Ozark Nurse

By Fern Shepard
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1965

The man in her life was tall, blond Dr. Paul Anderson. Nurse Nora Hilton had fallen in love with the young surgeon almost from the moment they met. Their marriage plans were a lovely dream—right up to the moment when he lost faith in his surgical skill and, without warning, shut Nora out of his life. Stunned and hurt, she lost herself in her work. When a handsome, wealthy patient begged her to marry him, she was tempted. But could she ever really love him—when her heart belonged to another man?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Don’t you know that some of the most fascinating women in history have been in their late thirties or early forties?”

“He had gone over to wherever it was they kept those poverty-stricken hill kids.”

“Bobby was a high-strung, nervous child .… It made Nora sick all through to watch him growing into a highly neurotic child in a constant state of anxiety. It was his mother’s fault.”

“You aren’t eating your frogs’ legs, honey.”

“Sometimes he wondered if he could be turning into a psycho.”

“She thought drearily, it’s probably my fate to end up another disgruntled, neurotic spinster who will be highly regarded as a dedicated nurse.”

REVIEW:
The titles are a huge part of the mystique of the vintage nurse romance novel. Arctic Nurse, Ski Resort Nurse, Jane Arden Space Nurse, Surf Safari Nurse, Hootenanny Nurse—how can you resist something like that? So between the title and the fabulous cover, Ozark Nurse had set itself a high standard to reach. It doesn’t quite make it, but like I said, it was a pretty high bar.

For starters, it seems to me that if you are going to call your book Ozark Nurse, you ought to have something of the actual Ozarks in the story. The only thing we find here is a passing reference to “the illiterate, poorly dressed old fellows who resided in huts and cabins in the backwoods. … These men, some of them, had never seen a bathtub. They lived in a primitive fashion, and considered themselves lucky if they had enough to eat. … They couldn’t read, write, or understand why anybody could be such a golderned fool as to go messing around up on the moon.” Well, that was easy. And once this facile and stereotypical backdrop is established in the first chapter, we never need think of the Ozarks again.

Nora lives with her widowed mother, and soon her shiftless brother Jerry, his wife Ethel, and their son Bobby move in, too, because Jerry has lost another job and doesn’t seem to feel like looking for another one. The responsibility of supporting the family falls to Nora: “She paid the food bills, the tax bills, most of the repair bills on their old house, not to mention a lot of other incidentals.” And now Jerry is pestering her to buy him a boat, which he claims is going to heal the ruptured disc in his back. The reason she continues to fork over most of her paycheck is that she is adopted, and she feels she owes it to the family to keep them all afloat.

Because of this obligation, Nora cannot accept the proposal of marriage by Dr. Paul Anderson, whom she loves madly. But at book’s open, Paul’s proposal has become as shaky as Nora’s family. He’s a pediatric surgeon, and the last four children he operated on have died. “And all four were patients whom no doctor could have saved,” we are told, but “Paul insisted on taking the once chance in a million—and he lost.” As a result, he has lost his nerve and is “going to pieces as a surgeon.” Soon he’s quit his job at the hospital and is working as a life guard. Really. If only, Nora tells him one day when she stops to visit him at his lifeguard chair, “if you had to operate, with no time to worry or wonder how it would turn out, that would do it, wouldn’t it?” Paul agrees. “But that would take a very special kind of situation. It would have to be made to order, really.” One made-to-order special kind of situation, coming up! Nora picks up the binoculars and scans the water: Is that little Bobby, choking there on the water’s edge?

One of the best points about this book is how the adoption issue is handled. At one point, Nora finally snaps and chews her family out for being such pathetic leeches, then storms off to her room. Her mother follows her, and guiltily admits that she’s let her biological children take advantage of Nora all their lives. Nora says this is as it should have been: “After all, I was only an adopted child.” Nora’s mom flames, “Don’t ever say that again! I never thought of you as adopted. You were my baby, in every sense except the physical sense, and that has little to do with maternal love.” The reason everyone leans on Nora is that “you’re the strong one,” she explains. “The rest of us are clinging vines … who can’t cope with life the way grown people should.” It doesn’t change the facts of the situation, but at least it does away with Nora’s idea that an adopted child is a second-class child. This has particular resonance for me because my sister is adopted. I never really understood that until I was about ten—she’s my sister in every way, and who actually gave birth to her is totally irrelevant to our relationship. So I was pleased to see the issue managed so well.

Fern Shepard’s writing is pretty good, and helps speed you smoothly through the book. She’s got some feisty characters in there—not the heroine, though; it seems the only VNRN characters with any real sass are always the best friends. The cover, of course, is fantastic, and if the title has little to do with the story, well, I’ll forgive this book.

