Word: schoolgirlisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From the moment he arrived in London for his six-week rock-'n'-roll tour of Britain, Tennessee's flaxen-haired Jerry Lee Lewis, 22, made himself at home in the headlines. The tiny, pony-tailed Mississippi schoolgirl he had brought with him, he proudly announced, was none other than his third wife, Myra. Her age: 15. When reporters gaped, Lewis, resplendent in blue velvet trousers, casually drawled: "I can assure you that my wife is all woman, even though she looks kinda young...
...headmistress of one private school defended the costume: "There is no reason for a girl to be a girl until she leaves school. That's quite early enough." A buyer for Daniel Neal, largest English supplier of children's uniforms, presented a different defense: "The British schoolgirl just doesn't have the sort of figure one ought to draw attention to. Her poor little tum bulging with rice pudding, you know, and no foundation garments to take care of her seat. More often than not she is covered with a thick layer of puppy...
Most of the picture's defects are inherited from the author-the schoolgirl longueurs on life, the Rimbaudelairean sentimentality about evil, the fashionable despairs with the Paris labels on them. But then the author has provided the vital thing in the picture too: a story that seizes the imagination and insists on being read not only as a story but as a symptom of one of the more exotic diseases of leisure...
TRISH DWELLEY is the 17-year-old blonde youngster with the warm, blonde voice whose appearance as an unknown schoolgirl on Jack Paar's Tonight TV show in October developed a bolognoid scent when someone remembered that she had sung a year and a half ago with an outfit called the Dream Weavers. While Paar clutched his wounds. Trish grabbed a recording contract with Decca. She might hit the big time, with the help of a cute nickname (short for Patricia), a fine nose for publicity and a sentimental, "There's-a-tree-in-the-meadow" kind...
...Kathryn Hulme's The Nun's Story, and by comparison comes off secondbest. Such fascination as it has lies in the book's embittered documentation of a nun's daily round and the romantic-escapist character of Sister Ursula who acts like an adolescent schoolgirl at the stage door of heaven waiting for God's autograph...