The Girl in the Red Swing

The house is cantilevered over a cliff, like a bird's nest on the muzzle of a memorial cannon. In the driveway is a Jaguar sedan named Black Widow. In the two-story living room is a red canvas swing hung from parachute cords. In the dressing-table mirror is the reason for the house, the car and the swing.

The face is pretty, slightly cute, not startlingly beautiful. It has good bones, in the phrase of the fashion photographers, but it does not have great bones. It grins well, and has mastered the large-eyed look that goes with the expression "Ooooh!" But it is not very good at registering more subtle emotions ("Aaaaeee!", "Aaannh?" and "Mmmm!"). And nothing it shows in public moments is as intense as the faint crinkle of brow when, several times a day, its owner changes a mole into a beauty spot with a makeup pencil.

This matters little to Warner Bros., which employs the face; as long as Dorothy Provine's makeup is straight, her most important register is cash. She registers that very nicely, as the blonde Charleston hoofer in the least roarious of TV's lost hours. The Roaring 20s. It is Dorothy's oooohing and shimmying that have kept the series afloat: each Saturday night, viewers who might better be occupied playing Guggenheim or watching Perry Mason turn faithfully to ABC. They endure anywhere from five minutes to an hour of stupefying drama about racketeers and handsome reporters that is worth watching only because each reporter is able to say. "This time you've gone too far, Rocco," without removing the faint smile from his lips. Eventually, press and prey fetch up at a speakeasy, always in time to catch Dorothy's number.

Minor in Mono. She makes the wait almost worthwhile. Hands splayed at her sides, she bounces onstage in a fringe-bottomed silver dress, dancing madly from the knees down. Looking fragile and heart-catching, she flashes a brave smile (she is seldom in danger from the racketeers and certainly is not menaced by the reporters, but her silver dress weighs 40 pounds). Then, in a small, careful voice, she sings My Buddy or Till We Meet Again. Afterward the actors go back to stalking each other. But next season things will be different, and Dorothy's role will be fattened. Before long, if things go right, The Roaring 20s may consist of 50 minutes of Provine and five commercials, with screen credits superimposed on a shot of the St. Valentine's Day massacre.

TV's new sunshine girl was not born in a trunk, but in Deadwood. S. Dak. As a child she dressed up in pillowcase sheaths with her little sister (now a housewife in Montrose, Calif.) and learned the Charleston. At the University of Washington, she majored in drama, minored in mononucleosis, got elected princess of this and that--later, it was to be "Queen of Better Drive-Ins"--and handed out quiz prizes for a local TV station. Two years ago, Dorothy began looking pretty for Warner Bros, at $500 a week. In her first TV series, The Alaskans, she played opposite a moose. There was no opportunity to Charleston, and the series died.

Alone in a Nest. Now Dorothy has left the fellahin class, and at roughly $1,000 a week is a member of Hollywood's petite bourgeoisie. At 26 (Warner's wants her to say 24), she is a solemn sort of flapper. She can imitate a drum, a trombone or a sea lion brilliantly, 'but just as often she imitates Joseph Alsop, brooding fitfully about life and Laos ("The world's problems bother me"). Although she is more than a starlet--Hollywood has no word for a young actress who is steadily but not spectacularly employed--she is not yet a star. But she is serious enough about show business to have fired four pressagents, to be considered difficult on the set, and to date Frank Sinatra.

The brooding boop-a-dooper has had bad luck with maids and pets, and so she lives alone in her bird's nest. She wakes up at 5 a.m. and drives the Jag-- she hates cars--diffidently to the studio. At night, if she has no date, she paints ("almost always little girls," says a friend, "and they almost always end up looking like her") or sits in her red swing and listens to 1920s records. On weekends, she does dutifully the chores of a not-yet star: she packs up her 40-lb. dress and dances the Charleston (In Person!) at Kupcinet's Harvest Moon Festival in Chicago or at the annual Palm Springs Police Association Show. Occasionally she sneaks off to visit her parents in Seattle (her father is assistant manager of a men's club). Her parents have watched her show only two or three times during the past year, and in all that time, the TV set has been out of whack--the vertical control is broken, and Dottie, as her baby sister puts it, "keeps flipping upward." One of these days, the elder Provines keep saying, they will have to have that set fixed. Meanwhile, the girl in the red swing just flips.

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