Door to Door Nurse

By Jeanne Bowman (pseud. Peggy O'More Blocklinger), ©1967

Rietta Mendall, R.N., was perfectly happy. She was, in fact, in the middle of counting her blessings—her interesting work, her comfortable apartment—when tragedy struck. Her brother’s teenage son was in trouble, and Rietta’s help was needed. And when such a need existed, Rietta could not place her own happiness first. She knew that her brother’s troubles would clear up in time. But her own way of life was drastically altered. To support herself now, she worked as a visiting nurse serving a trailer community. Her patients’ problems became her problems…and multiplied rapidly. Then romance beckoned…and Rietta knew it was the one problem she might not be able to solve!

GRADE: D

BEST QUOTES:
“Oh, that we had the right to stab her with a hypo right where she needs it most.”

“Dunbar’s dream was as set as his arteries.”

REVIEW:
After Ms. Bowman’s Conflict for Nurse Elsa received the first (and still the only) failing grade I’ve ever handed down, I was reluctant to take up another of her titles. Why set yourself up for that kind of punishment? But—and bear with me—having discovered the blog “Women Running From Houses,” and realized that nurses also have been seen running from houses (see Private Duty Nurse and Nurse at the Castle), I then discovered a sub-genre to that sub-genre: a nurse running from a trailer park. Which brings me to Door to Door Nurse.

Nurse Harriet “Rietta” Mendall has a nice life, a nice apartment, a nice job at Thorton Hospital. “She’d take her profession, with its assurance of an income … in preference to a wildly romantic love affair, marriage and an equally wild divorce with its residue of bitterness,” she says, because all marriages must eventually end in divorce. But then her inconsiderate sister-in-law Sophia, while making a “long cruise to regain nerve strength,” makes a stop in Peru and wires home that she’s going to be staying there for six months, leaving her husband Hal and their two teenagers, Teena and Merton, to fend for themselves. So Rietta quits her job, subleases her apartment, and moves into her brother’s spare bedroom. She takes a job as a visiting nurse, tending patients who are either well-to-do or poverty-stricken, or both, in the case of one widow who was once rich but has run out of money.

We meet numerous patients, too many to keep track of, many with alliterative names such as Leon Lieb, Lenore Lamont, Zelma Zander, and Dorcus Dunbar, who is a man, poor thing. We also meet the up-and-coming attorney and love interest with the unfortunate moniker Hadkin Stratford. He is confusingly nicknamed “Had,” which makes for false starts in sentences such as “Had Stratford arrived before Harold left for the base” and “Had Stratford waited a moment,” leaving you wondering if the first word is a past perfect verb or a proper noun. Or not, if you are less keen on grammar than I am.

One of Rietta’s patients lives in a trailer on his own property, but the town snots are trying to pass a law that prevents private property from hosting said humble dwellings. Had is working to add a clause to the law that grandfathers in properties already containing a trailer, bless his noble heart. He is also attempting to finance a trailer park, where new town residents who can’t afford a home fixed to the ground can put their trailers. Another of Rietta’s patients is trying to sell Had a worthless swamp, which will bankrupt him and make him unable to marry a particular young woman in town who “simply cannot afford to live on a restricted income.” Rietta is bound by ethics not to reveal anything she learns in the homes of her patients, so she is in a bit of a bind, more so because she is hankering for Had herself. He can give her, she believes, “a new life, a supplementary life which would make her more than merely a nurse.”

We get a fair amount of pop psychology suggesting that author thinks that “nerves” are the cause of all organic disease. Thorton Hospital apparently sees businessmen who “come in for recuperative rest when they’re facing some important meeting.” A patient with a new colostomy blames stress for her surgery: “I just tied my innards up in tensions until they wouldn’t come untied and had to be cut.” Rietta cautions herself not to eat when she is upset: “Hadn’t she been trained to relate upset emotions to an upset digestive tract?” Even Had has the curious belief that people who marry for financial or social gain “usually show up at one hospital or another.”

While not as bad as Conflict for Nurse Elsa, the prose contains a healthy amount of Ms. Bowman’s nonlinear writing, which runs around in circles, leaving you muddled and directionless. I give you the following paragraph: “Professionally she need not rush. Personally, she had to escape, get away from the very presence of the housekeeper. Ridiculous but true. Also interesting, a subject often discussed over the Thorton coffee tables: how individuals were like chemicals reacting on each other without motive or desire.” Can you run that by me again? When it’s not confusing, the language is stilted and phony, which seems to be an attempt to be literary but just makes me nauseous. Rietta leaves a note for her neighbor, saying, “Thank you for the nicest breakfast I’ve had in years. I savored peace and the promise of contentment.” When Sophia comes home early and brings a guest, effectively kicking Rietta out of her brother’s guestroom and rendering her homeless, she “sallied forth and bought the newly scorned: a mobile home.”

