Ham & Legs

Trembling with fatigue from the top of her platinum-blonde hair to the tips of her dainty little (size 5) shoes, the onetime idol of 2,000,000 G.I.s faced newspaper photographers one night last week in a cramped backstage office of Manhattan's garish Latin Quarter. "Let's have a leg shot, Betty," shouted a cameraman, and gamely she snaked out one of the most celebrated gams this side of Marlene Dietrich. "Spread open your dressing gown," snapped one photographer. "You look like you only got one leg."

Thus last week Betty Grable, for six years Hollywood's top female box-office attraction, hit the comeback trail--with both legs. Idle in the movies since 1955's How To Be Very, Very Popular ("It was a turkey"), she had allowed herself to be talked into preparing a nightclub routine for the plush, high-priced Hollywood-Las Vegas-New York-Miami circuit. Explained the Latin Quarter's General Manager Ed Risman: "We booked her because of nostalgia." But for a packed house at her opening in New York, it was the night the old nostalgia burned down.

In the 37 musicals she made for 20th Century-Fox, Betty Grable's assets--pretty, round face, small, high-pitched singing voice, and the ability to stay on her feet through the dance numbers--were parlayed by skillful sound engineers and cameramen into a vision of the little girl next door turned vaudevillian. Under the harsh nightclub lights, Performer Grable looked uncomfortably like the little girl's well-preserved mother, as she sang:

I'm just lucky, I guess

I sing just a little

Dance just a bit

Act just a little, I guess.

The kids down from prep school for Easter vacation were puzzled by this heroine of another generation and probably confirmed in their judgment of that generation as hopelessly square. But the squares themselves glowed under Betty's apple-pie charm. They were perhaps a little disappointed by the show, but at 42 or thereabouts, Betty still has the legs everyone remembers--almost.

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