Girl On A Roll: Memoir of a Model and Actress in 1950‘s New York

By Ruth Foreman

Experience the excitement of New York in the late1950’s through the eyes of an ingénue who becomes a model and actress. Learn how her path leading to college. . . . takes a detour from beauty pageants to New York City and into a modeling and acting career that leads to the famous Rehearsal Club where so many young hopefuls began and later became famous. See who she met while she was there.

When asked what were your ultimate aspirations? Broadway? Hollywood? Ruth replied,
“I never had any real aspirations…was just on a fascinating learning curve that I became propelled into from nothing I set out to do. It all “just happened” like a snowball gathering snow as it races along merrily on its way, grounded, and yet soaring like a star, each new development through other people constantly keeping me in action. No chance for ego to enter into any of it as it was all just a continuing marvelous experience. A lovely blessing perhaps as I was followed by a guardian angel with new aspirations or experiences for me. When she decided I had had enough she placed my future husband in my heart, a man I had met almost ten years before New York, and moved me onto a new and different life.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483510873

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

LOOKING FOR . . .

It’s kind of unbelievable when you really think about it, that is considering that you never really looked, and life just happened. At least that’s pretty much the way I remember it.

There we were, my husband and I, married some forty years and shopping in Borders Bookstore in Las Vegas, Nevada, with our youngest daughter and son-in-law. We had just enjoyed a whirlwind tour of Vegas: great food, shows, the slots; and now we were about ready to catch our plane back to Florida.

The bookstore was huge and one of the nicest with a terrific coffee shop inside and where you could wander around carrying your Danish and coffee and still select books at the same time. The entire place was filled with the delicious aroma of hazelnut coffee and sweet pastries. Borders was practically daring customers to try one or both.

We were nearly through exhausting my search for a smutty novel to read on the flight back home. I hated flying so much this was the only way I could take my mind off the flight. I fiercely dreaded the reoccurrence of those nasty air bumps that seem to drop me weightlessly when I begin thinking this is the end. Not a good reason for smut but what the heck. I guess Danielle Steel might be a better choice but I found I always knew what was to happen next in her novels and besides they were boring. Perhaps picking up a copy of Hawaii? No, much too long and maybe I would drift in and out of my reading. Maybe a good mystery? The DaVinci Code would have been perfect had it been written at that time. Nope, couldn’t find a thing and finally gave up while still perusing the shelves as I walked towards the middle of the store.

Mom! I heard suddenly from the front of the store. I looked up and waved to let my daughter know I had heard her. She stood next to my son-in-law holding out a book in her hand with a very excited look on her face. Mom, this is you, isn’t it?

Oh my God, I said as I looked closer. It was a little purplish-colored book by Bradley Trevor Greive, author of The Little Blue Book and many others, called Looking for Mr. Right. Plastered across the front cover as well as on the first page of the book was a horrible photograph of me taken nearly forty years earlier. The photo showed a young lady with pearls (pop-its to be exact) pulling her hair out and making a hideous face. Oh my! A cover girl again, but with this picture? Nevertheless I was truly excited that I had come out once again.

Earlier memories flooded my brain; of my first days in New York and being sent by my new modeling agency to a commercial photographer to have photos taken to fatten up my portfolio (and for him, to fatten up his pocket book when and if he sold any of these shots). The deal was to sign my rights away to these photos in exchange for 11x14 prints to exhibit my photogenic and emoting qualities. I had copies of me feigning a headache with hand to my head and a painful look on my face, drinking lemon-aid through a straw, smoking a cigarette, drinking out of a coke bottle, using eye drops in my eyes, dressed as a pajama-clad teen-ager raiding a refrigerator, and of course this photo which I disliked so much it never went into my portfolio. In fact, perhaps I had never really seen it before, at least that’s the way I felt until I recognized the outfit I was wearing the day the photos were taken.

I contacted the author of Looking for Mr. Right, who by the way, lives in Australia. I spoke with his secretary and told her that I was the gal on the front cover and inside page. She was delighted, most likely that I was still alive as some of these photos were quite vintage. She told me Mr. Greive would be sending me an autographed copy of the book. I didn’t have to tell her that I had already purchased three for my family and friends.

Within a week my copy arrived with the inscription: For Ruth, Stay glamorous! BTG 2001.

Further searches on the web turned up the photo stocking company where Mr. Greive was able to purchase my photo. There I found even more photos of this old gal still for sale. Yup, the eye drop and headache shots are still out there, and who knows, perhaps some day they will turn up in some publication too.

