The Prodigal Nurse

By Teresa Hyde Phillips, ©1936 

Celia Landis looked across the dingy table at Tony Starr, whose fine surgeon’s hands were toying nervously with a coffee cup. “No, Tony,” she said slowly, “I’m not ready to be married yet. I … I haven’t really lived.” And Tony, who knew she was the best nurse St. Martha’s had ever had, smiled into her impetuous young eyes, and was silent, thinking, “You’ll be back soon enough!” So Celia tried life—a life not bounded by nurse’s rules or constant sacrifice, and with the help of suave Carlie Daklin she became the best photographer’s model in New York. But what of happiness? Celia had to choose between Carlie—her kind “angel” in this new and giddy world and Tony—the symbol of a life she had vowed to abandon. Which would it be?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“The only thing wrong with you is astigmatism.” 

“I have had dozens of nurses it seems to me in these last weeks and I had begun to believe that your profession begets none but worthy women who look like nothing but disasters on land and sea.”

“Women were such egotists, they thought that what they said and did and what happened to them mattered so much.”

“I’m a Harvard man. I wouldn’t get myself seriously shot outside a lady’s boudoir.”

“One’s mind said, ‘One must not think, nor remember, nor hope.’ Champagne said, ‘Leave that all to me.’”

“Character is a better bet than glamour any day.”

“Women have some silly romantic idea about surgeons. Completely uncalled for. They have a job, like the rest of us.”

“Men! They let you down. For chivalry, for kindness, you went to women.”

REVIEW:
Celia Landis is “twenty-one, beautiful and free!” She’s just graduated from nursing school, and Dr. Anthony Starr, right there on the first page, is “offering her the prisonhouse of marriage, proffering the ball and chain.” Good girl, she turns him down flat. “I don’t believe in marriage,” she says. “I don’t want to be tied down. I want to see things, to do things, to find out for myself. I want to be on my own.” The author, interestingly, doesn’t seem to be on the side of her heroine, as Dr. Starr, who “knew that only in bonds is there freedom,” is smiling condescendingly at Celia. 

It seems that Celia thinks she has made a mistake by becoming a nurse. She was forced into it when both her parents died her freshman year in college and there was no money to pay for her education. Now she has no other option but to work  to support herself, though she is not interested in dedicating her life, “as that of his wife must be, to illness” and is hoping to find another career option. “I’m not tough,” she tells him. “I want the beauty and the fun of life.” Of course, she is nonetheless “an exceptionally good nurse,” as VNRN heroines, reluctant though they may be, usually are.

She loses her first two cases because men in the house insist on forcing themselves on her, and the head of the nursing registry of course blames Celia for this. “If there was anything to be deplored in a nurse, it was beauty. Beauty. Detestable quality, leading only to trouble,” the woman thinks. In the depths of despair that she will never get another nursing job, Celia runs into Tony and his boss, Dr. Alderdice, and the pair take her to lunch. Afterward, as Celia tries to tell Tony about her fears, he dutifully proposes again, though Celia thinks he does not mean it and decides she’s not sure who he really is. “She felt that she no longer had any hold on him. None whatsoever.”

Then Carleton Daklin, the husband of one of her patients who had fired her, calls her up and offers her a modeling job. He is the head of an advertising agency and is looking for a nurse to pose in a series of ten ads for the National Hygiene Council, and the pay is $1,000—an enormous sum in the wake of the Great Depression, when a furnished two-bedroom apartment on East 43rd Street costs $120 a month. She takes the job, and when Tony calls her to say he’s taking a trip to the West Indies to do germ research, she tells him of her triumph. He is happy for her, but less so when he hangs up the phone, though he berates himself for his idiocy. “Had he for a minute thought she would say to him: ‘Tony, my darling, nothing that happens to me is of the slightest interest, there’s only you and your life.’” Now he is the one thinking he has lost Celia, but “he knew Celia, he thought, better than she knew herself.”

Then United Models calls, and soon the phone is ringing off the hook. Eventually Tony comes home and phones her, and he’s dismayed with her new life. “What had this girl thrown over? A real job, the greatest thing in the world—medicine,” he thinks, again frustrated that she did not ask him how his trip had gone. She goes out to dinner with Tony and enjoys his companionship, believes “there was no one like him, no one who could touch him in any way.” But he again sneers at her new profession with “amused malice” and tells her she should not have given up nursing so soon. “As a nurse, Celia Landis was a bust on her first two tries and only because she let herself think of herself as a bust,” he says. She is torn between her desire to live her own life and her attraction for him, but chooses the former, though she’s not certain for how long: “When she came to him she must come with everything—heart and mind and with every intent.”

