A. Government Girls

About 200,000 women work five days a week for Uncle Sam. They come from every corner of the nation. And no matter how long they remain here, few of them ever really live here. They sleep in various kinds of barracks, rooming-houses, rundown hotels, board with retired married ones, and in all constitute a class so large and so displaced that the city cannot absorb them as it does working-women in other communities.

They are not all physically repellant, nor do they behave generally like spinsters are supposed to. The deadly monotony of their routine tasks and their lonesome lives wears out their charm before it destroys their looks. They are a hard, efficient lot, doing men’s work, thinking like men and sometimes driven to take the place of men—in the proscribed zones of desperate flings at love and sex. Lesbianism is scandalously rampant, frequently an acquired dislocation rather than a pathological aberration.

The existence of the average G-girl revolves between routine grind and physical frustration. She leaves her job at five. If she goes home, it is to her tiny room or apartment to heat her dinner out of tin cans and ponder whether to wash her panties or write letters home, or get drunk.

It isn’t all wrapped up in the fact of the female overflow. Left-over women can learn to do with half their share of men. But strangely, where every guy ostensibly could take his pick and date alternately, it doesn’t work that way. The Washington male clerks and middle-class bureau employes largely avoid their opposite numbers. They, too, are hall-room habituÉs, and they fraternize by some unwritten rule with other men, usually normal men. Propinquity does not work its magic here as the dominant factor in the mingling of the sexes.

Thousands of visitors and thousands of servicemen from nearby installations, most of them dame-hungry, don’t have to hunt; they are hunted. Not only that, but often they are paid, and seldom are they allowed to pick up checks without a struggle.

One of the sights of Washington is the outpouring of the janes at five o’clock. Many of them dash for cocktail bars, where they compete with the harlots, who violently resent them and call them “scabs.”

A favorite after-work guzzle-and-grab spot is the Cafe of All Nations, in the Mayfair House, at 13th and F. Wise men in the mood are there awaiting the stampede—not only for pleasure, but for the gigolo’s mite. Men and women are paid the same for equal work. Therefore the income is high for females and low for males as such things are usually adjusted. We gave the place a play at the right time and sat at a table with a third man who had come with us. A waitress shuffled up to us, and in voice and manner characteristic of an old-timer doing a familiar task, said, “The young ladies at the next table would like to buy you a drink.” We nodded, the potables were delivered, our hosts raised their glasses, and soon they joined us. We had another round, and when we insisted on taking the tab, not only for our drinks but theirs, too, they left us; they knew we weren’t “regular.”

A T-man in the course of a check turned up one instance where 12 G-girls had banded together and were keeping one man, in an apartment on Q Street.

Of course, among hundreds of thousands there are thousands not so situated. Many are beautiful, their intelligence is beyond the average, and even humdrum government work cannot make eunuchs of all men. Desirable girls quickly find that they get preferential receptions and promotions even in civil service examinations. There is a middle-aged woman with a superior position in the General Accounting Office, who has risen because she functions as the procurement officer for members of Congress and other dignitaries. The G-gals hear about her specialty, get in touch with her, and if they have appeal they find fun and get ahead. Outstanding ones are sometimes invited to entertain legation attachÉs or visiting celebrities.

Second-class lobbyists, who cannot finance dazzlers in the top echelons, have lists of typists and file-clerks and secretaries who are happy to be taken out, or taken in, and are not prissy over how an evening winds up.

Beyond these escapes from a circumscribed daily existence, there is nothing else. A couple of gals will walk the Mall on Sunday, hoping to get picked up; or they join a church, or go to one of the countless dances held during the winter season by state societies, where they find everyone else as desolate as they are; or they scrimp and save all week for a thrilling breakfast-lunch on Sunday at the Statler, where they find to their dismay everyone else in the room is a government girl, too, and stranded for company.

Many secretaries of Senators, Congressmen and executives are their office wives. All Congressmen’s offices contain sofas paid for by the Treasury.

