Night Bus

[from back of Dell Ten-Cent Book, 1951]

"Propriety," jeered Elspeth, "after we've been traveling together for nearly a week."

Pullman drawing rooms were Elspeth's accustomed mode of travel -- not the night bus she took to New York. The bus was natural for Peter -- when he didn't use his thumb. They met on the bus, and that's when the excitement started -- and kept right on -- through a wreck, a flood, tourist cabins, hot-dog stands, as they hitch-hiked their way to New York.

Peter Warne, in Night Bus is no Clark Gable: "By no stretch of charity could he be called an ornament to the human species. His physiognomy was blunt, rough and smudgy with bristles; his hair reddish and uncompromisingly straight." (97) The movie though, hews otherwise close to the tale -- the runaway, the reward, the stolen purse, Horace Shapely, the "road pirate", the tourist camps, the Walls of Jericho -- and retains its snappy dialogue, lifting straight from the page in some scenes. Where they differ, it's in degree rather than kind: Elspeth/Elspie takes more initiative than Ellie (which is actually refreshing): she's not marrying aviator Westley King, they're just "playing around together" and she wants to accompany him on an expedition to South America and become "another Amelia Earhart". She wires a cousin to find out more about her traveling companion ("Who what and why is Peter Warne Stop..") and, after Peter drops her off at her family's 5th Avenue mansion, she hies herself to the toy counter of the 5 and 10 and mails him...well, you can guess. She's a girl who knows her own mind and needs no fatherly convincing and brooks no noble resistance. The whole air of the book is less spotlessly chaste than the movie, pre-Code though it was, and that's not surprising if you consider the spicy stuff Adams wrote as Fabian!

The book also, in line with Adams' progressive views (he was a muckraking journalist before he got into light fiction), gives a stronger sense of its Great Depression setting: the bus first blows its tire, for instance, by an abandoned subdivision: "They were opposite that sign manual of Florida's departed boom days, a pair of stone pillars leading into a sidewalked wilderness and flanked by two highly ornamental lamp-posts without glass or wiring" (44) and Elspeth runs into one of her society friends driving a bus "the family having gone bust...What-ho!" (139) Night Bus takes place over a longer time, and meanders a bit more than the movie, but they've got the same tone and spirit and Adams' good writing makes it the perfect complement to an evening with one of Hollywood's Golden Age best. Take this line for instance: "Between Alexander Bruce MacGregor Andrews and his daughter, Elspeth, there existed a lively and irritable affection of precarious status, based upon a fundamental similarity of character and a prevalent lack of mutual understanding." (147) Didn't Walter Connolly and Claudette Colbert embody this to a (1926 Ford Model) T (Touring)? Wonderfully illustrated by James Montgomery Flagg, too.

Sidenote: If you can get your hands on it or a scan, the August 1933 Cosmopolitan Midsummer Fiction Number is worth it for the ads alone.

"I like your hair! Not all sunburned like the other girls'."
"It used to be...now I protect it with Admiracion."

DAINTY HELEN QUITS THE RAZOR
No More Bristly Hair On Her Arms
"Jack -- Helen is lovely --bright -- but that man-like stubble on her arms. Someone should tell her!"
"I'd be wild about her -- but I can't bear any trace of hair on a girl's arm!"

Never been easy to be a girl.

Also, 12 pages of private school/college advertisements.