Swotter in a Sweater

Sabrina tries a new policy

Daily Mirror
9 September 1957

FLUTTERING her very best pair of eyelashes, Sabrina, that blonde phenomenon of the soaring forties, invited me to her flat yesterday to hear her Big Announcement.

Sabrina is going to study The Method — the realistic school of acting dreamed up by a gent named Stanislawski.
But that is not all.

Sabrina is going to buy a £10,000 house (named "Chez Two"?), a while mink coat, and two Alsatian dogs as bodyguards.
All of which is a sizeable achievement for this Titanic creature, once a thirty-bob-a-week waitress at a King's Cross, London, cafe.

Only a Stepping Stone

I sat down. The white-sweatered Sabrina carefully engineered herself beside me like the slow touch-down of a dirigible.
" Well, what's the news?" I asked, reversing a little way along the couch.
"I'm going to study The Method," she said.
" I've decided I'm a long way from stardom yet. The Bust is all right as it goes — but it's still only a stepping stone."
"Like Stonehenge?" I asked innocently. Sabrina quivered with amusement.

"I want people to respect me," she went on. "The Method will help me to act naturally — you know, cry, look miserable, emote. and all that sort of stuff."
"Does that mean you will no longer be a pin­up girl?" I asked casually.
"Oh. no!" she cried, recoiling at the horrifying suggestion. "I shall always have my figure to fall back on."

I PONDERED this fascinating but bewildering contortion as Sabrina swayed towards the ringing telephone.
" It's my insurance agent," she explained during a lull in her conversation. " I'm renewing the £100.000 cover on my ... well, you know what."
"I know what" I said. "But tell me — what is... er... it insured against?"
"Deflation," explained Sabrina brightly.
"What kind of deflation?" I asked.

Collect? — Never!

Sabrina passed the query on to the agent. He told her. She said:
"The company will pay out if my bust measurement falls from its normal forty-one to thirty-eight and stays that way for a minimum of three months."
"But I'll never collect," she said with a hazardous shrug.
"Why not?" I asked.

She leaned forward and whispered, "I'm growing bigger and bigger. You can tell the world I'm forty-two inches now!"

Hey, world — dig that crazy inch!