Play On!

In the mid-1930s, I was a teenager on a bicycle on the streets of Winter Park and saw many things that intrigued me and were etched in my memory.

My parents had an active social life, and I knew a lot of the main players on our local social scene.

The most beautiful and voluptuous woman (whom I shall call Chloe) was a friend of my mother’s and the wife of a staid and colorless member of the academic community. The difference in the attractiveness of this man and his wife was apparent to anyone.

The most innocent-looking town can be deceiving, i.e., the same things that happen in New York or London probably go on everywhere. The strange activities that went on in our placid little town were emphasized when I later read Anthony Trollope’s “Barchester Towers” early in my college studies.

The banal saying, “People are the same everywhere,” is a simple truism.

In the ‘30s, Winter Park’s social life changed abruptly when a Napoleonic French “conte” — title possibly bought — and his wife leased a home on a lake here.

Conte Henri (I’ll call him) was not swayed by the ordinary rules of the American social game: He once wore white tennis shoes with his tuxedo, explaining, “My feets hurt.”

Conte Henri spoke several languages and he and his wife soon became the de rigueur social rage, giving an international flavor to what were previously modest local get-togethers.

In those pre-air conditioning days, Winter Park in summer was Dullsville, USA. The sultry, humid summer weather drove most people of means to the mountains of North Carolina or New England.

In September, after school opened, the town perked up and boarded store windows on Park Avenue were open once again.

My family spent summers in Atlanta, where my grandmother maintained a large home in Ansley Park.

Over a time, I enjoyed a retinue of Atlanta friends. “Bill,” a boy of good family, was my closest friend. He was a year older than I was and introduced me to hitchhiking, a means of transportation that was quite safe in those days, but a mode I would scarcely recommend today.

He suggested that we hitchhike “out West.” I had a tussle before my parents would let me undertake such a madcap adventure.

Bill and I loaded our backpacks and rode to the farthest outskirts of Atlanta on a streetcar. There we began “thumbing” our way West.

After three weeks, Bill and I found ourselves in Hollywood, no less — home of the stars I had seen at the Baby Grand Theater on Park Avenue.

We sneaked onto the set of “Reap the Wild Wind,” a movie being made with Paulette Goddard and Ray Milland.

Outside a private girls’ school on Sunset Boulevard, we met a nice girl who took us home to lunch with her family in Beverly Hills.

However, the most interesting people I saw in Hollywood were not movie stars, but a couple I ran into walking down Hollywood Boulevard. They were two family friends now 3,000 miles from Winter Park.

The couple was Conte Henri and the sumptuous Chloe — sans spouses!

We exchanged highly embarrassed fumbling “hellos.” I kept my mouth shut until I returned to Winter Park — where the news had somehow precipitously preceded me.