When Tony walks her home, Carleton Daklin is waiting for her in her apartment—the first time Celia has seen him since he got her the modeling job—but Tony does not believe it and stomps out, and when Celia calls him to explain, he is cold. So she starts going places with Carleton, becoming the It Girl of Manhattan. “The emptiness Tony left was teaching her things. It was enlightening.” But one late-night party goes awry and a man is stabbed. Celia is the only one who can keep a cool head, not surprisingly, but the scandal lands her in the tabloids with a not-so-gentle assist from a couple other women in Celia’s circle who do not have her heart of gold—just as the sordid affair has made her realize she wants out of the glittering birdcage, the same day an offer to become chief nurse of the OR at the hospital where she trained arrives, which is withdrawn the next day. Tony runs to her house when he hears the news, but Celia, wounded to the core, can only snarl, “To tell me exactly what to do—is that your idea of friendship?” It’s more than a little true, but Tony says good bye and leaves, Celia thinks for good.

There are the usual crises before Celia is brought back to her man and nursing career, and if the ending wasn’t quite the complete perfection I wanted it to be, this is still a really lovely book. The writing in this book is sparkling: “Behold Miss Celia Landis, R.N., diploma summa cum laude, drilling through the traffic of Manhattan in a taxi which looked like any other taxi but which, if the world had eyes, was a jumping-off place from which one flung oneself into the fun of accomplishment.” It’s a thoughtful book full of philosophy about life and what is important, but not overly intellectual. It’s not hard to feel what the characters are going through, and how Celia has grown over the course of the book. If for most of this book she is not working as a nurse, she is still at heart a nurse throughout. My only real beef is that the ending does not clearly give Celia the strength she has earned from her experiences, and it’s not quite certain how she is going to live up to her new character. But that aside, this is a thoroughly delicious book, and if you can track down a copy for yourself, the effort will be worth it. 

Mollie Sloan Special Nurse

By Millicent Morgan
(pseud. Rudo Globus), ©1962
Cover illustration by Jo Polseno

Mollie Sloan, R.N., was a good nurse, so good in fact that a group of doctors from the hospital where she’d trained used her exclusively on their most difficult cases. She had a nice apartment, money in the bank, friends galore, but something was deeply troubling Mollie. It came to a head when Eric Hart, a young concert pianist at the peak of his career, was admitted to the hospital. His right hand was completely paralyzed, though organically there was nothing that matter with it. Dr. Paul Desmond, his doctor, immediately put Mollie on the case. But in the end it was more than curing Eric so that he might return to his career. For in the process Mollie discovered that she must make one of the most difficult choices in her young life. It involved not only her work, which she loved, but two men. The trouble was that it seemed to her that she was in love with them both!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“The truth of it was that people were more dangerous than bacteria and a cure for ‘people’ was as elusive and far-off as ever.” 

“Next time I see you, I’ll expect a sexy smile. That’s why you women are here.”

“Some day, of course, she would marry, have children, fulfill her role as a woman.”

“None of you smart people have any idea what the nurse really does. There seem to be two schools of thought. One is that a nurse is a drudge, forever emptying bedpans, making beds, giving shots, handing out pills and taking temperatures. The other thinks that all we do is sit in a room with someone like you and play gin rummy. Well, both are wrong. We’re something special. We’re not little doctors and we’re not glorified maids. We’re the extra part of medicine, the ones who give patients something that makes it easier to stand illness, the cold impersonalness of the hospital, the mechanics of treatment.”

“A nurse isn’t supposed to look the way you look now. Fix your hair and straighten up.”

“I’m very proud that you can admit that you’re wrong. Most people try to find excuses to prove that they were right. That’s when I mean by running away. They think it’s easier that way. But it’s the hardest way in the end. If they faced up to things and told themselves the truth, they could easily solve problems. Never run, Mollie. Stick it out, fight it out, demand the truth of yourself and do what the truth demands you do. When you’re older, you’ll learn that somehow you can deal with any problem if you tell yourself the truth and don’t run away.”

“From now on I’m just an unemployed gal waiting for some man to make an honest woman out of me.”

REVIEW:
This book is like a nurse novel heroine’s runner-up boyfriend. He is so handsome, and he makes your heart pound—but in the end he turns out to be arrogant and selfish, and he runs off with the wealthy patient. The philosophical question to ponder here is whether your ultimate disappointment nullifies your initial excitement.

Mollie Sloan is the greatest nurse ever! She explains, “I’ve got a funny kind of auburn hair, I’m five feet two, my eyes are hazel, and I’ve been told that I have a cute figure and gorgeous legs.” She is a private-duty nurse, and has a half-dozen doctors who can’t live without her. “They would tell her that she was the only nurse in all of New York City good enough for this case—oh yes, this was a case for that special something of Mollie’s, Mollie’s Magic Touch.” In her first year as a nurse, “on Grand Rounds, the attendings, the great men, asked her opinion and took it seriously.” Which has happened in real life exactly never.

Here, though, she’s called to care for misunderstood, overwrought, emotionally traumatized musical genus Eric Hart, a brilliant pianist who was raised by an abusive mother and who after a weekend of debauchery following a smash concert at Carnegie Hall develops conversion disorder—psychosomatic paralysis of his right hand. Mollie’s casual boyfriend, Dr. Paul Desmond, is a neurosurgeon who asks her to take on the case, because she is the only nurse in all of New York City good enough for this case, as we’ve already heard.

