By Diana Douglas
(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1969
When lovely Elizabeth
Spencer, R.N., made up her mind to escape the narrow confines of hospitals and
see for herself what went on in the outside world, she never expected anything
like her job at Key Sud—the luxury Florida hotel where female attributes seemed
more important than nursing qualificiations. She also never expected to be
working with a doctor as handsome as Kimball Brown—nor with a nurse’s aide who
was a very rich, very pretty, seventeen-year-old hippie with much too grown-up
ideas. But the biggest surprise of all was James Scott Haldane, the savagely
good-looking author who threw Elizabeth
the curve of her life … and forced her to wonder whether she was ever meant to
be a nurse at all.
GRADE: D
BEST QUOTES:
“With
her legs pressed together, she was feeling uncomfortable in the overly short
uniform the management had insisted even the hotel nurse should wear.”
“You’re
an intelligent girl, Elizabeth, and very, very attractive. I’ll be surprised if
you remain a nurse for very long.”
“It
was her eyes that fascinated him—those glorious, golden-brown, slightly slanted
eyes. He had seen Eurasian girls with eyes shaped like that, but with most
Eurasians there was an impenetrability behind them. These eyes were
different—vital, utterly feminine, and full of changing expressions. And they
were wholly American.”
“Women
should only hide their eyes behind sunglasses if they have very pale, mean,
blue eyes. Or if they have a squint.”
“You’re
still a kid until you marry.”
“Rita
was rather a plain girl with mousy hair and pale blue eyes, but she was
cheerful and efficient, and beneath her mini-skirt she had perfect legs which,
as far as the men on the staff were concerned, more than compensated for her
face.”
“She
was twenty-five years old, and she supposed it was time she thought of marriage
with the right guy. But how did a girl go about finding the right guy? At one
time she had thought that if he were tall, dark, and handsome, and two or three
years her senior, that would be sufficient. But now she knew that this was not
enough. A lot of other things came into it. Love and marriage should be for
keeps, and that meant a great deal more than just physical attraction in a
man.”
“I
don’t believe any drug can put into the mind what isn’t there. The impulse must
already be present, whether the addict knows it or not. But he or she has been
told that this is what the drug will
do, and, because they want to feel
that particular way, they take it, and suggestion does the rest.”
“A
doctor friend once told me that the difference between an heroin addict and an
alcoholic is that the alcoholic gets high and goes home to beat his wife, but a
heroin addict goes home and his wife beats him.”
REVIEW:
I don’t pick up a Diana Douglas/Richard Wilkes-Hunter book with any
eagerness whatsoever, and Resort Nurse
is yet another reason why. They—and this—are superficial, stupid, patronizing, and
perfunctory. And a little creepy; the heroines are usually ridiculously
beautiful with “slim, high-breasted figures,” and in the case of Elizabeth
Spencer, R..N., brains and personality—or so we are told, though we see little
evidence of either in any of the pages that follow. Exhibit A: Elizabeth has left her job at a hospital
because she’s decided “to escape the narrow confines of hospitals and to see
for herself, for a while, a little more of what went on in the outside world.
Life owed her that, she had decided, and this had been the argument she had
used to escape, no matter how briefly, from discipline and routine. She had
tried private nursing, at first, but had found the patients demanding and
irritable.” So right off the bat, Elizabeth
comes across as a lazy whiner.
She’d
seen an ad for a nurse at a resort in Key Sud, Florida,
and now she’s in Miami,
being subjected to an unnerving interview with her boss, who insists, “When we’re
alone, call me Marvin. That’s one thing you learn in the hotel business. People
in high places come to detest formality, Elizabeth.
They have too much of it in their work. Success is a lonely thing. It’s made me
a lonely man. That’s why I want you to call me Marvin.” Next thing he’ll be
telling her that his wife doesn’t understand him. When she finally shakes him
off, she can’t get a cab, and when a handsome hotel guest offers her a ride in his
“powerful white sports car,” she hops right in. It turns out that her escort is
James Scott Haldane, a very successful novelist. She immediately dissects his
latest play, which she didn’t like at all, and when he drops her off, “she had
been ready to refuse an invitation to dine with him—or at least to go out with
him again. Now she felt frustrated and angry: He hadn’t asked her at all. He
hadn’t even bothered to ask her name!” So when James Scott Haldane calls her
later to ask her out for a drink, she gets all pissy and hangs up on him.
The next day she heads to the beach for an early swim and is “indignant” when
he doesn’t show up, angry when he doesn’t call her. “Not that it mattered, she
told herself, because neither did she have the slightest interest in James
Scott Haldane.” Clearly.
But
while in Miami,
she inadvertently stumbles into a club for a cup of coffee and finds out it’s a
drug den, with a couple of stoned teenaged hippies dancing in the back. Now we
get a pages-long lecture about how evil LSD is and how it causes genetic
defects and “leukemia-like symptoms of cell abnormality” (it doesn’t).
Ham-handed foreshadowing is a specialty of the author, so I shouldn’t be
surprised, but it’s still irritating.
Once
Elizabeth reaches the hotel, she is working with Dr. Kimball Brown, who “was not at
all like James Scott Haldane.” Their biggest medical concern is Mrs. Connell, a
pregnant woman with a heartrate of 42 and hyperemesis gravidarum, which the
good doctor tells the patient, is “primarily caused by a neurotic influence, so
you see how important it is for you to try to control your vomiting and not
worry.” He asks her to “help us by trying not to expect to be ill every time you eat something.” His treatment is
bed rest in a darkened room, codeine for sedation, and—the obvious treatment
for someone who is bradycardic and vomiting excessively—fluid and diet restriction. He tells Elizabeth privately that
hyperemesis gravidarum is “one of the toxemias”—an older term for pre-eclampsia
(it is not)—and that “left untreated it could have led to dehydration,” so
again, one does wonder why the doctor has ordered fluid restriction. Elizabeth is also told to
position Mrs. Connell in bed “so she can’t inhale any vomitus while she’s under
heavy sedation.” God help this poor woman, because the doctor obviously won’t.