These females, when they arrive, usually have accents, idiosyncrasies and dress foibles peculiar to their regions of origin. They quickly fall into the common mold. This is not surprising to your authors, who for years have been writing about Broadway showgirls. Within six months after one leaves the farm to join the chorus, she has acquired a new veneer which covers all she brought with her. You can’t, in any one chorus-line, classify the girls, except by their current hair shades. They are as uniform as if they wore uniforms.

The government is like a chorus; instead of 20 girls there are 200,000, and they all talk the same—mainly about favoritism shown to another by the immediate superior whom they accuse of sleeping with her. They dress the same—usually in suits. They eat the same—salads and dainty desserts. They live the same—in spick and span tiny rooms, with intimate wash hung on the line in the bathroom, which does triple duty as a kitchenette. They drink the same—martinis.

Their sex-lives are remarkably alike, too. Some are afraid they will. Others are afraid they won’t. And it all boils down to the same sustained jitters, but in different wrappers.

The G-girl is in an unnatural vacuum. She has no time-limits; her sentence is for life, usually. She isn’t home and she isn’t away. Her marriage outlook is bleak. No family ties console her. She is more often wooed by women than by men.

She makes a mockery of the theory that a woman’s first instinct is for security.

B. Girls with Glamor

Let it not be surmised that government-girls are all the girls. There are wives and fiancÉes, college co-eds, a sprinkling of debutantes and other daughters of the rare society clans, smart saleswomen, even a few presentable sob-sisters.

But the true glamorette, as she is known on Broadway and Fifth Avenue, Vine Street and Sunset Boulevard, and even in such remote oases of joy as Galveston, Texas, is virtually non-existent.

Chorines are but a memory of leg and lavender for the old inhabitants. Except for a rare transitory line in a night club, there is no such thing. Occasionally an imported single or sister-act plays the vaudeville house. Some of the painted peelers who work in the suburban dives sleep in Washington hotels. A movie celeb popping in for publicity, to attend a birthday ball or be photographed smiling down on Truman from the top of a piano, is an event. If there are any gorgeous, dangerous, slinky spies, we didn’t find them. Judy Coplon, by the men who specialize in the field, was called exceptionally lush for that trade. So we stopped looking.

The indigenous flora shape up about as they do in Brooklyn, except that they are better dressed and have less sooty complexions. They do not come downtown in slacks. Sloppy galoshes are de trop. Most girls at 16 appear and behave grown up.

But few can enter the accepted avenues where beauty may command a respectable commercial return. In any ranking hierarchy of glamor the model comes first, having long since passed the chorus girl, because of the more stable rewards and higher standards brought about by the great advertising demands. Washington has little need for animated manikins. Some of the choicer shops employ them to demonstrate clothes. There is no extensive advertising field.

The most lucrative and the steadiest calls for models come from sources not seeking those who might be employed in industrial cities for modeling. They hook on as hostesses, guides, ushers, and to decorate the booths and exhibits at conventions and trade shows, which are numerous. Those who are engaged sporadically earn a minimum of five dollars an hour, plus indeterminate tips. Their morals vary with the personal equation. The models who are willing to pose in the nude at stag-parties get fifty dollars an evening. These register with surreptitious characters of the middle-world between flesh-market procurers and shady promoters.

Among the better-known models’ agencies are Models Bureau, in the Chastleton Hotel; Ralston, 711 14th Street, NW, and Phyllis Bell, 306 13th Street NW.

The girl who sets out to be a model in Washington is usually one of those rare creatures—the native. An out-of-towner with such ambitions would naturally head to New York.

(Note: Most model agencies are schools instead of employment agencies. They seek to sign job-seekers to contract to learn how to walk, instead of sending them out to work. Some, billing themselves as agencies, provide girls—but not for modeling.)

Another reason for the shortage of really high class cheesecake is that there is almost always a displacement movement in effect.

The trains and planes to Hollywood are loaded with lookers, sent there with entree obtained for them by such influential VIP’s as cabinet officers, four-star generals, bureau heads, etc. When a prominent daddy gets fed up with his dame, he can’t just brush her off; she might make trouble, and that might get into print.

