Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (17 page)

1. In some cities certain decorators will “lend” you their license (resale number) to buy wholesale, then charge you only 10 per cent of the purchase price as their fee. Actually they aren’t decorators. They are just people with a license. This is a good deal. Look into it.
   
2. Investigate getting a decorator’s license yourself from the State Board of Equalization or whatever agency supplies them in your state. This will allow you to buy wholesale. In order to qualify, you must lie your head off and say you are going into business. I have a license. It cost $150, but I’ve never bought anything with it. I get hopelessly confused in showrooms and run right back home to my decorator.
   
3. Plow the major part of your money into a few important pieces. If a woman has jewels, everything else looks expensive! In a small apartment these might be lamps that cost $80 to $100 apiece; a marvelous coffee table; and, my friends say, cushions!
   
4. They believe custom-made, satin cushions allow you to get away with just average couches and chairs. Opulent cushions say, “This girl
   is
   chic. This girl has expensive taste. This
   is
   an apartment wonderful things happen in.” Mark and Schuyler believe in other expensive accessories too—a glass-topped Louis XV gilt glove box to keep cigarettes in … ash trays that are
   objets d’ art.
   
5. Keep to simple lines in big pieces of furniture. The bigger the piece the more basic it should be. Periods come and go; but, if furniture lines are basic, you can change the period oftentimes by reupholstering or changing the grain of wood (stripping and refinishing). Don’t buy big antiques with a lot of gingerbread either. Fifteen gilt mounts on a Louis XVI chest will run the price up. Pay for ornamentation in one glorious gilt candelabrum that bums fifteen candles!
   
6. The
   shape
   is the thing! Don’t worry about disreputable wood in buying secondhand pieces. Refinishing has become such a fine art you can sleek up the most careworn objects.
   
7. Don’t try to have all woods in one room the same color.
   
8. Haunt your favorite junkshops, secondhand and antique stores and be ready to snap up bargains the minute they come in. Other predators will pounce if you don’t. You’ll be able to spot the real “buys” with a little experience. Most decorators have their own houses littered with finds too good to pass up which they know they’ll use
   sometime.
   
9. Try to pick pieces that could go a number of different places. A pirate chest might do in the living room, bedroom, hallway or to serve buffet on!
   
10. Learn to see the dual possibilities of furniture. You could sell the works of a grandfather clock and probably get back its purchase price; then take off the door and have ground glass shelves put inside to display china or copper mugs. (See how smart
    decorators
    have to be!)
    
11. In a small apartment don’t make everything little-bitty. Men are
    not
    happy in doll houses! For a really dazzling effect make some of the furniture oversized. Enormous lamps, a giant coffee table are the ticket.
    
12. Place expensive and inexpensive side by side. Mix periods. Mix old and new pieces. This is particularly important with modern furniture which is abundant, reasonably priced, easy to care for, but so masculine and stereotyped. A modern couch covered in thick creamy linen would be handsome with a fragile old Chinese screen or Spanish wrought-iron end tables.
    
13. Assemble a list of experts to do your upholstering, rewiring, refinishing, remodeling, hauling and installing. Naturally you will charm them into doing exquisite work at rock-bottom prices. (P.S. Some people learn to do their own upholstering, but we won’t open that can of tacks here.)
    
14. Be prepared to chase your legs off. Take home and take back and take home again. Everything must be tried out in its actual setting.
    

To Please a Man

Now … a few notes on how to make your apartment sexy. One man I discussed this subject with suggested leaving black lingerie hanging on the bathroom door or across a chair in the bedroom. Typical male thinking! Poor darling doesn’t understand girl-think! She wants her apartment to be sexy, not necessarily to encourage
rape.
The fact is, if the apartment is beautiful and tasteful, it
will
be sexy … no strewn lingerie, black satin sheets or mirrors on the ceiling needed. The following are known man-pleasers!

Gobs of Pictures

Have a wall of pictures. Men are usually much taken by them. In the living room these should be fairly expensively framed—one of your major investments. If the picture wall is in the bedroom, the frames can be less costly. My wall of pictures was in the bathroom and proved so popular, I used to wonder sometimes if people who went in to wash their hands were ever coming
out.