The patient isn’t told that his problem is psychological. “If we had years and years, we might try psychoanalysis and reveal the truth behind the conflict, but we haven’t time,” Paul says, because if Eric is unable to use his hand for months or years, his brilliant career will be ruined! After chatting him up for a week in the hospital, Mollie is allowed to take Eric out on unethical Saturday night dates, during which he begins to open up to her—and to kiss her. Highly unprofessional! But she is not allowed to come off the case because “Eric has made a transference to her,” a psychological term that goes unexplained but here means a deep connection to a therapist. Paul “was certain that she was the key to Eric’s recovery, the one factor motivationally strong enough to make Eric want to use his hand.”

Meanwhile, we are told repeatedly that Mollie and Dr. Paul are Just Friends. “She and Paul had never gotten past the point of enjoying each other’s company. They were attracted to each other and affectionate as all get out, but the words that changed friendship into a serious romantic feeling had somehow never been spoken.” “Was it possible that she was in love with Paul? Good heavens, no! They had known each other too long. Their friendship was so fine, why ruin it with sentimentality?” “Paul was too totally absorbed in his work and snorted contemptuously at physicians who married too early, giving up crucial years of creative work to support a wife and too many children.” But, surprise, now that Eric is demonstrating a strong interest in Mollie, Paul begins to recognize that his casual attitude about Mollie is a sham. “It was not until Eric had threatened to take her away that he had come to realize that he wanted to marry her.” But is it too late?

When Mollie ultimately manages to cure Paul—by tumbling off a cliff and requiring two equally powerful hands to pull her back to safety—Eric’s feelings for Mollie become more than a little alarming as he demands she stay with him morning and night, even though he no longer needs a nurse. “After all, he owned her now, didn’t he? Hadn’t he saved her life and hadn’t she given him back his right hand?” Unfortunately, no one seems to feel that the admittedly nutty Eric’s behavior is off base.

How does Mollie decide which man she wants? She chats up her old superintendent of nurses and spends a day wandering the hospital where she had worked before leaving to do private duty—and ultimately makes a heartbreaking decision. Though Mollie has many times asserted and demonstrated her devotion to nursing, she decides that “nothing ever really can take the place of a man and children.” “Something else had entered her life, something more important than work.” Numerous nurses tell Mollie that as much as they love their jobs, “if a man ever showed up who could give me the kicks that I get out of my work I’d quit in a minute.” I know that in 1962 this was a prevailing attitude, but this book does not question of that sexist, illogical line that we find in some VNRNs. I do wonder if this book takes that position in part because it was written by a man, who can’t appreciate the prison he is sentencing Mollie to.

The language and intellect in this book is quite sophisticated, reminiscent of a JeanneJudson novel, and it has a similarly complex understanding of Eric’s psychological problems, which gives it a touch more realism than the usual VNRN. But Eric’s alarming stalker-like attitudes pass without comment, and the beliefs about a woman’s place in the world, make this book in some ways even more disappointing because initially it gave me such hope. Is it better to have loved and lost than to have read another dull Arlene Hale story? I think maybe it is, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re still let down in the end.

Wanted—One Nurse

By Joanna Grey, ©1977

Celia Price’s new life in New York as a nurse to a struggling young doctor meant complete freedom from her English mother’s old-fashioned ideas. But it also meant imprisonment by feelings which she tried to suppress for Dr. Eric Adamson, feelings which she rationalized as respect for him as a skilled doctor. But Celia didn’t fool herself one bit! It was love. With no interest from Eric in return, the only direction she could take was away from him. Yet, could she run away from life again? 

GRADE: D

BEST QUOTES:
“New York could turn you daffy, and in a very short time, at that.” 

REVIEW:
I felt no small amount of apprehension when I realized this book was copyrighted in 1977; VNRNs tend to get worse the more recently they were written. (Six of the seven reviews of books written in 1975 or later got C- grades, while the earliest VNRN I have found, “K,” which dates to 1916, got an A.) The trend continues with this dud. 

Here we have gratuitously British Nurse Celia Price, who has been living in New York at 85 West 88^th Street in New York City, deciding to work for Dr. Eric Adamson at 226 West 89^th Street. He’s setting up a new practice that hasn’t actually opened yet, so they wash the walls and baseboards of his office and go shopping for carpet and linoleum. After the doors have opened, they take care of the patients who trickle in at a gradually increasing rate. Eventually Eric takes Celia for a picnic and, the poor dolt, does not kiss her at a moment when she was hoping to be kissed. This proves to be a fatal mistake for poor Dr. Adamson. “The bitter disappointment and hurt that Celia felt was like a physical pain. As well as that, she felt betrayed. It had taken some courage, and some difficulty, to bring herself to the point where she had to admit that her feelings for this appealing young man went far beyond what was normally expected of an employee. And then, having struggled with her conscience, and forced herself to look at the truth of the matter, he had turned away from her.” This “total rejection” renders her cold and snippy for the next four weeks. Undaunted, he asks her to go to Shakespeare in the Park with him, but she shows him who’s boss when she turns him down—and then “it upset her that he had not asked her again. When she noticed in the paper that the season had ended, she felt that it was almost a personal affront to her.”

