Big Blonde

BACK STREET--Fannie Hurst--Cosmopolitan ($2.50).

Cincinnatians will take note that for the opening scene of her new book, Fannie Hurst has taken care, as is her custom, to have a letter-perfect local nomenclature-- Alms & Doepke, Shillito's, Pogue's, Rook-wood Pottery, Eden Park, Avondale. Her story starts in the '90s, when "Over the Rhine" boasted many a beer-garden and German delicatessen dish. Ray Schmidt was good-looking, a blonde whom drummers, even happily married, invariably tried to lure into sin. Everyone liked her and thought the worst. In a day when beer was plentiful and automobiles a stock joke, her wasp-waisted, full-bosomed, generously rounded figure tantalized the males she met. More than tantalize she would not. Her many offers were more flattering to her figure than honorable to her sex. She was willing to marry Walter, the Jewish bank clerk, but something respectable in him drove him elsewhere. Circumstances took Ray to Manhattan. There she re-encountered Walter, less clerkly, more respectable. They drifted into a sub-rosa apartment, and she became the perfect mistress, he the perfect banker. Legally unhallowed years brought out the sacrificial-maternal in Ray, the paunchy ego in Walter. When he died respectably in the arms of his wife, he had made no allowance for faithful Ray. Her old beau Kurt, now an automobile-millionaire in Detroit, might have married her, but Ray was not that kind. Instead she starved herself to send money to an impoverished niece, and tried to make ends meet by playing the races. She got to be a well-known figure at the tracks but made no killing. Retired to a cheap French pension she outlived her poodle Babe, but not for long. The Author. Hearty Fannie Hurst (Mrs. Jacques S. Danielson) loves words like "thigh" and "sausage." Born in Hamilton, Ohio (near Cincinnati) 41 years ago, she grew up in St. Louis, now lives in Manhattan. Never destitute, she has acted as saleswoman, waitress, has traveled steerage, visited Soviet Russia to get material. Long and often the recipient of editors' rejection-slips, she is now one of the best-paid writers in the U. S. Other books: Humoresque, Lummox, Appassionata, Mannequin, Five & Ten.

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