Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (4 page)

You usually meet them on blind dates or by taking a chance on a Charles Boyer voice that dialed your telephone number by mistake and persuaded you to rendezvous.

The numbers in this crowd are legion. You could meet three a week.

The Don Juans

We might include them with the creepies, but I think they deserve a category of their own and a special rundown.

No girl is really ready for marriage, I believe, until she has weathered the rigors of a romance with a Don Juan. It’s part of her training. A married girl doesn’t appeal to him—she has someone to run home to and that spoils his fun … reveling in the thought that she is alone, miserable and missing him after he has gone.

The two Don Juans I have known I would stack up against anybody’s for pure D.J. talent. They had two things in common—the unrequited need to make girls fall in love with them and an all-consuming vanity which kept them chained to their haberdashers. Allen was a kind of sartorial genius who practically opened up Brooks Brothers on the West Coast. He wore their narrow shoulders and skinny pants when everybody else was padded to the gills. He even gave all his girls Brooks Brothers shirts for Christmas—a different color each year. Paul, whose fantastic looks could have popularized gunny sacks, if he had favored them, was the helpless prey of an expensive tailor in Beverly Hills.

Paul flashed his snow-white-chopper smile at me for all of three weeks before deserting for a minor night club singer from San Francisco. Allen, who came along the same year (how could one girl be so lucky?), was far deadlier, smarter, and a more consummate operator. He lasted, or I lasted, incredibly for five years, off and on, though there were long periods when we didn’t see each other.

One of the great sadnesses of a relationship with a Don Juan is that you lose so much self-respect. It’s not only that he doesn’t want to get married. It’s that you know all the time he is unworthy of you—ruthless and sadistic in his boyish way—but you are too hooked to do anything about it.

You find yourself stooping to things like looking for alien lipstick on glasses in his apartment. I remember plowing through a bunch of love letters from one of Allen’s Other Girls as unabashedly as I would have scanned my own bankbook. He had conveniently left the collection on top of his desk. I read every line and cried for three days … mission accomplished!

A Don Juan is the only man who doesn’t squirm when you have hysterics. He considers it a vote of confidence.

A Don Juan may sleep with only one girl at a time but he has a dozen fringe associations that keep you in purgatory. And while making impassioned avowals of his fidelity, he manages never to let you forget how irresistible he is to other women.

When he’s late for a date he explains it’s because Daphne telephoned and he couldn’t get her off the phone. Daphne was all upset because of a fight with her mother. Who is Daphne? One of his ex-girl-friends of course (so may Daphne’s
mother
be for all you know) but somehow she doesn’t sound very ex.

Allen was the vortex of a storm of girls who hovered about him with their career and emotional problems. Models he would send to photographers. Secretaries he would get placed in friends’ offices. Actresses he would introduce to agents. His own ex-wife was part of the job. Jocelyn would call from Portland, Miami or Spain to say she was having a problem with her teeth, her passport, her poodle, and Allen would comfort her. Her real problem was Allen. To the girl Allen was going with he explained this sort of thing as lending a helping hand to those in trouble—just like the Community Chest. How could anyone be so uncharitable as to construe this as lust? Well, I’ll tell you who could. I could and
did. Finally
!,

I remember our last date … preceded by any number of “last dates.” It was for lunch on a Tuesday, and that morning he called to see if we could make it Friday. It seems he was driving Janet Van der Hofstadt and a private nurse to Ensenada that afternoon. Janet was in a little trouble and the doctors in Ensenada were excellent and cooperative. He’d just get Janet settled in the house she’d rented, be right home and … fade out. End of romance.

The reason I think a Don Juan should be part of every girl’s past (heaven help you if you are just beginning to go through one) is that it gives you a chance to get the romantic dream (white knight, white charger) out of your system. A Don Juan is unbelievably romantic.

His telephone conversation would make a movie scenario, though a bad one. It runs something like this:

SOUND: PHONE RINGS. RECEIVER UP

YOU: Hello?

D.J.: (QUIETLY) Darling … how long has it been since I’ve held you in my arms?

YOU: (FLUSTERED BUT PLEASED) Oh, Mark, honestly …

D.J.: Answer me … how long has it been?

