The Amateur Wife

Convent-etched innocence collides with footlight excess when Justine Spencer—clad in piety and serge—descends upon a Manhattan palace of rouge and razzle where her mother, the velvet-voiced comedienne Dodo, holds court like a pagan queen. A single gun-crack of jealous passion—Billy Ferris’s bullet through Dodo’s sequined heart—ruptures the gilded tableau, leaving the orphaned daughter a dowdy relic in a mausoleum of spangles. Enter Cosmo Spotiswood, silk-gloved philanthropist of grief, who weds the drab duckling out of cemetery pity and sails away, leaving her to molt in solitude. Yet under the sly tutelage of Loti, Dodo’s Creole maid who knows every backstage door to womanhood, Justine shears her moral mane, slips into sinuous lamé, and re-emerges a sleek nocturne of Jazz-Age allure. The prodigal husband returns to find his once-invisible spouse incandescent, orbited by suitors who smell gardenia and danger; in the refracted glow of her transformation, Cosmo’s detached benevolence combusts into voracious, belated love.