So many millions of inspirational and incoherent words are annually written in raves over New York's chorus gals that the time has come to do a little debunking.
1. Our chorines are not the prettiest girls in the world.
2. Nor are they the most immoral—
3. Or the most stupid.
4. They are usually poor dressers.
5. Few have passable gowns.
6. A small number live in penthouses.
7. Fewer win rich patrons or sweeties.
The New York rolls of Chorus Equity and the American Guild of Variety Artists list several thousand girls who work in the ensembles of musical shows, vaudeville houses and night clubs, or road-show in traveling theatrical troupes, tabloid units, circuses and carnivals originating in New York.
Of these, not more than ten tyros in any year come forth as glamor gals, and the proportion of those with outstanding beauty is just about the same as in non-professional life.
New York's chorines, like her models, are drawn to the magnet from every state in the Union and all corners of the earth. Few hit the jackpot.
Many Hollywood femme stars once hoofed in Broadway lines and other cuties snared rich husbands or near-husbands.
But for every Paulette Goddard, Barbara Stanwyck, Alice Faye, Joan Crawford and Lucille Bremer, there are thousands of kids who pound out the soles of their aching feet for five or six years, then discover that at 21 or 22 they've been around the Stem so long the managers call them "old faces" and they no longer can get work.
If they have no particular talent to develop into individual specialties, or if they haven't the faculty to snare a man to take care of them, they've got to get jobs in inferior outlying night clubs or in out-of-town cafés or road-shows, and, typed as a "road louse," there is only one direction for them—down.
Yet nothing deters recruits. For every one who gets a Broadway job, there are 100 applicants.