists at the Downstairs at the Upstairs, Herbie Mann at imperishable Birdland, Bobby Darin at the Copa, Thelonious Monk at the Jazz Gallery.

Because of the compactness of the city and all its overlapping enclaves, New York girls are walking girls. They walk to lunch. They walk to shop. They walk with dates. They walk their dogs. They often walk to work, and sometimes even walk to walk. They march resolutely and wander aimlessly. They stride gazelle-like and panther-like. They ankle, amble, ramble, rove, stroll, weave and waddle. They trek and tramp, stalk and swagger, scurry and flounce, gad and gallivant, pad, pussyfoot and promenade. They dogtrot, hobnail, heel-and-toe, shanks-mare and pound the pavement. They sidle and saunter, swing and swivel. They jog and jiggle, fishtail and sideslip, tack in the wind and scull with the tide. They migrate, emigrate, perigrinate, and some say even somnambulate. All of which makes chance acquaintance that much less chancey.

Whether bedecked in plumage plucked from the racks of high fashion's omnipotent arbiters of taste, accoutred in the bush-league afterimages of markdown shangri-las across the wide East River, or caparisoned in the hemp, thongs, eye shadow and monk's cloth of the Bleecker Street irregulars, the New York girl is an irresistible lodestone for uncounted thousands of male pilgrims to the girdered minarets of the Unforbidden City.

Conjure up her composite and the image emerges a brilliant blur. It is her infinite variety that puts the spice in Manhattan's life. There are the Gittel Moscas playing two for the seesaw with woebegone dreams of a career in ballet. There are the disarmingly naive Sister Eileen types, winsomely resolute in their quest for men and success, not always in that order. There are the girls upstairs willing to scratch a seven-year itch, and the girls downstairs with an itch of their own. There are the too-articulate coeds from Finch, Barnard and Hunter, with money from home, a cheek full of sass, and a well-turned rump. And there are the home-grown debutantes, modish to a fare-thee-well, who dally in the arts, putter in the social sciences, hostess at Junior League brunches, ride with the hounds on weekends, caper to the other side of the tracks on weeknights, but, it is said, never go to the West Side except en route to Europe.

Whoever she is, wherever she comes from, and wherever she's going, the New York girl stands apart – with one foot slightly ahead of the other – from the rest of her sex. Is it her versatility, her shrewdness, her self-sufficiency, her worldliness, her ambition, her attractiveness? Yes, but more. She is a creature uniquely attuned to the city in which she lives, loves and labors. She enacts her role against a shifting panorama of coexisting danger and excitement, glory and infamy, restlessly groping in a thousand different directions for the dreams – tangible and intangible – that she's sure are just around the corner.

She breathes the heady air of a town where, if she can stay aboard the whirling carousel, she may be able to grab for a hundred golden rings – one of them, perhaps, on her finger. And if she can't reach them, she can still place or show with the world's best money for her run. For the male who climbs aboard to ride the pink horse with her, the perils and satisfactions are equally exhilarating. But more meaningful, and perhaps more surprising, is the discovery of tenderness, sensibility and compassion beneath the lacquered façade of hipness and hauteur. She may not be anybody's idea of The Girl Next Door, but then The Girl Next Door isn't anybody's idea of her either. And that, as they say, is what makes horse racing.