The wealthy characters in the book are generally haughty and rude, while the poor, like the colostomy patient, have many friends who care for them: “She thought of Mrs. Zander, whom no one wanted to drive to the city, and of Mrs. Minor, who would have to draw lots to determine which of the many would have what they’d consider a privilege. Which was the richer?” So we are treated to treacle about how much better off poor people are: “Mrs. Brown might be poor where money was concerned, but she was rich in understanding, the more lasting commodity.”

This book is barely tolerable, not really infuriating, but bestowing more of a mild queasiness, between the dizzy writing, the cloying sentiment, and the pretentious language. The concept—and the cover—of this book were far more promising than what it delivered. I’ve noticed that the titles of some nurse romance novels are used repeatedly, such as in Head Nurse (both Barbara Villet and Ruth Dorset have written a book of this title) and Big City Nurse (by both Jane Highmore and Peggy Gaddis, not to mention the smutty version by Albert L. Quandt). I’m not sure the title is worth recycling, but in the right hands—I’m talking to you, Faith Baldwin—the concept could be made into something really great.

Nurse's Alibi

By Jane Corby, ©1966

Kate Saunders, R.N., returned from a working vacation as a ship’s nurse on a Caribbean cruise to find that a sensational murder had taken place in her home town on the very night of her departure. The chief suspect, George Hewlett, was claiming Kate as his alibi, and although Kate’s fiancé, Dr. Tim Weaver, advised her not to become involved, Kate felt she had a duty to tell what she knew, however dangerous that might be. With the support of handsome newspaper reporter Dave Warren who loved her, Kate followed her instincts and nearly risked losing love…and life as well.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“There was something about the young man that annoyed her. Perhaps it was the way his sandy hair was cut, so that one side of it was combed down over his forehead in a kind of ragged bang.”

“I couldn’t help thinking how much more athletic you look without your clothes.”

“For this occasion she had not spared the eye shadow.”

“Don’t eat that candy! It may be poisoned!”

“The district attorney did manage to bring out the fact that George’s mother was ‘emotionally disturbed,’ but even this, Kate thought, would only prejudice the jury in his favor. Most of the men—and there were seven on the jury—had perhaps had a similar experience with their wives for a short period.”

REVIEW:
There is just no excuse for a dumb heroine. How can you have any sympathy for a woman who continually makes the worst possible choices, who throws logic to the wind, who is a complete hypocrite?

Meet Kate Saunders, who is working part-time as a nurse while she returns to Stratton University in Mansfield, NY, to obtain a graduate degree in psychiatry. A fellow student and acquaintance, George Hewlett, age 20, has been accused of murdering his girlfriend, Claire Taylor, who we are told is both 16 and 17. Kate has heard George say that he would kill Claire before he “let someone else have her,” and that he would do it by strangling her with a wire hanger, which is the exact way she died. She has heard him threaten other people as well. He has told the police that Kate was with him at the time of Claire’s murder, which is not true. She was “frightened at the way he lost control” when she told him she would not give him a false alibi. After George has been released from jail, a car just like his tries to run her off the road, and then George lies to her about where he was that night. And she receives an anonymous box of chocolates that has been poisoned.

What does Kate do with all this? Why, she tells no one at all about being run off the road, because “there was no use to add to the counts against him.” She asks the lab worker who tests the candy to destroy it all as well as his lab report. When she sees George on campus, she hurries to catch up with him and apologizes for not giving him an alibi, and seems hurt when he says, “If a man is going to be persecuted by someone, he ought at least to have the sense to stay away from her,” and stalks off. She apparently agrees that George killed Claire, but does not dwell at all on that question, rather insisting that is going to “help” him by providing a “nurse’s alibi,” which means she is going to testify to the fact that she thinks George is a “borderline disturbed personality,” possibly schizophrenic. She wants to testify on George’s behalf, she tells her fiancé Dr. Tim Weaver, because “nobody else knows what I know about George Hewlett,” and she is willing to break off her engagement with Tim over it. So although she will make considerable personal sacrifices to tell the world one thing she believes about George, she simultaneously buries her other suspicion, barely even admitting it to herself, that he is attempting to kill her.

