Few Gotham glamor gals are home-grown. Our gals don't go in much for show business and modeling. Those professionals you see on the street and in the night clubs almost all come from out of town.
The deep South--Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and Florida--towns like Scranton, Pa., and West Coast points, contribute most of our flashy frails.
For a long time, during the war, our source of supply was cut off, when the gals made more money at home in defense work or as waitresses than they could expect to begin with in the expensive-to-live-in metropolis.
But in days before that, there was no horizon at home for a good-looker with ambitions.
They hitchhiked, rumbled in by bus, train and plane. The more fortunate became models or show girls. One of a thousand went on to fame and fortune in Hollywood or acquired a millionaire, in or out of wedlock.
But the reward for the lucky ones is so great that for every failure a dozen new, young, starry-eyed twists come to town.
The case of Mary Stuart, of Tulsa, Okla., is typical.
It is one of the stories that could only happen on Broadway.
Joe Pasternak, famed movie producer and discoverer of Deanna Durbin; his wife, the former Dorothy Darrell, who was a chorus girl Cinderella, and Mary Stuart, the 19-year-old beaut from out West.
But let us start from the beginning. Destiny stopped in Tulsa and pointed his long, bony finger straight at New York. Mary took the hint.
That day she shoved off. Lacking the fare, she thumbed her way. She had no difficulty flagging rides. For Mary, as we've told you, is a beaut. She has soft brown hair and a figure curved in the right places to accentuate all her loveliness--all 118 pounds and five-feet-five of it.
So she had no difficulty finding work here, as a model by day and as a photo girl in the Grill Room of the Hotel Roosevelt at night.
Into the Grill one night came Pasternak and his own lovely wife, accepting an invitation extended by Guy Lombardo, maestro at the spot.
Miss Stuart, hotly hoping she'd be seen by a Hollywood mogul, had been fired from the photo concession the day before.
But Destiny hadn't been; it was still working.
Through the voice of one of the musicians in Lombardo's band, whom she knew well, Destiny whispered to her that Pasternak had a reservation for that evening.