For Young Ladies Only

by Caroline S. Hoyt

Three smart girls grow up and tell you other smart girls how they feel about it all

    Girls, girls, girls! Lend me your ears! For this is a story with girls, about girls, and for girls. When you have read it, you will have the answer, I think, to many of the questions you smart girls ask these three smart girls whenever you write to them.
    For I talked with the girls - Deanna, Helen Parrish and Nan Grey, each one in turn and then all together. I lunched with Deanna and her mother in the commissary at Universal. I talked with Helen and Nan in their portable dressing-rooms on the set of “Three Smart Girls Grow Up.” I also talked with them in their schoolroom, which is another large, portable room, moved from stage to stage as the scenes shift. In this portable, between scenes, Helen labors over French verbs and Nan furrows her porcelain brow over Civics, in which she is particularly interested. I talked again with Deanna in her bungalow dressing-room where she has school with her private tutor. Deanna is studying
French and is concentrating on her two favorite subjects, English and Music Appreciation, and she still takes her singing lesson every day.
    So I talked with the girls the whole day long and learned the answers to most of the questions. I know what these three smart girls think about make-up and clothes, about girls who smoke and girls who take cocktails. They gave me their ideas about boys and dates and dances, about music and books and hobbies. I asked each girl to describe her ideal man and two of them did, rather sketchily, and one of them didn’t at all. And the one who didn’t is Deanna. Because, she says, she has no preconceived image of her ideal man, either in her dreams or in her heart. I gathered, indeed, that the anticipated Prince Charming, that familiar fantasy of other days, is now an antiquated figure, as unvisualized as the Unknown Soldier.
    “Is it,” I asked Deanna, “that girls today have grown ‘too old to dream?’”
    And Deanna answered, “Too wise, perhaps. Too busy, certainly.”

"I think it's silly," says Deanna, "for girls to have preconceived ideas about their future husbands."

Deanna, Helen Parrish and Nan Grey are three smart girls as unalike as peas in different pods!