In the interim, her roommate Joan meets Eric and they go for drinks while Celia does a slow burn at home. Then she meets his roommate, Mike, and “not that she was thinking of Mike in any romantic way,” but she hopes he might date her. He drops by her apartment and meets Jean, “her hair wet and straggly, her body anything but curvaceous under her shapeless robe,” but within a few hours the two “were completely and totally in love.” So Celia is back to being “curt and short” with Eric even though he remains completely magnanimous, and even takes her to lunch to try to get her to tell him why she’s being so horrid. She doesn’t, but at least she defrosts enough to agree to go with him and Jean and Mike on vacation to a cabin in the mountains. Not surprisingly, Mike falls into a ditch en route to the cabin and breaks his leg, so Eric and Celia are at the cabin alone, which is a shocking risk for her reputation, and there’s a long, dull scene in which Celia becomes increasingly enraged that Eric won’t take her back to New York as he lies smugly on the sofa with his eyes closed. Guess how it ends?

Time and time again, Eric proves himself to be a much bigger person, while Celia is irritatingly small and petty. No sensible reader could possibly understand what drives him to continue to pursue her, but there it is. I wasn’t sure I understood why author Joanna Grey devoted the hours it must have taken to phone in this soggy lump. Some books are so bad they’re good (see Harbor Nurse, A Nurse at the Fair), but this one is just dull, to the point that I was grateful on multiple occasions while I was reading it that it was only 124 pages, and the font not overly small. I can only hope Grey didn’t write any more VNRNs, or if she did, that they were written in the 1930s.

Hospital on Wheels

By Anne Lorraine, ©1956

Susan had loved Ricky Sharp all her life, with the passionate devotion of someone who had too much love to give. On the night their engagement was announced, Ricky was dangerously injured in a car accident—while eloping with Susan’s best friend. In her anguish Susan turned to her work. But could even the exciting new Hospital on Wheels, with the brilliant but temperamental Dr. Stephen Brand, make her forget losing Ricky?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Once she was married, her life would consist of loving and looking after Ricky.” 

“Never pause at doors, my dear child. Every time you come to a new door in your life open it boldly and walk in, no matter what you dread to find on the other side.”

REVIEW:
Susan Mance is a lucky orphan, in that after the demise of her parents, she was taken in by a family who had known her all her life and raised with love and compassion. The family also had a daughter, Bette Jonson, and much is made early on about how fabulous Bette is. Bette is “pert, vivacious,” “a breaker of hearts,” and everyone is “lost in admiration of her beauty and charm.” “Bette was everything Susan was not—cherished, adored, lovely, witty and determined.” She’s also willful and spoiled, with every boy wrapped around her finger, and one adoring worshipper in Susan, who expresses her adoration of Bette by following her to nursing school and acting as Bette’s live-in “friend, sister, nurse and slave,” doing all the cooking and cleaning. To be fair, Bette seems to love and appreciate Susan also, and the pair are known as best friends at nursing school. 

Susan eventually manages to land her childhood crush, Ricky Sharp, who has become a doctor (the inspiration behind her and Bette’s desire to go to nursing school). He’s proposed to her, but the night of their engagement party, it’s pretty clear that something is afoot, as Bette acts nervous and Ricky acts guilty, and even the hospital matron is telling Susan to open her eyes. Before the party, however, she works a shift with Dr. Stephen Brand, who is a strict, unfriendly, cold man, and while in clinic she tells him about a patient who can’t make it to prenatal visits because she doesn’t have transportation and no one to mind the other kids. She offhandedly suggests that in these cases it would be best to “take the hospital to them,” and this sparks a fire in Dr. Brand.

But neither Ricky nor Bette turns up for the engagement party, and as she arrives home at her apartment, she gets news that the pair have been in a car crash, and Ricky is paralyzed. Rushing to grab a coat, she finds a note on her pillow from Bette, saying that she and Ricky are eloping! What a shock! So when she tells everyone she is not going to marry Ricky, everyone thinks she’s dumped him because he’s crippled.

Susan also drops Bette like first-period French, and Bette goes to pieces, quits nursing, and moves back home with her parents to care for her mother, who is conveniently ill. Susan visits Ricky from time to time, but the visits are cold and strained, and it’s not clear why she goes—before long, Ricky refuses to see her, so clearly he doesn’t get it either. But the whole story appears to be more than we know—not that we’ll ever find it out, at this rate, because absolutely no one in this book ever has an honest conversation with anyone else. Unfortunately, what this means is that there will be 100 more pages of this silly book that could have been avoided.