Tim is opposed to her testifying because he is concerned that the attorneys will attempt to destroy her character and try to convince the jury that she is in love with George. As her fiancé, this will damage his reputation as well. Most of the book details their quarrels, his dates with “number one belle of New England” Mandy Burr, and Kate’s dates with reporter Dave Warren, with an interlude in which she stars in a play about a group of young women in 1910 seeking admission to the then-all-male university. There’s the trial in the end, of course, when all is revealed, and the engagement in the end, when all the difficulties are swept under the rug, but you knew that would happen.

The pop psychology in this book quickly becomes annoying. When George tells Kate that she is “persecuting” him, she starts with the psychoanalysis: “This was something that was definitely tied up with emotional instability. … Had George ever suffered from a persecution mania before?” Does use of the word on one occasion make for a “mania”? George’s mother is living in a sanitarium for the mentally disturbed, and Kate reasons that “her highly nervous condition might have been the cause of her son’s instability, and [George’s father] Jim Hewlett, unwilling to recognize the signs of emotional disturbance as an inherited trait, would be all the more belligerent toward anyone who suspected trouble.”

There is also a curious dichotomy about sexism. Kate and Tim get into an argument prompted by Kate’s horror at how constricted women’s lives were in 1910, when their roles were limited only to “making a man’s life ‘easy and agreeable,’ educating the young and taking care of those who were sick.” However, the other vintage nurse romance novels of the 1960s I have read suggest not a widely different role for women even at that “modern” era. Kate also mentions that in 1910 women teachers “had to work for half of what men were paid,” but in 1960, women were earning only 59¢ for each dollar earned by a man (Getting Even, by Evelyn Murphy, ©2006). So it’s not clear to me that Kate is all that better off than the character she was playing. Especially when her fiancé starts arguing that “there was no use saying women were better off because they could earn their own living. In many cases, this simply meant they supported members of the family, or an indolent husband. They had actually been better off under the old system of being cared for and attending to their household chores.” Kate, the ninny, responds to this by bringing up wife beating, totally missing the point that women are human beings, not possessions, with the same right to choose their own destiny as men.

It should not come as a great surprise that at the end of the book Kate agrees to marry Tim, despite what she has called “the great differences in their points of view on almost everything.” “You won’t let me be myself, and I can be no one else,” she tells him when she breaks up with him. Yet at the end of the book, when she brings up the fact that they don’t “see eye to eye on many subjects,” he answers, “You don’t want a yes-man for a husband,” and tells her that he likes green hair and green eyes like hers more than black hair and brown eyes like Mandy’s. If you’re as dumb as Kate Saunders, R.N., a person’s coloring is just as good a foundation for a life-long relationship as any other. And it shouldn’t be too hard to get used to being considered chattel.

Ski Resort Nurse

By Jane L. Sears, ©1962

Nurse Quentin McCall had two great loves—skiing and nursing, and the Crystal Valley hospital seemed the ideal place to combine them. But lovely Quentin soon found herself tangled in a snowdrift of conflicting emotions. For two men occupied her thoughts and neither would believe Quentin to be what she was. To the wealthy widower Alex Kriloff, she was the past refound, the dead come alive. To Dr. Ken Johnson, who turned a cold shoulder to romance, Quentin was a disturbingly beautiful reality. Quentin asked herself, “If a mask was a necessity for love, was she willing to wear one?”

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“I got TB bundling with a doll in Smitty’s sleigh!”

“I’m meant for greater things than emptying sputum cups all day long!”

“Quentin couldn’t seem to stop Tillie from jamming those needles into her.”

“She wondered where he was and if he was still tortured.”

REVIEW:
Quentin is a fresh nursing school graduate who has decided to take a job at a hospital at a ski resort in the Sierra Nevadas. She’s been skiing her entire life, having grown up in New Hampshire, and this job will allow her to combine her two passions. Of course, she finds some new ones just minutes after walking through the hospital door. Dr. Ken Johnson instantly reveals himself as “a complete grump, disliking youth and fun.” He hates skiing and young nurses, who he believes come to his hospital to meet unattached millionaires who have broken a leg on the slopes. And he’s rude, sarcastic, and constantly angry, shouting at nurses and patients alike. So Quentin is instantly infatuated, “glad she had on the black knit stretch pants that flattered her long-legged, narrow-waisted figure.” She can’t stop thinking about the big jerk, though he gives her little encouragement—just one fleeting moment when, for once, he apologizes for his rudeness and says, “I wish…” before being called away to attend to a patient. Love does not take a great deal of fuel to start a bonfire in a vintage nurse romance novel.