Ready-framed department-store stuff usually has that “I didn’t know what I was doing so I left it up to somebody else and they didn’t know either” look! It’s better to select your own prints and frame them.

Travel Posters

Coax these from United, American, TWA, Pan-American or any of the foreign airlines who have exciting travel posters. They are a trifle masculine but look great in hallways or kitchens. I have a TWA matador over my kitchen stove that’s really goose-bumpy.

Television

Have a TV set for quiet little evenings at home and shows of major importance but not too
great
a TV set or you’ll never get out of your apartment. One of the impressive-income girls I mentioned earlier is still viewing on a 9-inch set for this reason.

Books

Books say nice things about you and men adore them. The more the better. Augment the new ones you buy with paperbacks and secondhand editions.

Hi-Fi

Of course you’ll want music both to tame him and inflame him but don’t go overboard on equipment. You’re no symphony conductor and there are many other places to put your apartment dollar.

My secondhand Girard turntable, Scott amplifier and speaker cost $150 total and always sound fine.

Don’t have too many records. If a man gets tired enough of Fred Waring’s Glee Club and
Gaité Parisienne
, he may just bring over some new platters.

A Sexy Kitchen

Have an extravagant spice shelf with possibly thirty spices. They say you’re a good cook. A man who is possibly a bit of a cooking buff himself will be enchanted with them.

Put all your cookbooks out on a shelf.

If you have beautiful Descoware pots and skillets, hang them up for show.

Ice-crushers, lemon-peel peelers, heavy stainless steel bottle openers, corks with carved heads on them—anything gadgety usually pleasures a male.

Towel Girl

Give the man who showers at your apartment a luscious toga-size terry bath sheet. Sometimes you can buy “seconds” at a sale.

If a man comes over direct from his office and just wants to freshen up before your date, supply him with a fluffy fresh face towel and his own small bar of soap. An extra razor costs only a dollar including blades if you’d like to keep one on hand.

Have an ash tray with two fresh cigarettes and matches handy in the John. Magazines and books are nice too.

Little Jewel

An enormous brandy snifter or large translucent bowl filled with dozens of loose cigarettes, opened whole packages of many brands and “name” book matches from good restaurants is a man attractor (or
anybody
attractor) if you can afford it.

Something in the Air

Pot-au-feu
wafting from the stove or the perfume you usually wear clinging to the couches … both are among the nicest scents a savage beast ever encounters. One’s for soothing, one’s for rousing.

A
S A SINGLE WOMAN YOU
don’t have to entertain nearly as much as other people if you don’t want to. You are a glamorous acquisition for anybody’s party—a breath of oxygen at the married board. Feel free to be America’s guest!

The time does come, however, when you can’t avoid totting up the times they have had
you
and you have
not
had them. Action is called for.

Your motives for entertaining will vary from wingding to wingding. Some of your guests will be the saintly married couples who have fished you off the streets on national holidays and your birthday. Other times you’ll bring home the office crowd. Some cook-ins will be straight charity … a friend is coming apart at the seams and has to be restitched. You’ll have girl friends and family over to gossip. Still other times you’ll cook just to show off your apartment and your cuisine. The impressionable can range from a maiden aunt to the most devastating man in the world.

My theory about the guest list is that you invite people you feel
comfortable
inviting, as well as a few now and then you have no damn business inviting, but have your reasons!

I always died about ninety-five deaths at being turned down. On the other hand, my friend Marguerite
never
gets turned down. She has the knack of getting everybody from the chairman of the board of her company to a visiting troupe of ballet dancers over for sukiyaki. However, she has special psychological things going for her. She comes from a social family that boasted a governor and a mayor. Hoards of people were entertained where she was growing up, and she is as comfortable with a Tiffany tea service as with a skillet of eggs. Girls of this background simply don’t
know
fear! Marguerite also makes a hefty salary and can buy all the water chestnuts she wants.

