The Good Big Girls

"Et maintenant," shouts the announcer triumphantly, "voici Les Bluebells!" Out from the wings prance 17 abundantly healthy girls, strenuously smiling. They are big, leggy and bosomy. They can do a cakewalk; they can swivel through a Charleston to the music of Yes, We Have No Bananas and Ain't She Sweet? They can shimmy, shake and kick their legs in perfect unison. Then they race into the wings to ruffles, flourishes and fanfares in the orchestra and table thumping applause from the audience in the world-famed Lido of Paris.

Gone from England. But it is a piece of inside knowledge, so inside that it is known to nearly every tourist nursing his $20 bottle of champagne, that these famed ornaments of Paris' naughty night life are not French at all--just English girls who would be hard-pressed to manage a convincing ooh-la-la. The Bluebells are Europe's most famous dancing girls. All told, there are 120 of them; Bluebells were dancing last week not only at the Lido but at Las Vegas, on Italian TV and in Tokyo. Although they are known as an English company, they no longer dance in England. A troupe of Bluebells tried it two years ago and did not get the staging they felt that they were entitled to. Says Manager Peter Baker frostily: "You don't hide a Rolls-Royce in your back yard. You drive it down Park Lane. We shan't bring the Bluebells to Britain again."

The person who ultimately decides where the Bluebells will dance is a leathery little British woman named Margaret Kelly, 50, otherwise known as "Miss Bluebell." A onetime dancing girl herself, she formed the first Bluebell company in 1933, has directly hired all the 6,000 or so Bluebell girls who have passed through the company since. Bluebells get well paid ($68 a week in Paris; $195 a week in Las Vegas), and only one in 20 job applicants passes Miss Bluebell's frosty scrutiny. On the other hand, successful applicants get free nose-bobbing, tooth-straightening or ear-flattening operations if they need them. Most of the girls are English, with a sprinkling of Germans and Scandinavians. French girls, Miss Kelly explains, "do not have the proper breast line"--meaning that they tend to be smaller-busted.

Going Wrong Smiling. In theory, a Bluebell would have a hard time losing her virtue. The girls from 16 (minimum age) to 18 must have a chaperone always with them, and the older girls (up to 29) are fired if caught consorting with the customers. No Bluebell ever appears in the nude (although eight decorative non-Bluebell nudes stand around the Lido stage while the Bluebells perform). Presumably acting on the theory that a good big girl is better than a good little girl, Miss Kelly long ago decided that no Bluebell could be less than 5 ft. 8 in. Some hit 6 ft. 4 in., and when got up in four-inch hairpiece and four-inch heels they look like ambulatory Christmas trees.

The Bluebell staff finds that the best place to look for a dancer who is both big and good is in the ballet school, where many a hopeful ballerina outgrows her slippers. "When a girl gets too tall for the Royal Ballet," says Manager Baker, "she thinks of the Bluebells at once. The troupe is full of Fonteyns manquees." When a would-be Fonteyn makes a slip during her Bluebell act, she knows what she must do. "If you go wrong," says Miss Kelly to them, "no matter what goes wrong, go wrong smiling." They do.

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