There is, of course, another man. Alexander Kriloff is an insanely wealthy recluse who spots her schussing down the slopes one evening from his mountaintop aerie through binoculars and spends weeks uncharacteristically searching the pubs for her. His is a tragic story: He and his new bride had come to his house in the mountains for a skiing honeymoon, but she came down with appendicitis just as a blizzard set in, and there was no way to get to the hospital on the other side of the Donner Pass—and she died of a ruptured appendix in her husband’s arms two days after their wedding. He responded by building the hospital, where Quentin now works, in her honor. It’s quite a hospital, too, where waiters serve the patients bloody Marys, the cafeteria offers filet mignon, every window has a million-dollar view of the slopes, and the patients don’t have to leave until they want to. It costs plenty, of course, but most of the patients are wealthy jet-setters who don’t mind the bill.

Alexander meets her eventually—and then it’s a whirlwind romance. He has her over for dinner, fetched in the Rolls by his chauffeur, and gives her a tour of every room in the house—except one; gosh, I wonder what’s in there? He flies her to San Francisco for an evening of cocktails at the Top of the Mark and then dinner at Ernie’s. He sends her five dozen roses. But she has limits: When he tries to give her a gold clock with the alarm set for 8:00, the time of their date that night, she gently returns it. She quickly comes to feel a motherly affection for him that she calls love. “Only one thing disturbed her and that was his increasing possessiveness … demanding she spend every spare moment with him until at times she felt very nearly suffocated.” However, as soon as he proposes to her, “his complete need for her marked by a possessiveness that had troubled her previously, made her own heart respond and want to give.”

I could tell you more about the plot, but why bother? That’s not why you should read this book. The writing is entertaining, descriptive, and campy, everything I look for in a VNRN. The romance is amusingly over the top: “Her hands still caught firmly in his, Quentin slowly lifted her eyes, felt herself drowning in the depth of his brooding gaze.” The luxe settings help with both the appeal and the camp: “With a small sigh she turned in the seat, gazed at the back of Charles [sic] neat neck beneath his chauffeur’s cap, and let her fingers idly trail along the leopard skin upholstery. ‘My gosh!’ she whispered to herself. ‘Wait until Olive hears about this!’ ”

The biggest flaw this book has, apart from Quentin’s inexplicable attraction to Dr. Johnson, is the copy editing. Now, I know the people out there who care deeply about commas can be counted on one hand, but I am one of those very curmudgeons. Typos such as “grizzly detail” (they mean grisly) and “her body felt like it was being seered” (it should have been seared) can be shrugged off with a laugh, but the constant confusing of it’s with its was absolutely maddening. (The former means it is, as in it’s mine, while the second refers to something belonging to it, as in its color.) However, with such fabulous writing, a great cover, and another of Ace’s magnificent cover lines—“adventure and romance in two white worlds”—I can heartily recommend this book, it’s disrespect for punctuation notwithstanding.

Journey for a Nurse

By Arlene Hale, ©1966

Roberta Sterling, R.N., looked forward to her new job with mixed feelings. As the private nurse of the wealthy, aged Clayton Prescott, she would travel to California. When she arrived there she became involved—almost against her will—with two romantic young men who vied for her affections: her employer’s handsome chauffeur and the old man’s rakish son. But, back home, there was another who lay claim to her heart. And Roberta could never forget him. Then, in a whirlwind of dramatic events that left her breathless—Roberta reached the decision that brought her the greatest happiness she’d ever known.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTE:
“She felt a loyalty to her patient, although he was now dead.”

REVIEW:
I’m hard pressed to imagine what made author Arlene Hale decide it was a good idea to write about a road trip with four cranky people from the upper Midwest to California in which they seldom pull over or see any sights whatsoever. But there you have it, the backbone of Journey for a Nurse in a nutshell.

Well, I’m being a little unfair. There are the interpersonal relationships to explore—cantankerous millionaire, Clayton Prescott, now confined to a wheelchair and near death, is either driving everyone mercilessly or sleeping; Claud, the chauffeur, hates everyone except nurse Roberta Sterling, whom he wants to marry apparently based on little else than her appearance; secretary Elsa has little to say except, “Yes, sir”; and nurse Bobbie tries to get Clayton to swallow his pills and go to sleep in between fending off passes from Claud. You can see this is not going to be the most riveting vintage nurse romance novel on the shelf.

Bobbie “was 25 and not getting any younger,” hanging out with perennial good-time boy Joey Russell, who after years of dating has not asked her to marry him. So she accepts a job to accompany Clayton to San Diego by car to see his daughter, Nadine, before he dies. Bobbie’s chief qualification for the job, it seems, is her looks: “You’re pretty. I like that,” Clayton tells her. “As long as a man has to be sick, he might as well have a pretty nurse to take care of him than an ugly one.”

