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At 17, Dita got a job modeling women's clothing. "I could wear sizes 11 to 16, depending on the maker." She refused to model anything as skimpy as a bathing suit, but traveled with a salesman to display clothes in stores in Western states. When he asked her how old she really was and she confessed, she says, "the poor bastard turned 17 shades of green." He told her she was through with the job. "I told him, 'If you fire me, I'll get you for the Mann Act.' He called his wife, and she joined us in Reno and traveled with us after that."
Dita admits to liking booze early in life. In her late teens she recalls being lonely at a Navy officers' club in Seattle on Christmas Eve. She found twelve equally lonely officers. "We got suffer than 900 planks." The family moved to Los Angeles, where Dita helped exercise horses at an exclusive club. She remembers that Joan Crawford's horse Red Satin was part of the stable. Later, in Washington, the Davis family lived in high society, so she tells it, entertaining the Cordell Hulls (he was Secretary of State under F.D.R.) and Idaho Senator William Borah ("Mother was a terrific Republican"). Dita came out at a debutante ball at Washington's Carlton hotel in 1939. "It was like a wedding without the agony of being married," she sighs.
Living in Washington, Dita claims she "got engaged to three men at the same time": a Far East expert in the Dutch embassy, an Army officer and an Italian naval attache. Since the Dutchman gave her the prettiest ring, she agreed to visit him in Honolulu, traveling on a Matson liner. "They were all interested in this long, lanky female traveling alone. We had a party that wouldn't stop." She ditched the Dutchman in Hawaii, but claims she met Ernest Hemingway there. "He called me Princess." As she booked passage home, "I saw this gorgeous hunk of body with the little tiny behind, and I went to the desk and learned that it was leaving that afternoon on the Matsonia. 'Book me on it,' I said." That, she claims, was how she became friendly for a time with Baseball Player Hank Greenberg.
Six-by-Six. During the war, Dita first worked as "a troubleshooter" for the Board of Economic Warfare. "I just stamped and signed and got things moving." She joined the Red Cross. "We were sent to George Washington University to learn to play poker and shoot craps—things that I was born doing." She was then sent to an Army camp where, she complains, "they had us getting up at 5 in the morning cooking for the goddam WACs." She got out of that by becoming a truck driver even after the motor-pool officer "checked me out on a six-by-six, and I ground the gears and choked it and screwed up."
Shipped overseas, Dita did not care for all the Red Cross clothing she had to wear or carry. "We had to walk six miles carrying those goddam suitcases to the ship." But Dita says hers was heavier than the others. "Everyone else had nice dainty underwear in their suitcases, and here I got twelve bottles of booze." She served in Casablanca, Algiers and for 13 months on Corsica, getting to know a lot of military airmen. She claims that she "used to fly P-47s sitting on the pilot's lap."