Susan “had never been one to profess to having a ‘call’ for nursing,” but we’re also to understand that despite her disinterest in nursing, she is also pretty good at it. But after the accident she needs a change, so when Dr. Brand comes to her with a full-blown plan to start a clinic in a bus, she immediately enlists. It isn’t long before she’s finding that Dr. Brand doesn’t deserve his mean old reputation: rather, he's “charming and attractive,” “a most delightful companion,” and even “kind”! Whenever she’s with him she gets a warm glow, basking in their “mutual understanding,” and the best days of the week are when he travels out with her. He repeatedly suggests they add another nurse, as much as he says he would hate to complicate their pure and easy relationship, and she flat-out refuses every time, even though it means she’s working most hours of most days. On one drive home after a long day, when she is nearly asleep, he kisses her, and then she can’t sleep; “praying only that the man at her side might not hear the excited beating of her heart, nor know that her face was burning hotly from his kiss.” 

At the same time, it’s not clear how she feels about Ricky. “Could she go back to that time when she had not loved him?” she asks herself. She demonstrates little affection or even unhappiness when she sees him, and we have no insight as to what drives her to visit. Painfully, she also can’t decide how she feels about Stephen, her vital signs notwithstanding as evidence. She’s “immersed in these wearisome questions” about what the kiss means, and does he love her, and could she ever come to love him in return? If they are wearisome to her, they are triply so to us, and they go on and on, round and round in circles, arriving nowhere.

Eventually Bette’s mother takes a turn for the worse and Susan is summoned to see her. Now we are presented with a home scene completely opposite to how Susan initially drew it for us. Bette, says Mom Jonson, “always needed you, Susie—always. You had so much that she could never have.” We hear that Bette “was so miserably jealous” of Susan. “She always had to watch you stealing her thunder,” Dr. Brand says, and Bette tells Susan that her mother is better, all owing to Susan’s visit: “A little of Susan is worth a whole lot of Bette.” More reality adjustment comes when Susan decides that Dr. Brand is going to propose to her at a party he’s hosting. The idea gives her “flushed cheeks and bright eyes,” but as soon as she gets home, she decides “grimly” that she will accept Stephen’s proposal: “What did it matter if she could never love him as she had once hoped to love the man she married?” Suddenly her relationship with Stephen could never be more than “firm friendship,” that it could never have “the mad rapture she had experienced with Ricky.” What?

When Stephen does propose, Susan “suddenly felt cold and afraid,” though it mostly appears that she’s upset that he didn’t gush about his unrelenting love for her in the process, but she agrees “quietly.” Just then Ricky turns up with the news that this famous surgeon from America is going to perform a risky operation on him—the only other patient with this condition that he’d operated on died—but there’s a remote chance that he’ll walk again if it succeeds! Alone for a minute, Susan and Ricky realize they’re still very much in love, and Susan insists he have the surgery, which somehow proves that she loves him: “Nobody but a woman deeply in love could have dared to give such advice to the man she loved.” 

Back at the party, Bette pipes up that Susan will never love Stephen, because “she’s the type who gives her heart once and for all. Her heart happens to belong to Ricky—to Ricky, do you understand?” Unleashed, she tells Susan that she had intended to persuade Ricky to elope with her and had left the note, but Ricky would not be persuaded—“he loves you, and has never loved anybody else, nor ever will”—so Bette had grabbed the steering wheel and crashed the car. 

Then Bette tells Susan, “Your whole life has been a constant demand for love, love, and more love—and because you need love so much, you attract it—my mother and father frantically trying to make up to you for your loss, eternally dinning it on me that ‘we must think of poor little Susan, darling’ I almost hated you, Susan, because you demanded so much from us! And then you had to have Ricky.” Following this revelation, Ricky and Susan quickly put things to rights between them, and Susan has an eye-opening realization that it’s true, “I have demanded love, all my life,” which somehow “hurt Bette—the way I took the love of her parents as my right, the way I accepted her love and generosity as due me, and then the way I demanded that you should remain true to me.” It’s a baffling position—doesn’t every child “demand” the love of the people who raise them, and doesn’t everyone insist that their beloved remain true? Is it a sin to need to be loved? As for feeling that Bette owes Susan love and generosity—after the way Susan has been “friend, sister, nurse and slave,” is that terribly surprising?

The maddening way this book completely turns 180 degrees on so many things, and how it willfully keeps half the story away from the reader for most of the book, means we wait and wait for the big reveal that makes utterly no sense; Susan ends up looking like an inconsistent, self-absorbed moron. Bette and Dr. Brand turn out to be the most interesting characters, and even he takes a turn in the end when Bette tells him that he doesn’t love Susan either, when he’s been as swoony in appearance as she’s been all along. Not much of this book makes sense, and with everyone acting so inconsistently and frankly stupidly, it’s really hard to care about them.