Clayton also has a son, Elliott, and there appears to be some bad blood between Elliott and Claud, and the hints about this are dropped as subtly as neon signs along the way. Eventually we learn that Claud’s sister, Jan, had been going with Elliott, and they were in a car accident and she was killed. Elliott is supposed to be in Europe, but somehow he tracks them down in his zippy sports car at their hotel in the Arizona desert—hard to imagine how he could have done so, since no one has been in touch with him to tell him where they are. He and Claud instantly start hissing at each other, and it’s clear there’s going to be a showdown at some point.

Curiously, during a couple of chapters the narrative voice switches from Bobbie to Claud, though this enables us to learn exactly nothing more about his character, apart from the fact that he’s really bad at seducing girls and “seething … because of Jan and what had happened to her.” Despite his dark moods, Bobbie tries to talk herself into falling for Claud, mostly just to forget about Joey: “There was much to admire about him. He handled the car well. He was very much aware of his position and he never stepped out of line.” Maybe it’s just me, but when I think of attractive qualities, good driving and obeying the boss are not at the top of my list.

Were women ever treated as disturbingly as every young man who runs in to Bobbie treats her? About the first thing Elliott says to her when they meet is, “Oh, don’t go, nurse. You’re the best part of this setup that I’ve seen so far.” He “reached out and wrapped a finger around a lock of her hair” on several occasions, though they are practically strangers. Claud approves of her not walking out after dark alone, he tells her, because “I’d be tempted to abduct you and run away with you, myself!” This sort of creepy aggressiveness toward women occurs frequently in VNRNs, and instead of being completely repulsed by it, our heroines either let it pass unremarked or, occasionally, are flattered by it. Let’s hope this was more fiction than real-life in the 1960s, but if even a hint of it is true, let us all pause for a moment and give profound and fervent thanks for women’s lib.

The medicine in this book is as outdated as its objectification of women. The reason Clayton can’t fly to California is that “air travel was out because of his heart”—instead he has to spend a week driving 2,500 miles, because this will be so much less stressful. When his heart does start acting up, the cardiologist diagnoses his problem by saying that his heart is “acting sort of cute.” And Bobbie tells someone to make a pot of coffee during a moment of crisis because “it helps settle the nerves.” You’d think if you made a living writing these books, you might take ten minutes to bone up on a few basic medical facts.

This book has no imagination, no sparkle, and no appeal. The best thing about it is the cover, so once you’ve looked that over, toss this book aside and move on to something else.


This is another cover for the same book. Illustration by Lou Marchetti.

 



Nurse in Hollywood

By Jane Converse, ©1965
Cover illustration by Robert Abbett

Her ash-blond hair. Her big brown eyes. Her pert figure. These were only frosting to her personality—a personality that was pure whistle bait. So what if Kitty Walters was a nursing student just three months short of graduating? So what if her idea of heaven was the symbol R.N. pinned on a starched white uniform? Phil Harlan wasn’t called “Boy Wonder” for nothing. He was dynamic, magnetic, charming, a glib Svengali whose record of convincing was 100 percent. Phil Harlan would have no trouble turning a dedicated would-be nurse into a determined Hollywood starlet. At least that’s what Phil Harlan thought …

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“That’s what M.D. stands for, didn’t you know? Mighty Dictator.”

REVIEW:
I was looking forward to reading this book because of the Richard Prince painting of the same name, done in 2004. He created a series of paintings based on the titles of vintage nurse romance novels, including Surfing Nurse, Dude Ranch Nurse, and Danger: Nurse at Work. Clearly I am not the only one drawn by such fantastic titles.

The actual story, however, is not as intriguing as the painting. Kitty Walters is three months shy of graduating from nursing school, dating resident Rex MacMillan. He says he loves her, but she thinks he is “caustic and superior … he lived medicine; he was surgery. … He thinks the world begins and ends with a hypodermic needle.” On study night in the nurse’s dorm, when they should be studying the names of the leg muscles, the students are watching Career Girl, U.S.A., a show that travels from town to town, “interviewing the outstanding local career girl,” with musical numbers as interludes. Something tells me this show would not knock Dancing with the Stars out of the ratings.

Dr. MacMillan is not a fan of the show, because he thinks the career girls are “picked for her measurements … The typical career girl’s apt to be a pleasantly plump, unglamorously efficient bank clerk from Podunk, Nebraska.” Well, not all of them. Kitty’s dorm-mates have sent her photo to the Career Girl producer, Phil Harlan, because he is looking for a real-life career girl to star in the movie version of his TV show. (It’s curious to ponder an era in which a working woman was such a novelty that she deserved her own film.) They’ve asked Kitty for an interview, and when she walks in the door on “those perfect Walters gams,” Phil takes one look at her and starts to gush: “You are it! You are she! She is her! We are made!”