So the procedure is to phone Hollywood, where a liaison contact is instructed to obtain a job at a studio for the chick. The big film companies employ scores of so-called “contract” gals at $150 a week or so, who do nothing but pose for publicity stills, date chosen visitors, like out-of-town exhibitors, and otherwise make themselves useful and amiable around the lots. One in a thousand rises and may become a star.

The movie industry is always skating on such thin ice, what with anti-trust laws, etc., that a request from Washington is a command. So it’s a happy out all around. Mr. Big gets rid of his discarded girl, she goes willingly because no girl can turn down a film contract, and Hollywood stores up a favor for the next time it needs one.

Many girls with talent originated here but they scrammed as soon as they were old enough to know better. Among them were Helen Hayes, Kate Smith and Mary Eaton, all members of the St. Patrick’s Players.

Washington has no clubs or theatres with lines of girls. The best a babe with light feet can do is get in as a teacher at a dance studio, quite a business in Washington. The local classified phone directory has four pages of listings of dance instructors. That’s because dancing schools are a swell way for lonesome people to meet each other, and that’s what Washington has plenty of. The local Arthur Murray licensee, across the street from the Mayflower Hotel, is the largest Arthur Murray studio in the world. At least 2,000 girls find full or part-time employment working as instructors in the dozens of studios. Many of these girls are little more than taxi-dancers.

Pretty, personable ones can make up to $100 a week with tips. Those who take dates after hours do even better.

The real Washington glamor girl is the kept woman. You’d be surprised how many there are. All the bigger hotels and the glossier apartment houses around Dupont Circle and out Connecticut Avenue are loaded with them. They are the ones you most often see in mink coats, in expensive beauty parlors and fine shops. They are maintained mainly by important government officials, Senators, sports and millionaires from all over the country who make their headquarters in Washington. Many an executive who commutes to the capital keeps a cutie there full time.

All Washington giggled when it heard the story of the tall, stately blonde whose bills were paid by a Cuban sugar millionaire, and who fell in love with an assistant manager of the Shoreham Hotel, where she was living in high style. Her Latin lover found her in flagrante delicto with the hotel employe. The men squared off for a fist fight, but first locked the babe in a clothes closet. They blacked each other’s eyes—but she fractured her ankle trying to kick the door down.

To add to the embarrassment of the unhappy Cuban, his wife had been spying on him and his love through high-powered binoculars from Rock Creek Park, across the street. She sued him for divorce in New York.

A genuine glamor-gal does pop up now and then. One was Evelyn Knight, the radio and record star, who warbled for $75 a week in Washington hotels until a couple of years ago, then clicked in Manhattan and is now dragging down thousands.

Bette Woodruff, another home-grown dish, seems to be on the upgrade. A dress model, Bette had a yen to sing. One day, on a dare, she phoned maestro Dick Williams to tell him she was available. He didn’t know her from Eve, took her name to shut her up. Next day his vocalist got sick. He phoned Bette in a hurry. That was less than a year ago. Now she’s thrushing regularly, and well.

But Jan Du Mond, a five-foot-three night club canary, pianist and composer, drives a cab by day.

“My little coupe broke down,” she told a reporter. “I couldn’t afford a new car. Becoming a taxi-driver provided me with transportation at night to get to my engagement—the company lets me take the car home.”

Besides, she meets the most interesting people!

Sometimes a government gal switches to a glamor gal. One was Sandra Stahl, “Miss Washington,” in last fall’s Atlantic City beauty contest. Sandra was a secretary for Air Force Intelligence, but she has a face, a figure, a noodle and a voice. She was the dark horse when she sang before 3,000 people in Rock Creek Park, but 14 judges, including the Treasurer of the United States, sent her to Atlantic City.

Sandra comes from Long Beach, California. In our “New York, Confidential,” we noted that many of Gotham’s orchids on display come from Southern California. Maybe Sandra got on the wrong train.