Summary
Sue Wilde, phosphorescent daughter of a pious embezzler, pirouettes out of her father’s chapel-cocoon into the klieg-lit anarchy of Chicago’s problem-play stages, where every footlight spits at bourgeois sanctity. Enter Peter Ericson Mann—ink in his veins, tragedy in his stare—who scripts heartbreak as deftly as dialogue. Their engagement is a glittering fuse: she hungers for the close-up that will transmute her into a secular icon, he aches for the third-act curtain to fall on domestic bliss. A cigar-chomping mogul wafts a contract under her nose; she signs away devotion in exchange for nationwide idolatry. Scorned, Mann leaks the ledger that topples her clerical father from pulpit to obituary column. The paternal suicide cracks Sue’s narcissistic mirror, forcing her to trade the scarlet swirl of stardom for the beige dependability of Henry Bates—“The Worm,” a salary-man without rhetoric, whose only miracle is a steady paycheck.
Synopsis
Sue Wilde has "kicked out" or the sanctimonious atmosphere with which her venerable father, Dr. Hubbell. Harkness Wilde, has surrounded her, and is luxuriating in life which knows no conventions, nor goal except that where the limelight shines brightest. She is an actress in one of those problems plays which scoff at the existing order of things, when Peter Ericson Mann meets her. Mann, a playwright, falls in love with Sue. Sue permits herself to become engaged to him, yet the lure of the limelight calls her. A motion picture magnate promises to make her the nation's idol, and she forsakes the writers love for fame on the screen. Driven desperate by jealousy, Peter betrays to newspaper men the secret that Sue's father has embezzled his church's funds. The old man, unable to bear the disgrace, ends his life. It is the shock which jolts Sue out of her selfishness, and back into woman's sphere. She weds Henry Bates, "The Worm," who, unlike Peter and the other "trufflers," has a job and is honestly working for a living.
