Tradition is that chorus girls get mink coats the same way minks do. But Rosemary Williamson, a curvaceous and languorous brunette, who helped take the eyestrain out of such Broadway hits as Peep Show and As the Girls Go, dropped by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan one day last week to deny icily that this is true.
Her monologue was inspired by the fact that one Sidney M. Levy, a fast-talking $75-a-week textile salesman had just been thrown into the pokey for swindling several victims out of $45,000 in a phony nylon deal. Sidney had been ungentlemanly enough to say that he had blown most of the swag on Rosemary, and Rosemary was afraid this was leading to a ghastly, ghastly misunderstanding. She considered Levy a "creep," she cried in tones of outraged virtue, and also a "congenital idiot." Her relations with him, she added firmly, had been only platonic. Then Rosemary poured out the classic story of the showgirl and the predatory stage-door Johnny.
Coffee for Two. Rosemary would never have tolerated Sid for an instant, she suggested, if their acquaintance had not begun on a simple note. A photographer had introduced them, and she treated Sid to a cup of coffee. She added that she only went out with poor boys and had presumed that he was busted enough to be eligible. To her horror, she discovered that this was not the case—Sid gave her a $3,500 mink coat.
"Always the big shot," said Rosemary disdainfully. But she hadn't wanted to offend him. "I thought if it made him happy, fine. But ... our relationship was never mad or romantic. I'm not the type of person to give anything to anybody for anything, if you know what I mean." However, her troubles with Sidney increased. He got "terribly jealous and possessive." Said she, reminiscently: "A real jerk!" And on top of that, he kept embarrassing her with more & more gifts.
Sidney gave her a $5,200 diamond ring. He gave her $600 worth of stone martens. He gave her a $5,800 powder-blue Cadillac convertible. The Caddie was just too much. Rosemary sold it for $3,800. Sid bought it back for $4,000 and gave it to her all over again.
"That's Easy." "This creep forced the convertible on me," she insisted. Asked how a Cadillac could be forced on an unwilling girl, she answered, simply: "That's easy." After eight months of seeing Sidney, she decided that she just couldn't stand him any longer. "On dates I'd take him to the movies—I didn't want to look at him." Then Sidney got mad and threatened her and swore to take back his gifts. "If he had said 'I need the money,' I would have gladly given everything back, but when he got nasty I got mad and told him off." The mink coat, she added airily, had been stolen recently.
All this had been bruising enough to her spirits. While admitting that she could do "anything" on a stage, including "wiggling my ears," she was really a poetic type who hoped some day to do Shakespeare. But Sidney's getting himself in jail as a swindler had almost been the end of Rosemary. "I never knew he was in an illegal business," she cried, with a revealing confession that seemed to explain all: "He told me he was a gambler."