MASSACHUSETTS: Path of Glory

For a while it was exciting to be a cause celebre. When pretty, honey-haired Teacher Isabelle Hallin was fired because of gossip that she had served cocktails to her high-school students (TIME, July 19, 1937), her neighbors in Saugus, Mass. signed petitions; students picketed her detractors' homes. She saw her picture splashed over the nation's front pages. Columnists glorified her. Out of the notoriety came a screen test—a chance to escape the humdrum life of a schoolmarm.

That was in 1937. She flunked the screen test. A radio job in Boston petered out. She sang a few times in nightclubs. Then she was forgotten. But there was no going back to Saugus. She wound up in Manhattan, writing advertising copy for lingerie and haberdashery, living in a tiny Greenwich Village apartment, struggling to make ends meet, like thousands of other obscure working girls.

On Christmas Eve life looked like an enemy to Isabelle Hallin. She was 32, lonesome and unsuccessful. Her mother had been her only visitor in seven months. She had failed to get a year's-end raise. She wrote a bitter note to her boss; then, early on Christmas morning, she turned on the hissing gas jets. Once more Isabelle Hallin got her name in the newspapers.