After
Mrs. Connell is soundly mismanaged, the next person to walk into the clinic is a
17-year-old girl in a “brief mini-skirt, a white sweater that accentuated her
young, pert breasts, and she wore the pale makeup that kids seemed to find
attractive.” And so I recalled with further dismay that Wilkes-Hunter never
described a woman without mentioning her breasts. Sharon Miller asks about the
“dangerous drug cabinet”—where could that
possibly be going?—and then, “How much of a drag is it? Learning to be a nurse,
I mean.” Elizabeth
quickly assures the teen that “nurses have boyfriends they go out on dates
with, the same as anyone else,” and adds, “I guess one of these days I’ll get
married and that will be the end of my nursing career.” The more this book
progresses, the less I like Elizabeth Spencer, R.N. Sharon asks if she can help
out in the clinic, “as a sort of nurse’s aide,” to decide if she wants be a
nurse in the same mold as Elizabeth:
“Where I worked wouldn’t matter as long as I don’t have to be ‘dedicated.’ I
could work until I got tired of it or wanted to marry some guy.” The ugly
mirror Sharon is holding up to Elizabeth passes, needless to say, unnoticed.
It
isn’t long before Sharon asks Elizabeth
to “give me one of those pep pills,” and helpfully suggests amphetamine, or,
when Elizabeth
balks at that, “benzedrine then.” Elizabeth
gives her a lecture instead, but decides Sharon’s
interest in drugs “was not important,” and assigns Sharon to sit up all night with and dispense
medication to pregnant Mrs. Connell, who is vomiting, hopefully while
positioned on her side, despite the codeine. Poor Mrs. Connell’s prospects of
surviving her medical treatment are growing increasingly dim.
Outside of work, Elizabeth is just full of bright
ideas: She goes on a date in Miami
with her lonely boss, Marvin, and between the two of them they consume a magnum
of champagne. Amazingly still consious after this, she has him drive (!!!) her
back to the seedy club for coffee, where they spot a girl who looks like Sharon
Miller, apparently the same hippie stoner Elizabeth
had seen gyrating wildly the last time she’d dropped in. Rather than try to
chase the girl down, they convince themselves that it isn’t really Sharon and
drive back to the hotel, Sharon’s head “pillowed carelessly on Marvin’s
shoulder,” and nevermind the four or five times she’s hoped he wasn’t going to make
a pass at her; she gives him an “almost sisterly kiss.” At this point I am
wondering if the author wants us to hate Elizabeth
in particular or if he hates all women in general. (Actually, I’ve read enough of his books to believe it’s the latter.)
One can only hope it’s a massive hangover that impairs her judgment and not her basic lack of sense when, the next day, Elizabeth asks Sharon
to count the drugs in the drug cabinet. You will be shocked to find out
that some amphetamines go missing—as does Sharon, who had gone to Miami for the evening.
Does the penny drop? Not for our idiot heroine. She innocently asks Dr. Brown
if someone might have stolen the drugs, but he is outraged at the insinuation that Sharon might have taken them, no doubt
because he liked the tiny little bikini Sharon
wore when he went surfing with the teen earlier.
Now
Elizabeth is
called to the penthouse suite, only to find—James Scott Haldane! Who finally
gets around to asking Elizabeth’s
name! She tells him about the missing drugs and kid, and he convinces Elizabeth that the two
might be related: “She’s in the age group with too much money and too much
freedom to do as she pleases. On top of that, she’s bored with her parents and
is ripe for all that talk about middle-class Freudian hang-ups, indifferent
parents, escapes, and so on.” The man missed his calling; he should have been a
psychiatrist. So the pair climb into his powerful white sports car and head
back to the club, where they chat with a groovy lad wearing a
red-and-blue-striped coat and a stovepipe hat, who tells them Sharon has run
off with a heroin addict named Roger. Hot on their
trail, Elizabeth and James Scott Haldane find their dilapidated hideaway, break in,
kick open bedroom doors, shine a flashlight around although the hall light had
worked perfectly well, and find Sharon, buck naked and unconscious, on a blanket
with needle marks on her “white thighs—which, along with her breasts,
contrasted vividly with the rest of her suntanned body.” Next scene, it’s a few
hours later and James Scott Haldane is inviting Elizabeth
up to the penthouse for a drink and a little conversation, which entails his
ordering her to quit her job and come to his ranch in Nevada
with him, after they’re married in Miami.
Ugh.
The
constant references to women’s breasts; Elizabeth’s
unbelievable stupidity and shallowness; the obvious, overly moralistic plot;
the automatic and distasteful marriage proposal on the penultimate page—this
book’s faults are many and egregious. It’s frankly insulting that the author
should think Elizabeth
is a heroine that we should like, although to be fair, there really isn’t one
single likeable character in the book, so maybe he hates everyone—though his
particular disrespect for women is quite apparent. As it happens, the book’s
readers will most likely be women, and it’s usually a bad idea to insult your
target audience. And so I suggest you refuse to allow Wilkes-Hunter to talk
down to you and decline to open his books.
By Ellen Randolph,
©1967
