by Hugh Hood
“Why don’t you take a couple of months off? You needn’t work so hard.”
She gave him a quiet friendly look, and he felt pity and embarrassment. Her eyes wrinkled very attractively at their corners and she communicated a quality that was never evident in her pictures, which would have been worth a lot of money if anyone had ever caught it, a spontaneity, warmth, courage, that are unpurchasable. Only one or two of the greatest stars have had it. Seth didn’t have it. What made him big was his nervous, edgy penetration and intensity, something that stirred his audiences at once. Vogelsang much preferred this elusive quality of Rose’s, but could never catch it long enough to record it. He smiled at her in genuine friendship, relaxing, or pretending relaxation, as they ate.
“You’re an awfully nice woman,” he said, “and you’ve got a great career still to come.” Maybe this wasn’t too well phrased.
“What are you lining up for me?”
“I could make you a lot of money in TV.”
Her face stiffened, and he went on quickly: “An awful lot of money if the show catches on, fantastic residuals, enough that in a few years you’d be independent and could do what you like.”
“I’ve heard that argument before,” she said, “and all I know is what I see. The ones who’ve gotten rich on residuals make another series right away. They don’t go back into films and pick and choose; they try for another quick strike, and then they’re marked as TV stars and never do anything afterwards. I can name a dozen who’ve gone like that. I’d sooner be a second-rate movie star than a top TV personality any day. Any day.”
“I don’t know what prompts that choice.”
“C’est une question de ma gloire.”
“Have you seen much of that fellow?”
“You ought to know. You threw us together.” Then she relented. “I haven’t wanted to bother him. It can’t be much fun for anybody to have to cope with me in this state. We’ve had a couple of dinner dates, but we actually got acquainted at the party.”
Vogelsang shuddered. “What’s the name of that law firm again?”
“Zaslow, Reichert, Bickersteth and Folsom.”
“Crazy name. What did you do, pick them out of the book?”
“They were recommended to me.”
“And you feel able to trust them?”
“More than I do you.”
“I suppose I had that coming.”
“Yes, you had that coming. Do you realize that I’ve been on Elavil for three weeks? Largactil. Sodium Amytal. You name it, I’ve been taking it.”
Her face was white and strained. “Rose,” he said.
“Don’t ‘Rose’ me. The only people who’ve come near me are Peggi and a total stranger. Imagine! Jean-Pierre Fauré, whom I’d never met before, has been kinder to me than anyone except Peggi. It’s humiliating to have to go for help to somebody you met an hour ago. I can only get to sleep, if at all, under sedation. ‘A potent anti-depressant with distinctive anti-anxiety properties.’ It’s humiliating.’’ She finished her food quietly.
“Then see them downtown.”
She said, “Yes, I intend to.”
11
No legal recourse, big help, Rose thought, no recourse. She laid a dozen stills on Madame Sylvie’s desk. They were mostly black and white shots from Goody but as a precaution, just to show what she used to look like, and what she looked like in straight comedy, she had included some bathing-suit shots from the mid-fifties, a gag picture of herself and Seth as Lady Aminta and Sir Grishkin, in which she wore a flowing kirtle with a good line, and two drawing-room shots of herself and a male ingénue in her picture before last, a black-and-white sex comedy in which they had all been falling over low divans. She held one of these up and looked at it critically. She had been wearing slacks of some abominable stretch material that clung so close you could see the edge of her panties. It shouldn’t have done that, she thought, that’s too stretchy. That wasn’t my fault, that was the material, nobody could get away with a pair of panties under that, not even Charity. No recourse, said Mr. Bikersteth, nothing at all we can do.
Madame Sylvie had the other pictures spread on her desk and was looking at them with the highest professional interest.
“It’s a slow deterioration,” she said.
Rose felt insulted. “I haven’t deteriorated.”
“You don’t understand. I’m referring to the behaviour of muscle tissue under aging conditions and loss of tone. Everything is just a little lower down. The band of muscle that attaches to the cheekbone and supports the jaw, for example, will stretch eventually and nothing can be done about it, even if there’s no fatty deposit, along it.”
“Nothing?”
“The process can be retarded, but that isn’t my business. For that you go to Goulmoujian.”
“That’s exactly where I’m going when I leave here. I’ve got to be in the salon at two and the gym at four. What can you do for me?”
“Why have you never consulted me before?”
“I never had this problem before. You’ve had my measurements for years, and you’ve made all my bras, at least those the studios didn’t make.”
“And the rest of it?”
Rose blushed. “I’ve been known to enter a department store.”
“That’s all right, my dear, we all do, but department store girdles won’t solve your problem, will they?”
“No”
Madame Sylvie shuffled through the pictures. “Let me try to sum up the situation. You haven’t put on much weight, but you’ve put on some hard fat, which comes off only after a death struggle. I can tell you exactly how many pounds.” She held up one of the first publicity shots of Rose ever released, showing her looking lovingly down at a baby lamb with a bottle in its mouth. She had ringlets, and the only bare flesh visible was her arms. Madame stared hard at the arms. “When was this taken?”