    I learned what are their favorite studies, what they do when they spend evenings at home, and what are their ideas regarding marriage versus a career.
    And I realized that they are growing up, these girls - Deanna and Helen just turned sixteen, Nan soon to be eighteen. You will notice that they are growing up when you see them in “Three Smart Girls Grow Up.” There is “love interest” in this picture, for one thing. Nan and Helen really “fall in love” and they think that Deanna is in love. They wear more adult clothes, too, not the kid clothes of the first “Three Smart Girls.” Deanna is sheer and flowering loveliness in a floor-sweeping formal. She wears fur-trimmed negligees, gowns with the first little whisper of sophistication.
    And they are growing up off the screen as well as on. There are little signs and portents that told me so. For instance, their teachers told me that when they made “Three Smart Girls” they didn’t even ask what boy was to be in the picture with them. They weren’t interested. When they began “Three Smart Girls Grow Up,” they did ask. There was much animated “girl talk” along the “boy-line.” Who would he be? They hoped he would be tall, good looking, “have personality.”
    Now, too, they no longer scream noisily between shots. They no longer get in Director Henry Koster’s amiable hair by their pranks and practical jokes. The scuffle of juvenile feet is forever silenced and quite high heels tap daintily across the sound stages now. Now, between shots, they dance the Lambeth Walk, play records in their dressing-rooms, practice the latest dance steps, or sit “like little ladies” at their needle-point or knitting. Deanna started the needle point fad when she made a cushion top. And so infectious has her industry become that you may now observe Deanna, Helen, Nan, the wardrobe mistress, the hairdresser and Nella Walker, who again plays their mother, all bent over the bright threads and busy needles of needle-point.
    Now Deanna has graduated from bobby socks to silk stockings and those quite high heels. Now she wears her last-Christmas gift from her mother, a tiny wrist-watch of diamonds around one slender wrist - Deanna’s first diamonds. Now Deanna is getting her license to drive her own car. Only yesterday, it seems, Deanna was perfectly content to have her father drive her to and from the studio, wherever she wanted to go. Now she is planning on buying a coupe for herself - black with white wall tires is her choice. Nothing conspicuous for Deanna.
    “I don’t care for flashy things.” And there is a new richness to the young beauty of Deanna, new lustre of skin and hair and steady eyes.
    Helen is straining at the schoolroom leash, more absorbed in glamor than in geography, more intent on the lines she speaks on the sound stages than in the lines a long-dead Caesar spoke in Gaul.
    Nan handles her own money now, gives herself ten dollars a week in spending money. Nan has gone kind of “fur-mad,” she admitted to me. She has bought herself a silver fox cape, a new fur coat. She is a young lady now. They are all young ladies now, these three smart no-longer-little-girls - young ladies enough to speak up for themselves if I will just stop talking long enough to give them a chance! Here they go!
    When I asked them to describe their ideal man it was Deanna who said, her smile so wise that I felt a little silly, “I haven’t one! I never give a thought to what kind of a man I shall fall in love with some day. I never visualize what I hope he will look like, what he will be or do. I think it’s silly for girls to have preconceived ideas about their future husbands. Because the ideas never come true. Most girls fall in love, I think, with the exact opposites of the images they may have made up in their own minds. Like girls in Hollywood who say that they will never, never marry actors. And then they almost always do! I have never even had a crush on any boy or man. I admire certain men very deeply, but I also have the same kind of admiration for Margaret Sullavan on the screen and Helen
Hayes on the stage.”
    And Helen Parrish says that she doesn’t think much about an ideal man, either, because she is too much in love with her work and the only crushes she gets are crushes on men on the screen. People think, said Helen, that girls in pictures aren’t picture fans like other girls are. But this isn’t true, because Helen herself gets as excited as any other fan about, well, Jimmy Stewart, for one. Jimmy is so natural, says Helen, and so young and seems to act just the way he feels. And there is Melvyn Douglas who is “just too wonderful for words” - and Joel McCrea is Helen’s idea of the ideal husband on the screen.
    “But if I really did have an ideal man in mind,” Helen continued, “his looks wouldn’t matter very much. The important thing would be that we should have a good time together, laugh and cry at the same things. That’s what matters!”
    And Nan admitted that she hasn’t had much chance to dream of an ideal man because she has been going with the same boy ever since she was thirteen. “One man I admire tremendously, though, is Noel Coward,” Nan told me. “And the only screen crush I have is Spencer Tracy. And of the girls on the screen, Bette Davis is my favorite, my pet, my Ideal, everything. And I think the Duchess of Windsor is wonderful!”
    “Dates?” I asked the girls, “what about dates?”
    “I can’t tell you very much about dates,” Deanna told me, “because I have never had a date with a boy. I can’t, you see. If I should be seen dancing somewhere with some boy, there might be distasteful publicity. There are people who think that girls of sixteen are too young to go out with boys. I think it’s perfectly all right for girls of sixteen to go dancing with boys their families know well.
    “I don’t go on dates, not because I think I’m too young or that it’s in any way wrong, but just because of the publicity which might offend people. I won’t go out with boys until I am eighteen. And so, all I know about dates is what the girls tell me. A lot of the younger kids go to the Palomar to dance or to the Grove. I don’t think that many girls of my age go to the Trocadero. It’s too expensive for youngsters and the crowd there is older and more sophisticated.”
    Helen said, “Until I turned sixteen I was never allowed to go out in a car with a boy at all. Sometimes I go dancing now. Quite often with Billy Arnold, Edward Arnold’s son. But I have more freedom than I might have because I have a brother a few years my senior and he and his girl always go with me when I go out with a boy. We go to the Biltmore Bowl or to the Beverly Wilshire mostly.”
    Nan goes out only with her special young man. She said, “My idea of the perfect date is first to put on slacks and then go to a Drive-In for sandwiches and coffee. Then go bowling or to the beach. I never go dancing unless I have a new dress I want to show off. I have to be dressed up on the set so much of the time that my idea of a date is to relax and have silly, unformal fun.”