Nurse Stacey Comes Aboard

By Rona Randall, ©1958

Cover illustration by Martin Koenig

Janet Stacey could not believe it when Peter Fuller broke their engagement. He told her that it would be unfair of him with so little income to ruin her chances for a “successful” marriage. Only a girl as much in love as Janet could have failed to read between the lines of such an excuse. As it was, she asked her uncle, owner of a shipping line, to employ her as assistant nurse on the luxury liner Regina, on which Peter was taking a business trip to New York. She thought that if she saw him every day she would be bound to win him back. In this innocent hope she reckoned not only without Peter himself, but without the ship’s doctor, Blane Hartley, who despised all girls in general, and Janet, the privileged niece of the shipowner, in particular.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“The best cure for sea-sickness is champagne.”

“No man who wanted to get on in the world could afford pride, these days. Not if he hoped to afford a wife, too.”

“When I was young I could spend a couple of hours choosing between only two frocks!”

“How one man could hope to stand up against two women Maude couldn’t imagine!”

“I’m off to get that dress material. We could cut it out on the surgery table this afternoon. How about it?”

“I’m always rude myself, and enjoy it, so of course I must excuse the fault in others!”

“Every woman is hurt, at some time or another. It’s better for them to experience it when young. They grow into better women because of it.”

REVIEW:
When we first meet Janet Stacey, she is being jilted by ne’er-do-well Peter Fuller, who says that he can’t marry her because he cannot support her in the lifestyle to which she has been accustomed. And also because her father had let his very considerable life insurance policy lapse, “most unfairly,” Peter grouses. Valiantly attempting to change his mind, she reminds him that she can get a job as a nurse. “Nursing for amusement is one thing,” he says, and so, right there on the third page, we’d like to close the door in Peter’s face. Unfortunately, Janet Stacey is not as smart as we are. “He was all she wanted in life and nothing would ever make her stop loving him,” and though we know she will be proven wrong in the end, unfortunately it’s going to be a long and somewhat excruciating journey.

Stacey’s rich Uncle Jim has a fondness for Janet and can see through Peter, realizing that he’s dumped Janet when “he’d learned that her father’s aura of wealth had been but a façade, that she was penniless, that she wasn’t such a catch as he believed when he met her.” So when Janet asks Uncle Jim to give her a job as a nurse on the same ship on which Peter is sailing to New York on business, with the aim of proving to him that she can too hold a job, he agrees to the scheme, thinking that Peter won’t be able to resist being the adventurer he is and that Janet will finally see his true colors.

Unfortunately, the doctor on board the ship, Dr. Blane Hartley, isn’t impressed with Janet at all, because he thinks she’s a rich girl playing at a job, and “a good-time girl out for what she can get.” During their first meeting, “they looked at one another, antagonism leaping between them like an invisible current. … It was open warfare between them,” and they’re snarling insults back and forth across the surgery. Naturally we know—so smart we are!—how that is going to turn out. Dr. Blane, it seems, “was trying to escape from some emotional problem, or a disappointment which went deep—or maybe only from himself.” So many mysteries! So many tropes!

After her verbal fisticuffs with Dr. Hartley, Janet sets about proving herself, and you will not be surprised to find that she is an excellent nurse, though the only job she ever really had was caring for her dying father. Along the way she takes the nasty rich Lady Elvira Travitt in hand, which turns out to be not too difficult because Lady Travitt, too, has a mushy center: “The first thing Janet noticed about her was the guarded expression of her eyes, as if she determined to allow no one a glimpse of her heart, and the second thing was the tightly maintained line of her mouth, as if she were afraid that if permitted to relax it would betray her. What would it do—droop pathetically? Reveal a sadness she was too proud to acknowledge?” Before long the old dragon has asked her to high tea in the first-class lounge and is plotting out her life.

There’s a beautiful young woman named Patsy Davis, whose luxurious wardrobe is described in such great detail that it isn’t long before we suspect something is amiss. Sure enough, Lady Travitt soon learns from a newspaper article that Patsy is a typist who won a beauty contest—”the only competitor actually holding the perfect measurements”—with a $2,500 prize, and now she’s blowing the wad on a round-trip ticket and one taste of the rich life. Her act quickly lures in playboy Peter, who is rushing her off her feet—and soon she’s in love with him, valiantly so, because she doesn’t believe she will ever see him again after the voyage is over, because she is no dope and can see Peter for exactly what he was—“the wrong man, of course. She knew that with the certainty and wisdom acquired in a tough school. Life had taught Patsy Davis to recognize people for what they were worth, for their character and integrity. But somewhere, somehow, Peter’s character had wavered; his sense of values had gone awry. But it didn’t make her love him any less.”

And of course it isn’t long before the hardened MD starts to bend. Though he is nothing but rude and insulting, Janet stands up to him and earns his respect: “She had sprit, at least, if nothing else. She stood up to him without insolence, answered without impertinence, and displayed a dignified sort of courage which he was forced to admire.” We learn that Blane had been engaged to Lady Travitt’s daughter Carol, who had dumped him for a “rich American—twenty years her senior and father of a grown-up family by the time she became his third, and youngest, wife,” because he was an “impresario” and had been impressed with the talent of the ambitious young woman. She’s “a star in her own right now, and didn’t need Wilmot any more,” and is getting a divorce—and she wants Blane back.

