PEPPER STEEP: I wish he’d told Professor Behr-Bleibtreau about the memory expert.
BERNIE PERK: Is he all right? Why’s he smiling like that?
MEL SON: What’s she doing?
BERNIE PERK: That’s right, Annette. There, that should make him feel better. His color’s coming back. Good. I think he’ll be okay.
DICK: You can sit there beside him, Annette.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: The memory expert?
PEPPER STEEP: Maybe Jack wasn’t on that panel. Were you, Jack? Was he, Dick?
DICK: I don’t know, I don’t recall … Jack — do you want Annette to take you home?
BERNIE PERK: Mrs. Patterson, it was all a joke. Your husband is a very good man. I have been with him when he has fought the anti-fluoridation people to a standstill with the force of his powerful logic. I don’t know why he would tell such a joke on himself. There is absolutely nothing to worry about. He’s resting quietly.
PEPPER STEEP: Were you on the panel with the memory expert, Mel?
MEL SON: I don’t — ha ha — I don’t remember.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: It’s loaded.
PEPPER STEEP: He was on the show because of me. I mean, Dick was just doing him a favor. He needed the exposure at the time.
You have to understand something about my school, Professor. We’re not a modeling agency — that is, not exactly. In your large cities where a real advertising industry exists — New York, of course, Chicago, L.A., a few others — there are schools which specialize in training girls to be models. A lot of these places are just phony, you understand, but some of them are quite good. I myself am a graduate of one of the better agency schools in San Francisco and had a pretty good career as a model in New York during the war.
Anyway, when age, ahem, withered and custom staled my infinite variety, when I entered my thirties, that is — I’m thirty- eight now—
MEL SON: A perfect thirty-eight—
PEPPER STEEP: Thank you, love — and saw that the demand for Miss Steep’s services was falling off rather too dramatically, I reverted to type, for I’m not a perfect thirty-eight, and I do not, whatever my charms of face and figure, exude riches, which is what’s called for today — I mean that 5th Avenue look that speaks of a four- year-old boy in the Central Park sunshine with his nanny, I mean that Biarritz aura. It is nature’s way. At any rate at thirty-one and a half I reverted to type, which in my case is Big Boned Northern California Rain Forest, and I knew that if I were to keep body and soul together I would have to leave New York. Well! What could a thirty-one-and-a-half-year-old gal do who all her working life had done nothing but watch the birdy? The birdy had flown. To start up a modeling agency or a modeling school in New York or any of those other places I mentioned and hope to make a go of it was simply out of the question. To be myself on the staff of such a school was inside the question but out of the answer. I’d earned too much big money in New York to take that kind of cut. But I had saved some of this money, and I thought I might start up an agency school in some smaller city. She’s an honest wench, however. She knew the market, knew the teensy-weensy demand for the graduates of such schools in such places. She would not have been giving full dollar value. The solution was the Charm School. A charm school in a town like Hartford has some tie-in with advertising. The big stores will use its girls for their Christmas brochures and ads. The developer may put one of its blondes up on water skis for the Hidden Lakes Estates billboard. (Forgive me my style as you did Dick’s. Probably as I go on I will work myself out of it. It’s just the way those of us who have been around, and are not perhaps too intelligent, talk.) But mostly the function of the Charm School is to teach charm, i.e. (very rapidly), “(1) a power of pleasing or attracting, as through personality or beauty; (2) a trait or feature imparting this power; (3) attractiveness—”
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: “(4) a trinket to be worn on a chain bracelet, etc.; (5) something worn for its supposed magical effect; amulet; (6) any action supposed to have magical power; (7) the chanting or recitation of a magic verse or formula.”
PEPPER STEEP: Yes. “—vt (8) to delight or please greatly by beauty, attractiveness, etc.; enchant.”
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: “(9) to act upon someone or something with or as with a compelling or magical force!”
PEPPER STEEP: Yes. I don’t do that.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Go on, please.
PEPPER STEEP: We aren’t a college, or even a finishing school. We’re not accredited. Our girls aren’t wealthy, they don’t come out of or go back into what is called polite society. You might be amused if you saw some of the things we do, there are books in our school, for instance, but we balance them on our heads. You’d be amused, but you’d need some charm yourself if you laughed. We render a service, you see. To the clumsy we do, the shy, the unconfident, to the ungraceful and ungainly and maladroit, to the bunglers and klutzes, the tongue-tied of body and spirit. Oh, we get them — all the wallflowers and fatties, all the unpopular, cripples to acne and dandruff. And I’m not just talking about teen-agers. There are housewives too. I mean the timid, I mean the terrified. There are women — a lot of them mothers — whose husbands have never seen them naked, who undress in closets and bathe only when they’re alone in the house — with the bathroom door locked and the radio off. They don’t go to doctors and they can’t purchase sanitary napkins in a drugstore, or bring themselves to buy a roll of toilet paper. I know one too shy to try on a dress in the curtained booth at the back of the department store, and another who won’t stand in front of a three-way mirror. Oh, the terror in Hartford! You just don’t know.
We have a winding staircase in my studio. Especially constructed; it cost me two thousand dollars. They come down the staircase with a book on their head. Making their entrances. At the level of the eighth stair they must begin to speak. “How do you do, Mrs. Powers? I’m so pleased you could come. Uncle Jim will be down in a moment. He asked me to take your coat and to see if there’s anything you’d like.” And they have to finish just as their foot touches the last tread. “Oh! Mr. Strong. I didn’t know you’d been admitted. Clotilda didn’t tell me. Would you like a cucumber sandwich in the library?” “Bless me, it’s Roger Thunder. How are you, Roger? Back from Persia already? How did you leave the Shah?” Don’t laugh — it’s true. The girls invent the speeches. And the names — I don’t make those up. They always use names like Powers and Strong and Thunder. They’re afraid, you see, and invest all other humans — even those of the mind: there’s no one at the bottom of the staircase — with strengths and fiercenesses.
“Hello, Mr. Lamb. Leave your umbrella outside, please. You’re dripping water on the rug.” Only the advanced ones say things like that.
MEL SON: What about this memory expert?
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: She’s coming to that.
PEPPER STEEP: I’m coming to that.
We have toy telephones. They talk to tradesmen, to people who’ve invited them to parties. Or they call up the most distinguished people in Hartford and invite them to parties. They speak to the accounts department of stores to straighten out incorrect billings. Or I give assignments. I tell a woman that her lover is on the line but that her husband is standing in the room. Or that she must speak to the doctor in the middle of the night. “Yes, Doctor. Thank God your answering service was able to reach you. My breasts feel funny. My nipples have turned the color of root beer. I’ve a pimple suppurating in my behind. My vagina is steaming.” We teach them diets and care of the skin, grooming of the hair they learn, what cosmetics to use, the juice of which fruits for complexion. Clothes and color scheme and scents and polite conversation and how to bend to pick up a fallen glove and get in and out of cars.