Summary
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.
Synopsis
Her education in a French convent school completed, plain Justine Spencer returns to New York. There she is shocked to discover that her mother Dodo is a flamboyant musical comedy actress with many male admirers. Dodo, on the other hand, is dismayed to find Justine priggish and dowdy. One of Dodo's suitors is Billy Ferris, who, in a fit of jealousy, murders her and slays himself. Out of pity, Cosmo Spotiswood, another admirer of Dodo, marries Justine, but soon tires of his platonic marriage and leaves for Europe. Upon his return, Cosmo finds Justine transformed. Under the tutelage of Dodo's maid Loti, she has bobbed her hair and donned fashionable apparel. Thus changed, Justine is surrounded by suitors. Stung by jealousy, Cosmo falls in love with his sophisticated wife.
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