When she tells Rex that Phil has offered her a two-year movie contract, he tells her she’s a fool to chuck her nursing career. “It was reminiscent of the time Kitty’s father had told her that she lacked the guts to finish a nursing course”—which was a large part of why she signed up in the first place. So she instantly decides to drop out of school and accept Phil’s offer. She is driven by “an insatiable restlessness, a desire for newness and excitement”; “though she knew her gain would probably never wipe out her loss, she also knew that pride would not let her turn back now.” This girl has a few issues she needs to work out.

So off she goes to Hollywood, where she finds a snazzy new apartment, Asian furniture, and a lot of new party dresses—and then she hangs around the house, waiting for Phil to call, for weeks. While she could have been finishing school. The film director, Damon Dyer, is a fat, has-been alcoholic with fabulous lines like, “Here, let me get you a weak ginger ale,” or, “Go embellish Mother Nature while I pop around the corner. I believe I noticed a haven for weary travelers as I drove up.” He is critical of Kitty, telling her, “To be driven is tragic but understandable. Merely to fall into a trap because you’re mildly intrigued …” But he is also kind, and takes her to a Christmas party at Phil’s house that the host neglected to invite her to.

Eventually Phil shows up with a script, and since Kitty has nothing else to do, she memorizes it from beginning to end. But on the first day of filming, which is in the desert 30 miles from LA, Phil fires the script writer and tosses out the script, writing a new one on the spot, which even Kitty can tell is wooden and hackneyed. So the actors spend a lot of time waiting around the set, contemplating Phil’s rapid crash, while Phil argues with Damon. Soon Damon walks off the set, and is promptly bitten by a rattlesnake. While Phil screams that someone should be cutting Damon’s leg and sucking out the venom (gross!), Kitty snaps at him to keep quiet, coolly packs the leg in ice, and keeps the patient calm en route to the hospital. After that, without Damon behind the camera, Phil is directing, too—and everyone can see that this production is going straight to video.

Kitty tries to quit, but Phil threatens her with a breach of contract suit. Then Rex shows up out of the blue on the set, and Kitty drums up an argument with him that even she can see is absurd. “She was succumbing to the same perversity that had made her defy her father when he had objected to her nursing career, the same mindless obstinacy that had prompted her to fight with Rex once before, discarding an R.N. degree three months before graduation for this debacle in the desert. She regretted her words in almost the same instant that they spilled from her, yet spewing out her anger seemed the only balm for her injured pride.” But then there’s a terrible sandstorm, and some nearby tourists are injured and require immediate medical attention—there’s nothing like a compound fracture of the leg, facial lacerations and third-degree burns to bring a couple together. Whether they are able to heal an impulsive would-be nurse’s psychological difficulties remains unanswered.

Sending Kitty into a miserable experience in Hollywood was a bit too easy; a deeper (yes, I am not afraid to use the word in referring to a vintage nurse romance) book would have bestowed her with success in the movies, yet still allowed her to choose nursing in the end. The writing was hardly Jane Converse’s best, though the character of Damon Dyer was certainly memorable. While it had some interesting bits, Nurse in Hollywood was not worth memorializing in paint.

Nurse's Masquerade

By Jean Carew (pseud. Jane Corby), ©1964

Never in her nursing career had lovely Cara Merrill received so strange a request. But Brent Butler was so persuasive that she reluctantly agreed to accompany him to the fabulous Butler estate and pretend to be his debutante fiancée. Cara’s real purpose, Brent told her, was to watch over his elderly uncle whose health had been mysteriously failing. Brent was suspicious of his handsome cousin Paul—and when both men declared their love for her, Cara had to make the most important decision of her life!

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTE:
“When you’re in love, the eyes do get shinier.”

“Seaking of fireworks, you should have seen the display Dad put on when he heard I’d ordered a topless bathing suit!”

“If two people are in love, there’s no use to discuss the pros and cons of the future like a Philadelphia lawyer.”

REVIEW:
Cara Merrill is bored with working as a nurse at a New York City hospital. She’s only 22, and presumably has only been there for a year or two—she’d better get married quick so she can give up her job permanently and become a housewife. In the meantime, however, she’s saved up some money so she can sleep late, go window shopping on Fifth Avenue, and take drives into the country. But the money is running out, and she needs a new job. So she sends a “rather flippant note” in response to an ad in the paper seeking a nurse who is “experienced, blonde, willing to live in the country (large estate).” Why she needs to be blonde is never addressed, but her facetious response surprisingly wins her an interview. Even more surprisingly, though she opens the interview with Brent Butler by scolding him about his unusual ad, he offers her the job. The position entails pretending to be his fiancée and going to stay for a month at Soundings, his Uncle Josh’s Long Island estate, to find out if Josh is being poisoned. Josh hates doctors, so Brent can’t just take Josh to see one, and instead has concocted this scheme to get him medical observation on the sly.

