pages 155-156 C Sheila Weller "Dancing at Ciro's" Published by Saint Martin's Press
Helen Hover Weller, Sheila Weller's mother, was a reporter in Hollywood writing on celebrities. Weller is setting up the mood of Hollywood at the grand opening of her uncle Herman's new restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. It is World War 2, the troops have invaded North Africa and Winston Churchill is optimistic. It is the day after Christmas... and the doors open.
"Consequently, "they came in twos and fours and sixes," Herman recalled..... Joan Crawford ...Cary Grant... Lana Turner came with her new husband, restaurant owner Steve Crane, and my mother - supervising the cigarette and coat-check girls with one eye, sleuthing for column items with the other - got the actress she most avidly chronicled to sit down with her in the cigarette girls' lounge.
"The movie stars of the forties had a combination of qualities that are the mirror opposite of their counterparts today. On the one hand, they gave off a glamour unheard of in our era, when ten-million-a-picture actresses wear jeans on David Letterman. But the jeans-wearing actresses are sophisticated; those glamour girls were not. They were often socially naive contract-worker-bees completely beholden to studio bosses. They were raised in a culture that still inculcated obedience and in an America deeply gridded by the caste system. A lot of them were insecure about their rough edges (high school drop out Betty Hutton told my mother she kept a dictionary on her bedstand to look up words whose meanings she didn't know) and their recent poverty (ex-elevator operator Dorothy Lamour remembered when she and her mother had to stretch $1.75 to last five days. However, they were still able to be human beings. They didn't have minders and bodyguards; they opened their own front doors; they worried about getting pregnant; and when they got drunk, they would pour out their hearts in a powder room.
