Cover illustration by Edrien King
Young Sharon Garrison was eager to start work as head of the clinic at KSEA-TV Media Center. She would be responsible for the running of the entire clinic and the care of all those who worked at the center. Her association with Mercy Hospital had ended on a sour note, after her uncle Elliott Garrison had been named hospital administrator. Suddenly friends and acquaintances treated Sharon with exaggerated caution or as if she could directly influence hospital policy, and the young nurse had felt it best to look for a new position. At the Media Center, Sharon also hoped to gain some insight into her parents. Concert musicians, they had sent Sharon to boarding school and to live with her aunt and uncle rather than spending time with her. How could people be so absorbed with the entertainment industry that they neglected their own child? What was the fascination it held? Sharon quickly became involved in the center and caught up in its excitement. Charming and capable, she won the respect and affection of Skip Richardson, who was eager to give her a screen test, and Paul Hamilton, the handsome boss of KSEA-TV. And she even befriended the young picketer, Chuck Baker, who seemed to have a grudge against the station. Misunderstandings seem to be the rule rather than the exception in Sharon’s love life, however, and it is not until the exciting climax that the young nurse’s future seems certain.
GRADE: B-
BEST QUOTES:
“Angel, you are darn late but you look good enough to get us
off the hook. For once they sent me a body with class.”
“I guess they warned you this job isn’t likely to get very exciting. So far there haven’t been any murders, although when I see Sheila I am tempted.”
“‘Take it easy, Sharon. You look nervous. It isn’t as bad as
you think it will be.’
“Sharon wrinkled her nose. ‘That’s what we tell our patients
just before we give them a barium enema. They don’t believe us either.’”
“I still think he will make the perfect husband once he is
properly trained.”
REVIEW:
As Sharon Garrison enters the building of KSEA-TV in San
Francisco for her first day as nurse in charge of the company clinic, she’s
grabbed by the shoulders and whisked onto the elevator by Skip Richardson, who
is in charge of casting for commercials. “This must be your first commercial,”
he tells her. “I couldn’t have forgotten your packaging.” He picks up her hand
to point out that she’s not wearing a wedding ring, too. Ha, ha, it’s a
mistaken identity, quickly set to rights, and “Sharon had to smile in spite of
herself. There was something appealing about the man despite his brashness.”
She doesn’t mention how attractive his misogyny is.
It seems to be epidemic in the company, unfortunately: If a show is successful they hang a toy elf in the cafeteria for a week and the girls are supposed to line up underneath it to be kissed by the boys. “All the pretty girls at the center have been kissed at least a dozen times,” explains casting director Skip Richards. Unfortunately, she accidentally walks under the elf when her boss Paul Hamilton is nearby, and though “the muscle in his jaw began to throb,” he just turns away and walks out of the cafeteria. Sharon is humiliated! “Why couldn’t he have kissed her?” she wonders. When he shows up at the clinic at the end of the day, she explodes: “You certainly succeeded in embarrassing me in front of the entire staff.” So he grabs her and kisses her: “His mouth was hard against hers; bruising, seeking, demanding, compelling.” She cries, he looks bewildered and forlorn, and “Sharon ached to reach out and hold him,” like anyone would after being assaulted.
Now “a series of minor accidents began to plague Media Center,” and the scuttlebutt is that it’s bad luck raining down after Paul refused to kiss Sharon under the elf. So Paul takes her to the cafeteria the next day, steers her under the elf, and kisses her “without haste, without passion.” Everyone in the cafeteria gives them a standing ovation. Take that, bad luck elf! Neither of them has time for a lengthy lunch, so they spend 90 minutes dining at a French restaurant, and Paul tells her he hasn’t wanted to date until the studio was successful. It is now, apparently, so he asks Sharon for a date. She suggests they go to Fisherman’s Wharf, which no actual San Franciscan ever goes near except on pain of death. Further demonstrating her complete lack of understanding of the city, for her date she wears a mini skirt and a sleeveless shirt, so she’s liable to freeze to death, the poor ignorant thing (it’s notoriously cold year-round in San Francisco; when I moved out of that city after living there for five years, I didn’t own a single pair of shorts).
Then Paul invites her to the house he’s just bought on the Pacific coast south of San Francisco. He tells her he’s in love with her and that she’s the first woman he’s brought there, but then she conveniently finds an ID bracelet with his secretary’s name on it on the walkway, and now she’s livid. Rather than discuss it with him, she tosses in bed all night, unable to sleep. “Well, for heaven’s sake, ask him to explain it,” says her sensible friend Kitty the next day. But before she has the chance, Paul finds out that she had wangled an audition for her nephews at the studio and is furious, thinking somehow that she’s compromised her employment with the company by pursuing nepotism. Now she’s hypocritical enough to insist that he listen to her explanation, but before they can get to that, someone with a bloody nose and then a crazy young man with a gun taking one of the studios hostage get in the way. You will easily guess how everything winds up from there.
It’s not the worst book ever, and in fact has a number of
silly moments to laugh at—just not enough to put it over the top like the
delightfully daffy Nurse at the Fair. The misogyny here
is rather shocking even for VNRN standards—a mistletoe elf in the
cafeteria???—but the writing is perfectly fine and the actual romance part is
kind of sweet. Overall, however, even if it is set in San Francisco, the
greatest city in the world, there’s just not enough that’s interesting about
this book to make it a good read.
