Sublime

Even now, at seventeen—high school graduate, mistress of her fate, and a ten-dollar-a-week file clerk in the very Forty-seventh Street lawyer’s office where Helen was a fifteen-dollar-a-week typist—as she sat on Helen’s bed and watched Helen primp for a party, the memory hurt. There was no consolation in the thought that not now and not then would

One treated them like poor girls and made the bare business offer. The other put a woman in charge—a motherly, dignified, capable woman. They did business in her name. They used her picture. She signed all ads and letters. She wrote to these girls like a friend.

Cincinnati-born Theodosia Burr Goodman, whose father was a Jewish tailor from Poland, became Theda Bara (an acronym of “Death Arab”).

1946 revue film The Ziegfeld Follies, “A Great Lady Has an Interview