I think you can acquire enough poise and confidence to pluck guests from outer space if they appeal to you. A single woman
must
broaden her horizons. But I do think it’s kind of silly to track celebrities or spoiled-male animals who can barely sift
through
their invitations. Why bother with those whom you bother?

Dinner
à Deux

When do you have
him
over?

My thought is that reciprocity is not entirely in order with beaux. I think the correct ratio between times on the town and
diner intime
in your apartment is about twenty to one! If you aren’t engaged—that’s a funny old-fashioned word, but you know what I mean—you don’t really have to pay back dinner
ever.
Part of the price bachelors pay for staying single
is
to spend money taking girls out. No use making their bachelorhood
easy
by feeding them like little mother.

Some single girls stir up a dinner nearly every night of the week for a loved one. And I guess they love it. Cooking
is
part of wooing when you have a live one, and I can’t count the dinners I cooked old David Brown.

But no matter how warm your relationship, it doesn’t seem right to dine at your place
every
night. After you marry you’re home a long time, cooking, cooking, cooking. Better go out while the going is good!

My friend Gretchen is death on cooking dinner for a man
ever.
She occasionally has one over to make fudge. I didn’t believe that fudge story when I first heard it. Fudge sounds so
sweet
… you might push an incipient diabetic right over the edge! Besides, what man would be
interested
? Two men have confirmed to me they really have made fudge at Gretchen’s, however (divinity, caramel and first-rate pa-nocha). And from the tone of their voices, I gather they’d rather make fudge at Gretchen’s than dine at Le Pavillon. Some girls have
all
the salesmanship! Anyway, that’s one female’s approach to entertaining men.

As for cooking for married men, that’s sheer insanity!

One reason you see them is to add glamour to your life.

If you are going to be bidden away in
your
apartment fussing with
his
formula, that’s very Back Street indeed!

Once in a great while you may honor a married man with a dinner invitation, or let’s put it this way: If he comes trooping over with two mallard ducks he shot especially for you and a bottle of Cordon Bleu, cook his dinner!

Guiding married men out in the open into the town’s better restaurants is a more meritorious plan ordinarily.

Now … the better cook you are the more renowned you become as a hostess. You will collect a small coterie of devoted fans who will bay your praises to every rising moon. It’s a nice sound!

Cooking gourmetishly is a particularly impressive skill for a career woman. Everybody expects fluffy dumplings from a wife and mother. (And are they ever in for some surprises!)
Your
head, they figure, is too stuffed with schemes for becoming the first woman President or stealing somebody’s husband to be able to cope with recipes. It’s fun to hand them a surprise! Put on an organdy apron, retire to the kitchen and come back with impeccable Eggs Benedict. Then listen to the purrs and praise … very soul-satisfying.

In the Beginning

Now, how does a single woman who doesn’t get day-in, day-out practice learn to cook scrumptiously and entertain with confidence?

The magazine articles on entertaining certainly do not help much with your special problems. Where is the color spread on “Seductive Little Suppers”? Who tells you how to seat six married couples when there is no host? All the recipe pages do is make it pretty clear that if you aren’t stuffing a twenty-pound bird with chestnut-and-bacon dressing you are weakening the moral fiber of America. It’s enough to weaken
your
fiber and send you out to the kitchen for another peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

The very word “entertaining” sounds kind of snooty and married—like the Turkish ambassador’s wife having seventy for sit-down dinner, the actor and actress team ladling out marguerites at a pool party. Can they really call what
you
do—frozen pizza for three girl friends before a Dean Martin spectacular—entertaining?

Certainly! All you have to do to qualify as an entertainer is to cook something or pour something.

Let’s talk about cooking.

I think many single girls get off to a slow start because for years they can’t afford to feed guests, and nobody really expects them to. They seldom cook for themselves, beyond an informal snack. They get no workout. Then when they do begin to sneak up on cooking—possibly at age thirty—they are justifiably defensive and self-conscious. While other dames are comparing notes on Chicken Kiev and Artichoke Provençale, the slow starter is trying to boil a
four-minute
four-minute egg.