“In 1951.”
“And you were then . . . ?”
“Eighteen.”
“And at that time you weighed between a hundred and two and a hundred and five, mostly around a hundred and two to three.”
Rose stared, and Madame Sylvie laughed. “There’s no magic to it. I can see the flesh on your arms in the picture, and I can see your bone structure as I sit here and watch you. In your stockings you’re what, five feet, three inches?”
“Exactly.”
“And you have—forgive me—a big rump, or at least apparently so?”
“Have I ever!”
“It’s more appearance than reality, and proper designers would deal with it. We’ll get to that later.” She eyed the other pictures and said, “Give me the one you’re holding. Ah, yes, this is from last year.”
“Late in 1965 actually. That picture was released in 1966.”
“You were in your early thirties.” She put a finger on the line of Rose’s thigh in the picture. “There,” she said, and Rose winced, for she had put her fingertip precisely on the place where the edge of her panties showed.
“You can’t blame me for that. Nobody on earth could have gotten away with those slacks, and I don’t know why I let them put me into them.”
Madame stared at the photograph. “You see what I mean about deterioration? In 1951 that wouldn’t have happened. But you weighed a hundred and ten in this picture.”
Rose said nothing.
“More?”
“Oh, the whole thing is so boring, so horrid. Is it for this that I’m alive? I weighed three pounds more than that. I can’t eat a thing. A cocktail is deadly.”
“A hundred and thirteen?”
“And a half.”
“Then don’t appear in this stretch material if you want to seem to have the same figure you’ve always had.”
“Well, do I?”
“My dear, I don’t know. Why did you
come here?”
“I guess I do.”
“You are not Twiggy or Jean Shrimpton. You don’t need the high-fashion figure. At your height, you’d have to get down to ninety-two pounds, and at your age you couldn’t do it.”
“I was never even close. It’s these hipbones.”
“No, the hipbones aren’t the trouble. A hipbone is a good thing to hang a skirt on, that isn’t the point. But you’re not doing modelling, and in your work they don’t simply use you to show the line of the dress. You don’t need the figure of a coat hanger and you couldn’t have it.”
The notion of the endless and hideous self-sacrifice involved in losing twenty pounds made Rose quail. Systematic near starvation and constant energy output, sweat suits and grinding bloating constipation as a way of life. “I don’t want that.”
“Of course not. What you want is the figure of the woman of thirty, a perfectly good figure, simply not that of a young girl.”
“I’d like the young girl.”
“Impossible.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“You must combine nature and art. You must lose eight pounds and improve your muscle tone, and allow us to do what we can for you.”
“What can you do?”
“We can help you to correct your most important figure defects.”
“What are they?”
“You’ve asked about your hips and derrière, and about your bra cups. To start with, you’re short-waisted, and this is the most troublesome and least obvious problem because it is so simple. Nothing troubles the designer like a short waist. It is innate and unchangeable.”
“Show me.”
Madame took up a picture of Rose in costume for the Automat dream sequence in Goody. She wore a sequined leotard with some boning in the bodice, net stockings, and that screwy headdress. This attire made the juncture of leg and hip uncomfortably obtrusive.
“Look,” said the great corsetière, pointing. “See the jut of the bone shelf here? See how short a distance to the beginning of the rib cage?”
Rose nodded wonderingly. No designer had ever told her anything about this. Obviously it had all been said behind her back.
Madame Sylvie said, “Between the lowest rib, where there is bony protrusion, and the top of the pelvis, bony again, there ought to be a regularly proportioned length, depending on your height. In your case, the distance is disproportionately small, and you have a slightly heavier pelvis and a considerably deeper chest than most young women of your height. The muscled area over the kidneys and liver is shortened and thickened and crowded.”
“And it bulges.”
“Exactly. The virtue of such a figure is strength and durability; its defect is dumpiness, as the English say.”
“Am I dumpy?” said Rose sadly.
“No, not at all, but you are insufficiently self-critical. Now watch. Lean on me.” She supported Rose. “Swing your left leg free,” she ordered. “See how it moves in the socket? When you stride or leap, as in dancing, the pelvis lifts and swings and the abdominal wall is lifted; there is a momentary bulging action, not ugly when you’re sitting down, or standing very erect, but evident when you walk or dance. You will always seem less slim in motion than poised and still, and in your business you can’t stand still.”
“Not for long.”
“Then what is to be done? Very much can be accomplished with a combiné.”
“A combiné?”
“A full corset in a stretch fabric, with a mild cinching effect. It will encourage you to lift the rib cage out of the pelvis, and it will not allow swift and ungainly movement. Half the beauty of the Edwardian type was in the slowness of her pace. And you will notice that in the twenties, when by reaction the uncorseted girl came in, every dress was long-waisted, with the attention focused on the hips, often by an obvious stratagem like a broad stripe or a bow.”
Rose suspected that she had missed a lot in life.
“But one can’t go about in sportswear fully corseted,” said Madame, pursuing her reflections.