Cara agrees to the plan, and before you know it, she is en route to the estate in a shiny new beige convertible with a huge sapphire on her hand, both courtesy of her faux beau. Cara is to pretend she is a debutante, which means only gussying up her language. “ ‘It’s a …’ Cara began, and stopped. She had been going to say ‘good,’ but remembered her debutante status and changed it for the livelier, ‘a keen custom, I think.’ ” Naturally, everyone in the house is totally fooled, even if she has never played golf or tennis, can’t sail very well, has never left New York, knows way too much about concussions, and wears dungarees and a green and white plaid nylon frock, the very idea of which send shivers down my spine.

Soundings is a large unkempt mansion with “a vaguely sinister air about it,” which seems to stem largely from its color: “Who ever heard of painting a mansion brown?” Uncle Josh has been bound to a wheelchair for years from polio, but is otherwise in good health—except for these attacks in which he feels “squeamish” and appears sallow and drawn, which always seem to come on after dinner. The suspects include Josh’s sister Susan and her nine-year-old daughter Linda, who have just returned to the States from their plantation in Haiti. Brent’s cousin Paul, a “perennial college boy type,” flirts madly with Cara, making Brent look at her with squinty eyes. Diane Forbes, an old pal of Brent’s, is hanging around the house, apparently determined to win Brent for herself, which makes Cara green with envy. There’s a lot of talk about how neither one of them means a whit to the other, but we know differently, don’t we, readers?

When Paul takes Cara sailing one afternoon and they are late returning home, Cara and Brent have a fight on the terrace, and she gives him back the ring and drives back to her Greenwich Village apartment—only to hitch a ride with Brent back again four days later because Josh had asked her to come to the July 4th festivities. Once there, Cara is growing increasingly concerned because Linda has created a voodoo doll of Diane. “Cara stood as if turned to stone. This was no childish whim!” For someone who doesn’t believe in black magic, she sure gets worked up about it. If it were me, I’d be more concerned about how Linda keeps going on about murdering Diane: “I’m going to kill Diane. I hate her!” Instead, Cara dishes out a treacly lecture: “If we want to hurt another person, and if we have evil thoughts about them, we really hurt only ourselves.” But she should be biting her tongue. Linda tosses her Diane doll into the pool, and a few hours later the phone rings—Diane has driven off a bridge into the river! She’s not dead yet, but maybe we can fish that doll out and try stabbing it with Linda’s “machete,” a silver letter opener!

For Linda’s next act, she concocts a potion out of ground beetles, soy sauce, and rum to feed to Uncle Josh to make him well again. The other adults are banished from the library while Linda, wearing a red scarf around her head and a pillow case as a dress, holds a private ceremony with Josh. Cara feels the sense of menace of the estate stronger than ever, and is shivering on the terrace and tearing her handkerchief to shreds while Paul chain smokes, Brent paces, and Susan clasps her hands tightly in her lap. Even the butler is poised at the door, ready to dash inside. What exactly are they afraid of? And if everyone there thinks this is such a terrible idea, why are they allowing the child to go through with it?

Linda’s voodoo works again, but not as she had planned—Uncle Josh drops with a massive heart attack. Cara springs into action, immediately asking the butler to put Josh to bed—apparently the nearby hospital isn’t a suitable option—and donning the uniform and cap she has brought with her. Josh is saved, and the butler gratuitously reveals that Josh’s “well-publicized attitude toward the medical profession was mainly a pose.” Why he would pretend such a thing? The poisoning angle is never mentioned again, and Cara is engaged just pages later, at the Fourth of July fireworks.

It’s a quick read, and not terribly painful, though the loose ends do flap annoyingly. I was somewhat perplexed by all the bizarre relationships that end by passing unremarked. Is jealousy supposed to be the same as love? Is Susan, who has dismissed Cara’s concerns about Linda, to blame for her daughter’s transformation into a (somewhat successful) witch doctor? And what about the voodoo—is it just coincidence, or is it supposed to be real? I’m left with more questions than satisfactory answers on the last page of this book. Really, the best thing about it is the cover—but even this, when we are all but beaten over the head with our heroine’s blonde tresses (they match her car!), leaves you wondering.