    Both Helen and Nan agree that you don’t go out on a date with a boy unless you know him very well, like him very much so that, if he wants to kiss you goodnight, there is no harm in that. “Petting” and “necking” seem to be obsolete terms to these girls in their teens, as obsolete as the dream man of whom they never dream.
    “Make-up?” I asked them.
    Deanna believes that it’s perfectly all right for girls of sixteen to use a little powder, a dash of lipstick. She does. She never uses mascara off the set because she is so glad to scrub it off when work is done. She believes that girls should make up very carefully, very sparingly, that a girl who overdoes it looks “not quite a lady.” They all agree that make-up is, essentially, a matter of good taste and good breeding.
    Helen maintains that “anything that approves the appearance is okay.” She uses powder and lipstick in the daytime and a little mascara evenings. She said, “I believe in taking the advice of older people about make-up. They can tell how much a girl should use, whether she improves her appearance or just looks ridiculous.”
    Nan uses hardly any make-up off the screen just because she doesn’t like it. She puts cold cream on her eyebrows and lashes and uses a dash of lipstick and lets it go at that. “No powder, ever,” she told me. “I like shiny faces!” All three girls use pale nail-polish off the screen. Mr. Koster doesn’t like them to wear it before the cameras.
    Of the three girls, only Nan ever smokes. Deanna told me, “I don’t smoke because I have no desire to. I wouldn’t smoke even if I didn’t sing. I think, too, that it’s much more original, nowadays, for girls not to smoke. I think that many girls of sixteen smoke because they think it makes them look older. But I think it makes them look younger, really, like a baby dressed up in high heels.”
    Helen echoed these sentiments, saying, “I know that most young girls smoke because they think it makes them look smart. When I went to high school the girls talked about smoking and said that is why they smoke. I never have, partly because I don’t want to and partly because my brother always tells me, ‘Helen, you don’t have to smoke or drink to be “with the crowd”.’”
    Nan thinks it’s all right for girls “almost eighteen” to smoke if they want to. She does, now and then, “just so long as they do not smoke in cars, in the streets, or too often.”
    Deanna and Helen just shook their heads over the question, “Should young girls take cocktails?” Nan said that girls of sixteen run a risk if they take a cocktail because “at that age,” quoth Nan, maturely, “lots of girls go at things too hard, get kind of crazy. I don’t think it’s right for any girl to take a cocktail unless she has a good head on her shoulders.”
    All three girls love dancing, all three are crazy about the Lambeth Walk. Deanna likes to do an “ordinary fox-trot.” She doesn’t do any jitterbugging or Big Appling or anything like that. Helen likes to watch jitterbugs, but can’t jitter herself. Nan doesn’t care much for going out dancing, but loves to dance at home to the strains of a good orchestra.
    All three girls are crazy about playing records. Deanna likes symphonies. Nan is crazy about good arrangements, particularly Tommy Dorsey’s arrangement of “Song Of India.”
    Of the three, only Nan has a hobby. She collects little horses. “Funny little horses,” she told me, “and little boots and shoes, too, china, wood, crystal, metal, all kinds. I collect charms, too, for my several charm bracelets.” The other two girls said that hobbies take time and they haven’t any time. Helen loves football and goes to a game any time she gets a chance. Deanna spends most of her very spare time reading.
    Deanna and Helen dislike shopping. Their mothers do most of it for them. Nan loves it. She says, “I’m clothes-mad, anyway. Hats and shoes are my especial extravagances.”
    They are in accord when it comes to their ideas about spending an evening at home. They like to have their girl friends come to their houses. Sometimes the boys, too. Deanna often has Helen over for the evening, her chum of school-days, Evelyn Craig, her sister. They sit around and “just talk” or they read aloud. They play Hop Ching or Detective Girls, or they play their records, roll up the rugs and dance.
    At Helen’s house, they play ping-pong on the dining-room table and serve sandwiches and cokes for refreshments. Sometimes they even have pillow fights, forgetting for an hilarious hour that they are crossing that fateful spot “where the brook and river meet.”
    “Most of the parties we give,” Deanna told me, “parties to which we invite boys as well as girls, are informal. ‘Sports’ parties, we call them. The girls usually wear sweaters and skirts or slacks. None of us like to fuss up.”
    “And when girls get together,” Helen told me, “the first question seems to be: ‘Well, what’s his name, now? Tell me all about him. What does he look like. What did he say to you and what did you say to him?’” Which seems to prove that, in spite of their young wisdom and practicality, this bumper crop of today’s adolescents are not so very different from all the others, after all.
    All three say that they would like to go to college. But when it comes to choosing between college and a career, they unanimously choose their careers. They will go on tutoring, however, in the subjects that interest them.
    And all three are rather eager than otherwise to grow up. Deanna told me, “Yes, I want to be older. I don’t mind growing up because the sooner I do, the more freedom I will have. But I’m not impatient about it, really. Because I’m very satisfied with things as they are. Everything in my life is traveling along at the right pace for me.”
    Helen wants to grow up more so that she can “travel round the world.” She said, “Next to being successful in pictures, to travel everywhere is my main ambition.” Nan wants to build a house.
    Not any one of them is enough interested in marriage as yet, to be willing to think of giving up her career for marriage. Even Nan, admittedly in love, says that she will not marry until she is well established in her work or maybe “through with it all.” Deanna doesn’t believe in crossing bridges. How do we know, she says, that there will be any bridges to cross? Helen said, “Between marriage and a career. You have to select one or the other, it seems. I’m just glad that so far I haven’t had to choose.”
    And so, and in such fashion, with such ideas and ideals, opinions and prejudices are these three smart girls growing up. It should be pleasant and, I should suppose, profitable for all you other smart girls to check and double-check your problems and pastimes and perplexities and convictions with those of Deanna, Helen and Nan.

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