YOU: Well, I’d say about one day, six hours, three minutes and forty-five seconds.

D.J.: That’s too long. What are you wearing?

YOU: Oh, I have on a little green ribbon knit.

D.J.: I don’t like you in that dress. Or any other dress. I’m going to come over there and tear it off your lovely body. (THEN JUST BEFORE YOU FAINT, CHANGE OF VOICE EFFICIENTLY) Darling, we’re going to a cocktail party at Frank Baum’s. Pick you up in fifteen minutes. Bye, darling. (KISS SOUND)

A Don Juan’s drive and attention to detail are awe-inspiring. He will work with as much zeal to snare a mousy girl as to seduce a beauty queen. He doesn’t stint on good restaurants, good wine or good theatre tickets. He is afraid to take a chance on inferior props for his act. And one of his major props is his status. He is single and
seems
available.

A Don Juan is patient. The average man with an urge will charge like a Pampas bull, smear your lipstick, scatter your bobby pins, crush your rib cage and scare the living daylights out of you. When you don’t respond, he is baffled and hurt.

Don Juan would curl his lip at such tactics. He never makes passes without first establishing desire. He will devote several nights to the project if necessary, which it rarely is.

Many Don Juans write letters—in purple prose that enables them, by leaving a note in your mailbox, to snap you back like a rubber band just when you’re beginning to pull away.

He sends gifts and flowers.

One Don Juan I heard about gave each of his girls a large fake-fur dog about three feet high that would be named after him, he on his mistress’ bed, and be her live-in companion. Months after our hero had been sent packing, there would be his big furry namesake looking reproachfully at her out of his blue-bead eyes.

A Don Juan is sick in the head of course—as sick as any chap who thinks he is Napoleon or pads around in tennis shoes peeping in windows. But he
is
also the man, alas, who can temporarily make you feel like Audrey Hepburn sneaking past the palace guard to fall into the arms of Gregory Peck.

You can be forewarned about a Don Juan and walk right into his trap like a sleepwalker because one of his skills is making you feel you’re
different
from all other girls. Advising a girl already in the clutches of a Don Juan is like talking to a zombie. She can’t hear you. You might as well try to stop a launched missile as try to break up the affair. And it will end one of two ways: He will get tired and mosey on to his next prey, or his
prey
will tire of his subtle torture and flee. It may even require several fleeings but finally one of them will take.

The Married Man

I don’t have to describe a married man. He is as available for observation as the common housefly and about as welcome to many single girls as the common cold.

I think he is much maligned. It isn’t his wife who doesn’t understand him. She understands him perfectly! It’s his girl friend. And what she doesn’t understand is how come he doesn’t get a divorce.

It’s simple. He doesn’t want one. Because of the children, because of the community property and because in many cases he doesn’t really dislike his wife. He may be tired of her and tired of her understanding him perfectly, but basically they are pretty good friends. And the stronger the pressure from his girl friend, the more angry and tearful she is, the longer he looks at his projected alimony payments, the more friendly he starts feeling toward his wife, who, by this time knowing she is in trouble, has started to behave like a living doll.

To be fair, probably every married man (and woman) has thought of divorce, and perhaps seriously enough to say “what if” to an attorney. But between the thought and the final decree lies an area as broad, stormy and unnavigable as the Straits of Magellan.

Now just where does that leave the single girl with a married man in her life? It leaves her with very poor marriage material on her hands, that’s where.

But since we agreed not to talk about getting married, let’s explore the pros and cons of having anything at all to do with a married man.

These I would say are the cons:

1. He almost never gets a divorce.
   
2. He is practically useless on Saturday nights, Sundays, holidays and nine times out of ten on your birthday.
   
3. You can’t introduce him around as your beau.
   
4. He dives under tables in restaurants when friends of his wife walk in.
   
5. He never introduces you to his boss or other influential figures in his life.
   
6. While not free to make you an honest woman, he has a screaming fit if you
   look
   at another man.
   
7. He will say just about anything that pops into his head (“You’re beautiful, you’re sexy, you’re the love of my life”) except what you really want to hear, which is “Will you marry me?”
   