CHAPTER TWO

WAS IT REALLY THAT LONG AGO?

Perched on top of the spinet piano wearing my teal-blue, lightweight wool sheath dress I sat precariously with my knees crossed at just the right angle in my high-heeled pumps. It was time to look vivacious and sexy. A time to sell the champagne in the sparkling crystal glass I held in my right hand as though toasting some special person or occasion. It was just another job, a quick one, destined for a catalog on wines and champagnes. I’d done it before many times seated at a table in an expensive restaurant setting looking worldly and sophisticated even though the table was cardboard and my chair nothing more than a desk chair covered with fabric. A click of the camera a few hundred times to get that one photo that would do the actual selling. That’s what this was all about.

I always enjoyed playing the role finding every job fun except for one which entailed posing for long hours in a series of wedding gowns under hot, hot lights to be used in a catalog. Thank goodness I didn’t perspire easily! My interpretation of pending bridal happiness would plaster itself across my face ready for each click of the camera as if on cue. I remember how delighted my mother was one day when she found on the newsstands a full-page ad of her daughter in Modern Bride magazine looking demure in a voluminous lacy gown of ruffles with short sleeves meant for a summer wedding. I had no idea it was there.

I much preferred donning chinchillas and minks and exotic cats in air-conditioned salons for the elite of New York instead. There was something so comforting about the fur; its exclusivity, and yet some feeling deep inside that made me feel protected—perhaps from the cold? Or was it the pretense of great wealth and the magic of make-believe? Definitely the magic of make-believe. Today I wouldn’t be caught dead in an animal fur unless of course I had to live in Siberia.

But far more interesting for me, and fun, was being able to become for the photographer any age subject from sixteen to thirty depending on how my hair and make up was done. For those true confession love story magazines I was the young gal in the wheelchair paralyzed from the waist down, in love with her young man, but unable to pursue complete love. Another day the mother who lost three babies and was photographed in a church pew wearing white gloves and a feathered hat; the next shoot a sexy young woman in a tight dress standing at the bar of a local pub telling her man off. The unforgettable photo shoot where I was seated on an interrogation stool that later came out on the cover of a detective magazine being called a Killer Bride. This is where the real acting came in, the various emotions I would emote just for the camera; feigning innocence, or showing anger at being deceived, or great sadness with actual tears, or sheer happiness over some wonderful occasion. It all came down to what I would portray along with what I wore to help give life to the character in each story.

Modeling jobs with disk jockeys, costumed jobs at east side deli openings or annual toy shows, fashion shows in Connecticut, acting in children’s plays on stage, doing films for the Signal Corps, trying out for the old Miss Rheingold contest, and meeting celebrities like Harry Belafonte, Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, artist Mark Rothko, socialite Peggy Guggenheim, New Yorker cartoonist Gahan Wilson—definitely kept me on a roll.

CHAPTER THREE

IN THE BEGINNING

From freckles and glasses and low self-esteem anything can happen. At least, that’s what I have learned.

My poker-straight, baby-fine hair was sizzled and frizzled by my well-meaning mom after she had heated the 1940’s curling iron over the flame on our gas stove. She would then cool it down a little after wiping off the brown spots where it began to burn and then apply to my short tresses in hopes of perhaps a wave or two. It wasn’t the heat that bothered me; it was the tangles that hurt as I tried to pull away from the heat, in turn angering my mom. I of course, mouthed off but to no avail except for an occasional swat on the arm with the hairbrush held in her other hand. It was frustrating for her as well but she just wanted to help my hair look more presentable for school.

We lived in a white-shingled Cape Cod style home with dark blue shutters that my parents had purchased when I was two in the lovely bedroom town of Westfield, New Jersey. A time and a place when doors of homes and cars parked out front were never locked. There simply was no need as crime was unthinkable and seemingly did not exist, at least in our town.

My brother George who was nearly two years younger and I loved playing outdoors rain or shine; we combed the neighborhoods with our friends frolicking through woods, traipsing through streams and city-sized fields filled with beautiful daisies and Black Eyed Susans. The flowers grew profusely and were as high as our knees. All I had to do was reach down to break off a quick bouquet or two to bring home to surprise my mom. My brother collected cattails and guppies. The cattails that we called punks would be left to dry out on our back porch and eventually our folks would light them to give off their pungent odor keeping the mosquitoes away during our warm summers. It worked well.

We had no fears, life was wild and wonderful and above all – safe. Socks falling down