“I started out as a sportswear model at seventeen.”
“Precisely. At seventeen one does not worry about her corset.”
“But at thirty-four . . .”
“I will design a line of foundation garments especially for you, in several models and colours, that will control your abdominal muscles and minimize their bulk, and I’ll tell you when to wear them. I can’t make you long-waisted, but I can help your designer to create that illusion. Another thing: don’t wear two-piece outfits with strong colour contrast at the waist. I’ve seen you in them, and they’re very unflattering.”
“I had a lot of those in Goody,” said Rose. “Very peculiar.”
Madame wasn’t listening. “The other matter is easier to correct. You complain that one breast is smaller than the other and that therefore all your bras are uncomfortable and a bad fit. That’s silly. Any difference in size would be minimal and extremely hard to measure. The only means I can imagine would be to immerse the breasts separately in water to gauge the displacement.”
“Can’t you do it with a tape measure?”
“My dear child! Only very crudely, as crudely as with the eye. There is no significant difference in size, I assure you. The trouble is fortunately simpler and easier to correct. You’re consistently holding your left shoulder lower than the right, I suspect to minimize the size of the left breast.”
“Maybe.”
“I think so. You’ve acquired a habit of swinging the left shoulder low, by a quite perceptible distance, and this is affecting the shoulder straps and cup sizes of any bra. You probably find that the right cup binds and chafes slightly under the breast.”
Rose admitted the fact.
“But if the left were actually larger, it would be the one to bind.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“You know I’m right. This is a matter for your trainer. Get that left shoulder into place with exercise, and we can fit you as your skin fits you, and there’ll be no more chafing and binding. That’s a promise which I can keep.”
“That will be a nice change,” Rose said.
When she came in, the salon was noisy with the cries and squeals of women in, if not torment, at least quasi-sexual agony. Out the window across the frivolous and lovely avenue she could see the consulates of several nations, and somewhere near, she remembered, the Cubans, until fairly recently. She wondered what had become of the leisurely gentlemen with perfect manners, cigars, and double-breasted suits who used to be seen on sunny mornings killing endless time in front of their prestige address. All dead? All in the hills of the Oriente province?
She swayed, staring out the window, in her leotard and tights, in a slower rhythm than her companions, most of whom seemed to have abandoned themselves to the species of corybantic ecstasy dear to the heart of S. J. Perelman. They stood, these devotees of the nine-hundred-calorie regimen, in front of a line of iron posts that looked like parking meters and vibrated like some sort of trick in a carnival fun house. To these shaking posts were attached broad belts of webbing which shook and pulled unpredictably, depending on which part of the body pressed against them. Slap, slap, slap, SLAP, SLAP, they resounded all along this line of girls, mixed with a deafening mixture of giggles, squeals, attempted conversations, protests of pain as the webbing struck too sharply at hip or thigh. A national fetish, thought Rose gloomily, for those who could afford it. In salon or studio, from New York to Terre Haute and beyond, these same machines racketed and vibrated.
Next to her an aged harpy with a ruined torso, still feebly resisting the inroads of six decades, shook and stomped in ritual earnestness, turning from time to time to those on either side of her to demand, “How much have you lost, dear?”
At first Rose made no reply, but at the third application she felt that politen
ess required speech, at least, if not information.
“I’m just trying to stay even,” she said somberly.
“Oh, my dear, with a figure like yours, I can see how you’d want to. Aren’t you slender, lucky thing! What do you do, dear?”
Rose pondered a number of answers, under the banging and shouting. “I’m a housewife,” she said finally. Nobody even knew her.
“You must do your own work, to stay so slim.”
“Quite a lot of it.”
“Roger won’t let me lift a hand. I tell him that’s what’s wrong with me, but he won’t listen. You know how men are.”
Rose said, “I may not know, but I suspect.” The other woman had swayed away from her, and didn’t hear. The band of webbing rubbed and slapped at her abdomen, wrinkling the cotton jersey of her leotard. She was quite certain that no real results were being effected. The only way to get rid of it without diet and real exercise, she thought, is with a knife. She switched the vibrator off and let the webbing drop in front of her, nodded and smiled politely at her neighbour, who had now commenced an obscenely rhumba-like oscillation, and went across the room to a device whose design had always amused her, a metal drum about two-and-a-half-feet wide, with a broad rectangular opening cut in the top. Inside was a series of irregularly shaped spindles, like chair legs, which could be made to rotate at varying speeds.
There were handles at the sides, and the whole thing could be adjusted to various angles. You could lie across it belly-down as though you’d just been saved from death by drowning, or you could mount it in any one of a number of somewhat suggestive attitudes, so that the spindles bumped solidly against the inner thigh. You could even lie sidewise across it, and so get at the spare tire over the kidney.
Once Rose had been at work on one of these machines when the next girl down, a dancer whom she had seen a number of times on television who was vainly trying to diminish the dimensions of her thighs, had looked up with a vague smirk of pleasure, caught Rose’s eye, and said involuntarily, “Cheap thrill, eh?”
