The Sex Shortage

What if Swift and Armour were to give up packing meat and start selling block-frozen string -beans instead? What if Goodyear and Firestone were to stop producing bulging pneumatic rotundities that tread softly and squeal raffishly? And what if Boeing—maker and creator of the 707s—were to open its vast doors only to release a string of skinny, canvas-covered, piston-driven biplanes?

That is roughly what Hollywood is doing. It used to produce an ever better line of girls—smoothly fuselaged, four-motored, flaps up, rubber-cushioned and sex-powered. Goddess after sleek goddess was projected into the skies, from the 1920s' Mae Murray of the bee-stung lips, the memory of whom is still enough to make old men tumble from rooming house porches, to Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood's last legend of sex. Fighting men in training for Cassino and Saipan were supplied with endless photos of film Aphrodites—Jane Russell in the hay; Rita Hayworth in a negligee; Betty Grable wearing high heels, an ankle bracelet, and a one-piece bathing suit; Lana Turner in the sweater.

The Grenadettes. They raced young motors, and there is nothing like them any more. It is not enough to say that magazines like Playboy, Dude, Gent, and Rogue have defeated Hollywood by double exposure, although today's military barracks and college rooms are all but innocent of actresses, being decorated instead with the slick-paper mermaids of whom Mort Sahl has observed that a whole generation of American boys is growing up with the expectation that their wives will have staples in their navels. But these lifeless gatefold odalisques could hardly compete with living dolls. Hollywood's sex stars were larger than life and, after all, creatures of motion on the screen.

Hedy Lamarr, who used to fire up anyone who saw the whites of her eyes, once said: "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." The new generation ignores the dictum. They all want to act, or try to. Susan Kohner, Natalie Wood, Tippi Hedren, Carol Lynley, Jane Fonda,Ruta Lee, Christine Kaufmann, Joey Heatherton—all are aflame with Strasberg and Stanislavsky. But as bombshells they are squibs, containing the equivalent of about ¼ oz. of T.N.T.

Hither & Ives. Now and then a new Hollywood girl shows bomblike possibilities, notably Yvette Mimieux. But an explosion is unlikely to occur. A new sex goddess would have to get multiple goddess roles. Fewer movies are being made, and when the plump parts come, the lean girls seem to get them: the best sex role in recent years is Irma La Douce, yet it is played by Shirley MacLaine, whose deep decolletage cannot conceal the clean-cut kookie girl beneath.