Lady Travitt turns out to be a bit Machiavellian, if not kind, when she tells Dr. Hartley that they should team up, keeping Patsy’s secret and “letting Janet find out for herself, slowly and surely, that the man she loves simply isn’t worth loving! That way, at least, her pride will be preserved. You’re not going to get the best work out of your nurse if her heart is broken.” Even more scheming is her recognition that Dr. Hartley is interested in Nurse Stacey. “She saw a lot—and she saw it clearly. To fall in love with someone else, to forget Carol completely, would be Blane’s salvation.”

So when he catches Janet sitting at his desk one evening—“she had wanted to touch his paper, sit in his chair, feel his pen between her fingers”—yes, just his pen – he swoops her up in an irresistible embrace. She tries to slap him, but he grabs her arm and pulls her toward him “until he pinioned her body close to him again. ‘You can’t escape, Nurse, so you can give up the struggle! Be still, you little fool, while I kiss you again.’” Though initially sobbing, naturally in the end she loves it, and “lay quietly in his arms,” until she tears herself loose and runs off to her room. Now there are pages of internal struggle—why, if she loves Peter, did she love being kissed by Bland? Why, if Bland hates her, did he kiss her?

The biggest problem with this book is that Janet is a complete dope. As she witnesses Peter’s first infatuation with Patsy, she nonetheless thinks, “Peter was absolutely trustworthy—she was sure of that. It didn’t matter to him that his fiancée was merely ship’s nurse, or that another girl was beautifully dressed and obviously moneyed, and that glance of his, which had seemed to observe every detail of Patsy’s appearance, had certainly held no hint of calculation.” Every letter of which is a lie. Even as she catches Peter and Patsy mooning at each other time and time again, she just thinks, “What if they were flirting a little? Her own affair with Peter was so different, elevated above all others. It was something much bigger.” Snap out of it, Janet! When the moment finally comes and Janet wonders, “just how stubbornly, and for how long, a girl could blind herself to the obvious,” we know the answer—125 dragging pages. And when Patsy unburdens herself to Janet, asking her if Peter will dump her when he finds out the truth about her, the scales fall from Janet’s eyes and she decides that she does not love Peter because she never saw him for who he really is. “She was disillusioned by his true character. She saw him as a different person, and one who no longer meant anything to her.” But guess who really is honorable, and who really does mean something to her!

The prose is fairly purple as well, with much hand-wringing and excruciating navel-gazing examinations of every possible angle of every interaction, offering moments when you have to reach for the Tums. But wrapped in all the lavender satin are some truly interesting characters, Lady Travitt and Patsy chiefly, and even Peter to some degree. It is surprisingly common that a writer will give all her skill to the supporting cast and leave the main characters flat and vapid. Janet is one such character, and Blane is just mercurial and moody, cut in the Heathcliff mold, without much real depth. So if there are some parts of this book that sparkle, they are sadly just not enough to make this book really worthwhile.

Hollywood Nurse

By Alice Brennan, ©1966

Merry Neil, private nurse to the “King of Hollywood” finds but nearly loses brilliant, handsome Jeff Morrow in the heartbreak city. Her love is threatened by Natalie Pries, moviedom’s beautiful, spoiled darling, and the romantic tension builds and builds …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Everyone who comes to California has to drink orange juice. It’s part of the protocol.”

“‘He didn’t try a pass or anything like that.’
“Tammy said crisply, ‘I’d feel  insulted if I were you.’”

“We all live by ourselves. I mean, when you come right down to it.”

“Who wanted a big, husky girl anyway? Not men, surely.”

“One thing that always ruins a conversation is somebody getting serious.”

“What she needs is the kind of guy who’d sock her any time she got out of line. She’d respect a guy like that. But she was born with a beautiful face and that louses everything up.”

“Don’t you know blushing is passé?”

“One thing I’ve found out,  nurses don’t need to diet. They run it off!”

“‘It isn’t fair for nurses to be as pretty as you two,’ he chided. ‘It makes people want to be ill.’”

“‘You don’t have the proper look of awe,’ he chided. ‘Don’t you know I’m a very important guy?’”

“How can you get romantic about a girl who has to stick her tongue out first thing so you can get a look at her throat or intestines or something?”

“‘Do you know what I really like to drink?’ Natalie asked her. ‘Milk. I mean, really, isn’t it ghastly? Can you imagine something like that getting out? “Sex queen admits she drinks milk”? I mean, really!’”

“You’re a very difficult person. I’m beginning to feel slightly sorry for your patients.”

“Southern California in the smog would make a great background for one of those old English horror movies.”

REVIEW: 
Author Alice Brennan brought us a triplet of nurse heroines in Nurse’s Dormitory, and here she earns another B+ for her second trio with the incorrectly singular Hollywood Nurse: By my count, Merry Neil, Agnes McLeod and Tammy Moore are more than one. As stories go, each character is less than a whole, though, so maybe not much more than one.

