Success in Skirts

SOONER OR LATER -- Elinor Glyn -- Macaulay ($2).

The Victorian Age was a great believer in literary volcanoes. It preferred them extinct, but from the semi-active ones it got delightful tremors. To Victorians, Elinor Glyn might have seemed a volcano in full blast, but plain readers today will find it hard to believe that she was ever in a state of eruption. Famed as the popularizer of "It," she still enjoys a smoky reputation which is mostly smokescreen. Many a nonreader who smacks over the supposed lubricities of Three Weeks would find it tame and harmless stuff. Elinor Glyn was a scandalous sensation to 1907, but 1934 will find her guilty of a less forgivable sin.

Mary, being the daughter of a chauffeur and a lady's maid, was class-conscious from her youth up. Orphaned, god-mothered by a real lady, she had the laudable ambition of bettering herself. She got a job in London at a fashionable dress shop, counted her pennies, cultivated her tongue, studied shorthand and typing, and kept her feet from straying. Her peers thought her strangely proud, for "common things like holding hands with strange young men at the cinema were not for her." She struck up a culturally useful friendship with a fellow-boarder, a crippled youth who was no less prim of speech than she, but she guarded her virginal beauty for a vague another. More by good luck than good management she escaped the snares laid by a wily woman-hunter and the cruder advances of a loathsome dope-peddler. Fittingly established at last as private secretary to a rich lady of charitarian views, Mary (now Marilyn) met the man of her dreams, who turned out to be an inventor of genius, a gentleman born, and a landed proprietor. All the signs were right; Mary let culture go, fell into his arms, spoke naturally for the first time in her life: "I am glad that we have met. You have given me a great big new outlook on life."

The Author. Daughter of a Canadian, widow of an Englishman (Clayton Glyn, J. P.), sister of a onetime London-Manhattan modiste (Lady Duff-Gordon), sixtyish, still handsome, Elinor Glyn has always exuded a faintly Hearstian phosphorescence. Considering herself a feline type, she strews her house in London, Paris, Hollywood with tiger and leopard skins, keeps two Persian cats who understand, she says, everything that is said to them. She and her sister as debutantes in London were famed for their brilliant wardrobe, much of it designed and made by themselves. Elinor Glyn began to write as a girl when she was confined by illness, never recovered from the habit. Since 1900 she has produced 28 books, ten films, and in spite of their internal evidence, is regarded by millions as an authority on passionate love.

In Hollywood, supervising one of her cinemas in which John Gilbert was playing, Author Glyn, dissatisfied with his efforts in a particular scene, asked: "Jack, can't you be passionate?" Replied Cinemactor Gilbert with a steady look: "Not now!"

Author Glyn has a better idea of her work than her admirers have. Says she: "There's really no sex in my books. People, out of habit, say they are shocking. They are just love stories."

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