The Theater: The Trouper

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Shirley keeps half a dozen pairs of identical spectacles so that she can be sure to find one pair when she needs it. She is a great food sneaker, and loves breads, rich desserts, ice cream and candy. She does her heaviest eating when she's upset. As a child, Shirley stopped spending her allowance on candy once she discovered that a 10¢ can of condensed milk, eaten with a spoon, is the sweetest thing there is. Asked this summer to name the foods she would most like to have on a desert island. Shirley said: "Fudge, brownies, chocolate ice cream and orange juice." She loves television, often eats her meals from a tray before her 17-inch screen, and races home from the theater to watch late-at-night TV movies, particularly British ones. She keeps a sketching pad handy, for doodling during the commercials. A stack of drugstore novels on her bed table serves as insurance against insomnia. She has relatively little interest in politics or world affairs, but remembers that she once struck a vague blow for social justice by picketing a shoestore ("A friend asked me to do it. Somebody was doing something unfair to somebody").

Though she loves sitting at home alone, Shirley is sufficiently feminine and inconsistent to love going to parties: "When someone asks me to go any place, my first instinct is no; then I go, and I'm the last one to leave."

Dirty Hands. Shirley believes that "my childhood made me a peculiar person." Born in 1907 on Manhattan's middle-class Morningside Heights in the shadow of Columbia University, she was christened Thelma Booth Ford. Her father, Albert J. Ford, was a serious-minded salesman for International Business Machines Corp., who lived by such venerable homilies as "Children should be seen and not heard." Shirley says: "He was the sort of man you'd run up to breathless and happy and he'd say, 'Your hands are dirty.' "

Her mother, Virginia Wright Ford, early won and never lost the passionate attachment of her daughter. To Shirley she was "an emotional and gentle person. My father completely crushed her." Shirley's parents were separated when she was in her teens, and her mother died in 1933. Today, at 46, Shirley is still stubbornly fighting what she imagines to be her mother's battle. Her father has since remarried and lives in Brooklyn, but Shirley has not spoken to him in more than 20 years because "when, anyone does anything to someone I love it's as if it was done to me."

There is a certain ambivalence to the struggle. Shirley concedes that her father "taught me to waltz without hopping," and remembers him as a handsome man who looked like William Powell. Relatives have tried, without success, to bring Shirley and her father together. Her younger sister Jean, who sees their father infrequently, says: "My father is stiff and proud, and will never give in. Shirley will never give in either." Shirley's stepmother. Rita Ford, cries despairingly: "If they could only understand how much alike they are! They both have the same dispositions ; they're both a bundle of nerves. I'm sure that each of them is dying to have the other make the first move." Of the feud, Shirley says frankly: "It's quite an insight into my character."