Interviewing A Lady - In Bed

I must confess that in all my years in the dens and pitfalls of New York, Irene Dunne has made me a little bit sick - being such a lady.

 Because ladies are lousy copy.

 For who cares about a perfect lady? Give us a real bad dame, give us a couple of pretties click-clacking down Broadway looking for trouble, preferably with money and we're in business, but...

 Irene Dunne? Nothin'.

 And then the other day they brought me this word:

 "You can see Miss Dunne, but you will to have to interview her in bed."

 WELL! My left eyebrow - the romantic one the girls all admire - rose perceptibly. I risked a long, low satanic whistle.

 "She is putting on her earrings to see you," they added.

 "No overdressing now!" I cautioned.

 And my brain churned. Problems arose. What does one wear to interview Irene Dunne in bed? Pajamas, nightshirt, or what?

 Handsomely draped in a new 1951 gunnysack, I arrived in her bedroom where Miss Dunne greeted me with a sizzling.

 "Oh, hello, there."

 I think, I'd better tell you, she was not alone in bed. Was I mortified! In bed with her, in fact clinging to her, was... a bad cold.

 The lower half of Miss Dunne was wriggled under covers. The upper half of Miss Dunne seemed occupied with a menu.

 "I can't eat this and I can't eat that," she seemed to be bubbling.

 It was a poor substitute for "He loves me, he loves me not."

 "I was just thinking that I suppose that some people have an idea it's nice to be glamorous," spoke up Miss Dunne with a glamorous sniffle.

 "But it's not," she resniffled.

 "For a woman gets to the stage where she thinks 'I can go this way with my weight, or the other.' You finally think you must watch your weight, and you probably are never going to eat much again.

 "And then you meet a woman like the Queen of England."

 The words "Queen of England" brought me to my senses with a jolt. My eyes had been straying over the room... to the cold medicines on her night table, to other glamorous touches.

 "The Queen's so pleasant," Miss Dunne said. "She's got such a lovely disposition and such a lovely expression.

 "And of course she's stout - just as stout as she can be.

 "She has such a great way of talking to you, just as though nothing else mattered to her - a good trick if you can do it.

 "And then you think of all the girls dieting all the time, and they don't have such wonderful dispositions. And you wonder whether it's right."

 "Of course the Queen's in a pretty good position to be any weight she wants to," I said.

 "Believe me, she's plenty busy!" Miss Dunne shot back. "There isn't a single day she isn't occupied."

 Miss Dunne looked sadly at the menu. She decided despite all her speech NOT to eat what she longed for.

 "Personally I'm not inclined to be the least bit heavy. But I know I could never be happy overweight.

 "And so, although the women who are heavier seem to be happier, still, I always stop and think of the expression, 'A moment of the lip and a lifetime on the hip'- and I don't eat it."

 Miss Dunne met Their Majesties while doing "The Mudlark" and while appearing at a command performance - and now that she's added such respectable folks to her aquaintances, we can never expect to get her to do anything the least bit bad.

 "It's a great privilege to see royalty at play," she said.

 ""The King started to do some imitations - he likes to act things out.

 "Of course the English press is different than here. They just ask you right out how old you are. I just never tell them!"

 Looking back over it, it strikes me that although being a lady is "lousy copy," it must be productive, after all, for who in the movies has been written about more than Irene Dunne? Has Mae West - the symbol of the Unladylike Set - had any more press clippings?

 Maybe, measured ton for ton, Mae West has had a little more space, but not much more.

 Miss Dunne, covered up to her neck by her bed jacket, and additionally covered by her earrings, bowed goodbye to me from the two pillows she was resting against. I slipped away thinking, "Good night, Irene."

...

 

("It Happened Last Night" was the tiltle of Earl Wilson's nationwide syndicated column which orginated from the "New York Post". Here taken from "The Terre Haute Star", 12.16.1950)