8. He tells lies.
   
9. You may fall in love with him and suffer.
   

This is what’s in his favor:

1. He can be your devoted slave and remain “faithful” to you for years.
   
2. He will love you more passionately than the woman he married, and prefer your company to hers.
   
3. He will spoon-feed you the praise and appreciation you rarely get from the single fellow who thinks telling you that you have pretty eyes might be construed as a proposal of marriage.
   
4. He is often generous with gifts and money. If he isn’t, you can explain the economic facts of life.
   
5. Any visiting married man on expense account is the greatest date since Diamond Jim Brady. He will take you to the best restaurants, the best night clubs, order the best champagne.
   
6. He will give you sound advice about your job, insurance, investments and even about getting along with your family and other men.
   
7. He is frequently marvelous in bed and careful not to get you pregnant.
   

It seems to me the solution is not to rule out married men but to keep them as pets. While they are “using” you to varnish their egos, you “use”
them
to add spice to your life. I say “them” advisedly. One married man is dangerous. A potpourri can be fun.

There’s no gainsaying that to take a married man seriously and fall in love is like dope addiction—dangerous and degrading. And you have to watch both of you every second because his greatest pleasure seems to be in
getting
you to take him seriously and fall in love!

But by and large I think you hold the better cards. Even though he has someone at home to bind up his wounds when it’s over, you are free to heal yours with a man younger than he, freer than he, and he suffers.

His Wife

What about the harm you may do his wife?

I’m afraid I have a rather cavalier attitude about wives. The reason is this:

A wife, if she is loving and smart, will get her husband back every time. He doesn’t really want her
not
to. He’s only playing. (She may have played herself on occasion.) If she
doesn’t
get him back, it’s probably because she’s lazy, blind, or doesn’t want him. If he’s a hopeless chaser, like the Don Juan, he will chase regardless of who does or does not give him succor, so no need to feel guilty.

Many people have said this before me but no man or woman is attracted to just one person in a lifetime. If a man, married for years, wants to take a single girl to dinner, it can hardly break up his marriage. If the dinner is paid for by his expense account and he’s a thousand miles from home, so much the better. He may arrive home a happier, more contented man.

Girls who live in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles seem to have greatest access to expense-account men because there is more dashing back and forth of executives between these places. However, large companies have branch offices in many other cities, so any number can play. These men are collectors’ items. They give you a chance to put on your prettiest dress, your prettiest smile and to polish your charm, and they leave town before you can get serious about each other.

Case Histories

Jennifer McCone, a pretty girl of twenty-nine, works for a public relations firm. Her company president, fifty-two, met Jennifer at an office party he gave for all West Coast employees. (He lives in New York.) After the party he asked Jennifer to dinner at Scandia, one of Los Angeles’ most glamorous restaurants. Many Aquavits and Danish beers later they were getting Jennifer’s coat from the check room and noticed a gift shop. He suggested they look around. While Jennifer was browsing among the only gifts that cost $1.98 (back scratchers) her escort spotted a handsome chafing dish. He said, “I’d like to take one of these back to New York. Why don’t we get one for you too?” Jennifer accepted graciously. A nice gesture from a man who could afford it.

The next time he came to the Coast, this charmer asked Jennifer if she would like to make him Crepes Strawberry like they’d had at Scandia. Jennifer said she’d love to. Smooth operator? Certainly. An archfiend? Certainly not! Any girl in the company would have jumped at the chance to make him Crepes Strawberry and Jennifer was flattered he picked her. After the crepes and whatever she fixed to go with them, they went to the Crescendo to hear Shelley Berman. Beddy-bye in between? Who knows?
I
don’t. Who cares? Not me.

Here’s another case history. The account supervisor on an advertising account that bills millions comes to the West Coast to make television commercials twice a year. His longtime companion during these junkets is a chic forty-one-year-old buyer at a department store. He loves the good life and is popular. During his visits (usually about two weeks) a movie star couldn’t be seated at the front booth of Romanoff’s any oftener or go to more glittering parties than our heroine. Are they having an affair? Probably. Would the lady like to slit her throat? Doubtful. She looks twenty-three while he’s here.