No Privacy Left

Ruth Elizabeth Collins is a comely girl who went to New York from Concord, Mass, to become a dance band singer. She changed her name to Dale Belmont, borrowing the first name of Flash Gordon's girl friend. At first she had little success. But after a microscope salesman named Joe Bonds became her manager she began wearing sweaters. Engagements at Manhattan's Versailles and Glass Hat followed.

Miss Belmont specialized in what she called "frustrated love songs," called herself The Blue Velvet Voice. Her singing was popular with men. Columnist Earl Wilson came, watched, went away and wrote simply: "Busting all records." Miss Belmont became a pin-up girl, sent 50,000 photographs of her sweatered self to soldiers who wrote countless formal, polite letters in return.

Last week, at the prompting of her manager, and with the aid of her attorney, Miss Belmont grew emotionally upset. She sent a registered letter to a firm known as Harvest House, to which she had once sold a photograph. The letter, which the attorney kindly wrote for her, threatened suit if the firm did not cease using her photograph to advertise a book entitled, The Complete Guide to Bust Culture.

The advertisement, she felt, insinuated that she had achieved "proud, glamorous curves" by exercise or artifice: her soldier friends were beginning to notice the ad in movie magazines. "They will think that I have deceived them, that I have faked," said Miss Belmont.

The detail of the letter over, her lawyer asked her permission to telephone a New York Daily News photographer. Miss Belmont, who was wearing a white sweater that day, assented. When the photographer arrived, Miss Belmont placed her hands behind her head, elbows out, swayed back happily, and smiled for a new photograph. But she still held to the complaint her lawyer had made in his letter to Harvest House. Its legal basis: her privacy had been invaded.

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