Merry Neil is the ostensible star of the book, and she’s a fairly bland lass who as roommate Tammy grouses, “for a girl who doesn’t want any breaks, and who wouldn’t know what to do with a break, you’re getting them all. It’s a shame you’re so nice, because I’d like to hate you.” For starters, Merry is nursing aging producer Pierson Webb, who’s checked in for what turns out to be metastatic cancer. Then, in attempting to escape the paparazzi who chase her down for an update on Pierson’s status, she’s picked up by a strange man in a white Jaguar who turns out to be famous crooner Arch Heller. She ends up dating Arch’s lawyer Tom Harton, who had been squiring young starlet Natalie Pries. It’s true that for a  lowly nurse, Merry does land undue attentions: She’s stalked by both Natalie and gossip columnist Mai Hinge in addition to the aforementioned male celebrities. But to no avail, she swears! She’d fallen for a man back in Michigan who’d turned out to be married, and now, time after trying time, she reminds herself fiercely, “I will not allow myself to fall in love with him. Or with any man. Never, never, never again!” The fact that this means she will be alone all her life never crosses her mind, and her philosophy certainly doesn’t stop her from dating. But all this is irrelevant; we know how her story will turn out!

Next we turn to Agnes, who had married an intern at an early age, but the bastard had walked out on her, not knowing she was pregnant, because “I suddenly realized the enormity of what I’d done. I’d saddled myself with a wife when all I’d ever wanted in my entire life was to become a doctor. So I walked out on her,” Harvey Miles says now when he miraculously turns up as a blind date at the nurse’s apartment in Hollywood, when he’d last seen Agnes in Ohio six years ago. In the interim, Agnes has had a baby, Ellen, who lives in San Francisco with Agnes’ mother—apparently there are no nursing jobs in the Bay Area—and is rapidly dying of a congenital heart defect that Agnes cannot bring herself to acknowledge, much less agree to treat. Once he learns of Ellen’s existence, from blabbermouth Tammy, Harvey forces Agnes to agree to Ellen’s surgery, and what a break for Agnes: “She wasn’t ready to admit it,  but there was almost a feeling of relief in her: She was almost grateful to Harvey for taking the decision out of her hands.” After Ellen’s operation, the rapprochement is pending, even if Agnes can’t admit it. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not ready to think about it yet,” she says but the pair are not actually divorced, so you can feel fairly confident they will get back together, especially since they have a child to consider. “What she did would depend on what she thought best for Ellen,” and Ellen herself is already growing attached to Harvey. “Agnes watched his head bent over the child’s bed. The word ‘daddy’ was still painful and shy in Ellen’s lips, but she seemed to find delight in saying it.”

The most interesting of the three nurse roommates is Tammy, who only became a nurse “because her mother had thought she should  be one. She wasn’t like Merry or Agnes … dedicated.” Instead, Tammy wants to be … a star!! Her plan on becoming one do not, however, involve trying out for parts or taking acting classes—that’s strictly for chumps!—but to wow famous people with her good looks and be “discovered,” so she begs Merry to ask Pierson to give her a screen test. Pierson agrees to meet Tammy at his house, and the scandal is that he’s planning to put Tammy on the casting couch with gossip columnist Mai hiding behind the curtains to witness and publicize Tammy’s downfall. It’s an interesting dilemma, because Tammy has said conflicting things: “If anybody … I mean anybody … tried that proposition stuff on me, I’d punch him in the nose,” she insists, but then wonders, “Is that the truth? Would I do that? If … if Pierson Webb offered me what I want, a screen test, a contract, and there were strings attached to it, what would I really do?” For better or worse, though, she’s spared the actual test of her character when Pierson changes his mind and “talked to me like a father. He said I should go to drama school and learn how to be an actress. He told me beauty alone can’t get a girl by in Hollywood these days.” Phew! Although the book holds up Natalie Pries as a woman who’d been working in a dinky drugstore when Pierson had wandered in and made her a phenom, so the lecture doesn’t really hold a lot of water.

Then Tammy meets Pierson’s son, whom he’d abandoned decades ago, and wilts into a pathetic, spineless nothing: “She was content just to be with him. And she’d never felt like that with any man before. Always before a man had been there to be used.” Here we uncover the book’s main theme—“what she really needs is to get married to a guy who’s the boss and makes her know it and like it.” Frankly, I can’t imagine any sane woman liking the fact that she has no say in a relationship, but what do I know? Clearly these nurses are all landing  men, the only thing that matters, once they surrender their independence. Two out of the three, anyway—Merry’s man just forces her to admit what she doesn’t want to, that she’s in love with him—before she lands safely in his arms. If this central theme is a bit disturbing, on the whole this is an amusingly written story with one slightly complex character, anyway, even if she’s cut off at the knees in the end. You could certainly do a lot worse than Hollywood Nurse, who’s worth the drive up Mulholland Boulevard.