Creative Follow-up Work

I. Choose a paragraph of no less than six lines and insert punctuation marks as you consider appropriate.

II. Tell the story briefly from Bertie’s perspective. You may choose the episode with the fancy dress dance.

 

TEXT 18: WISTFUL, DELICATELY GAY (extract)

by Irwin Shaw

Before you read:

1) Find out essential facts about the author.

2) What qualities are essential if one wants to become a film star? Have they changed over the last decades?

 

She was not spectacular-looking, but she seemed to shine with springtime health. She was small, blond, with a neat-brushed head and deep-blue eyes, and her movements were plain and unaffected, and as she talked her eyes did not flicker hungrily over the room. She had a slender throat that rose out of the high collar of her dress, and her mouth, which had only a light touch of lipstick on it, seemed almost childish and delicately gay. She gave the impression of being frail, innocent, and very young.

When, like almost every pretty girl around the theatre, she was offered a screen test, she worked hard on it and was not displeased with the result when she saw it on the screen. The man who had arranged the test and who sat in the projection room with her when it was shown, was impressed, too. But he was an old man who had been in the business a long time and he had seen many pretty and talented girls.

“Very good,“ he said, “very good, indeed, Miss Hunt.” He had a soft, polite voice and courtly manners, and he was used to discouraging hungry young people in the gentlest, most assuaging way. “But there would be objections on the Coast[††††] to the present nose.”

“What?” Carol asked, surprised and a little hurt. She was proud of her nose and thought in some ways it was her best feature. It was quite long and a little arched, with tense, nervous-looking nostrils, and an artistic young man who had been attached to her had once told her it was like the noses of the great English beauties of the portraits of the eighteenth century. By a trifle, a shadow, it seemed to deviate to one side, but one had to study her face to realize this, and the slight irregularity gave, she was sure, an added note of interest to her face. “What’s wrong with the nose?” she asked.

“It’s a little long for film, my dear,” the old man said gently, “and you and I know, don’t we, that it is not plumb straight. It is a lovely nose, and one you could be proud of all the days of your life,” the old man went on, smiling, honeying the harsh, official, impersonal truth with his own sweet-tempered, but personal and therefore finally valueless truth, “but the American public is not quite used to seeing young girls on film with noses of that particular quality.”

“I could name you six stars,” Carol said stubbornly, “with noses a lot funnier-looking than mine.”

The old man smiled and shrugged, “Of course, my dear,” he said. “But they are stars. They are personalities. The public accepts a personality all in one lump. If you were a star, we would assign publicity men to write poems to your nose. In a little while, it would be a priceless asset. When an unknown girl came into the office, we would say, ‘Look, she has the Hunt nose. Let’s hire her at once.’”

He smiled at her again, and she couldn’t help smiling back, warmed, even at the moment of disappointment, by his absurd, gentle manner.

“Well,” she said, getting up, “you’ve been very kind.”

But the old man did not rise. He sat in the big leather chair, his hand absently touching the controls of the box that communicated with the operator in the projection booth, staring thoughtfully at her, doing the job he was paid to do. “Of course,” he said, “something could be done.”

“What do you mean?” Carol asked.

“Noses,” the old man said, “while works of God, are susceptible to the intervention of man.”

Now Carol saw he was embarrassed by what he was forced by his position to say, and was using this high-flown and rhetorical fashion of speaking to show her he was embarrassed. She was certain there were very few actors or actresses who could embarrass this hard, gentle old man, and she was flattered by it.

“A plastic surgeon,” the old man was saying, “a little snip here, a little scraping of bone there, and in three weeks you could almost be guaranteed a nose that would meet with anyone’s approval.”

“You mean,” Carol said, “in three weeks I could have the standard, regulation-issue starlet ’s nose.”

The old man smiled sadly. “More or less,” he said.

“And what would you do then?”

“I would sign you to a contract,” the old man said, “and I would predict quite a promising future for you on the Coast.”

Quite, carol noticed. Quite a promising. He refuses to lie, even in his predictions. Almost as if the old man had put it into words, she could sense the images that were going through his head. The pretty girl on a contract, with her acceptable bobbed nose, being used for bathing-suit publicity stills, small parts, perhaps after a while for unimportant leads in unimportant pictures, for two, three, four years, then being let out to make room for other, newer, more acceptable pretty girls.

“No, thank you,” Carol said, “I’m terribly attached to my present crooked long nose.”

The old man stood up now, nodding, as though he was pleased, on his own, if not on the company’s account, by her decision. “For the stage,” he said, “it is faultless. Better than faultless. ”

“I’m going to confess something,” Carol said candidly, more open with this old man than she had permitted herself to be with anyone else in the city. “The only reason I’m up here is that if you make a name for yourself in the movies, it’s easier to go where you want to go in the theatre. I’ve planned myself for the stage.”

The old man stared at her, rewarding her candour with surprise, then approval. “So much the better for the stage,” he said gallantly. “I’ll call you again.”

“When?” Carol asked.

“When you’re a great star,” he said lightly, “to offer you all the money in the world to work for us.”

He put out his hand, and Carol shook it. He held her hand in both his for a moment, his face saddened, mischievous, regretful, touched by the memory of all the lovely, ambitious, courageous girls he had seen in the last thirty years. “Isn’t it hell?” he said, grinning, patting her hand in his rosy hands.