81 YEARS YOUNG.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 21, 26 January 1939, Page 21

81 YEARS YOUNG.

REMARKABLE WOMAN. GERTRUDE ATHERTON'S LIFE ▲ lIXX WITH HISTORY. (BY CHARLES ESTC'OURT.) LONDON, January 7. Gertrude Atherton, who is, to put it roughly, as oki as the United States, is in town at the moment, and the town had better step lively or get crushed. Breakfast early, the hairdresser, the Fifth Avenue shops, lunch with friends that stretches on into tea with other friends, that adjourns for dinner with more friends and then the theatre. It's her first visit to New York in six years. Her forty-first book ("Can Women Be Gentlemen?") in the la®t 45 years is off the Hough ton-Mifflin Press. Those are the obvious reasons for the holiday. There can be noted, also, something about the babbles of the soul. Eighty-one years old last month. When you think of that, you must paiuse. For. in the span of Mrs. AthertonV life, the world in which we live has been made. Look at it this way— she learned from people who were aiive when Marie Antoinette was, before Germany was a nation, before the birth of the factory—and you see how brief Is the span of the great events of history, how straight is the road to the past. But, when you se» this remarkable woman, you don't think anything so formidable. For what you see is a round, sturdy little person who comes striding across the room to shake your hand and lead you to a chair and plunge immediately into a brisk, cheerful rattle or talk. Full-bodied she is and fullfaced, with an imperious nose, a. powered and pinked face and blonde hair that doesn't look at all incongruous. Guys And Taunts. Tune in on her for a while in her suite at the Algonquin: "I love this place. It's so friendly. In the old days, when I came home late from a P ar ty. . _ You know, too late to wake my maid. . . The elevator man would unbutton me down the hack. Fool things those buttons were, right down the middle of the back, as if we were octopi. Only an octopus could wriggle unaided out of such a dress. Now the world has progressed to zippers, much, I thought to the relief of Mr. Case's elevator man. Well, that's what J. thought. I went to see Mr. Bergdorf-Goodman this morning and he showed ma the new styles. With zippers all right—right down the middle _of the back. Now the elevator man will have to unzip me. I'm not an octopus." And: "I came across the Continent by train. Not the streamlined train because I like a large room all to myself. But three nights and two days. . . Helen Wills Moody was on the train with me. Even that fine, big strapping girl felt a little tired. I stepped off the train very nearly exhausted. But I haven't had a chance to rest yet. I've looked at my calendar and I find I've been so ambitious about appointments I won't have a chance to rest until a week'from to-morrow. "I'd have flown, only they dont give you a room to yourself on the 'plane. I like tq fit .back, 1. you know. . . let my hair down. I flew once, a while ago, from San Francisco to Loe Angeles. Jtauitiful. Oh, marvellously, wonderfully beautiful. But I gbt an earache. A young *foman came qvAt and some chewing gum. ? most certainly will not chew thai stuff,' I told her. The idea, for goodness* sake, chewing, gum! She said it• would keep me • wallowing and that vtinld prevent an earache. I had on earache for six months after that flight and I haven't flown since. I think chewing gum is disgraceful." When Old la Old. To those of 81, anyone under 60 is a boy or a girl, anyone under 40 a child. Talking to Mrs. Atherton, who has known "everybody" all over America and Europe for so many years, you find the oddest children and the nrnt venerable boy* and girls among the earth's population. "Oh," the Iste Justice Holmes is reported to have sighed at 90 in the wake of a beautiful blonde, "to be 70 again." Mrs. Atherton said the sigh was quite natural: "You know the perfect definition of age, 'anyone 20 years older than yourself,' and of youth, 'anyone 20 years younger.'" And, at 81, most people find the world, around them dead. Frienda and family, emotions, sensations, will, the life of the mind and body, all past, all dead. If the world is populated at all to them, it is populated with shades and memories, with people who ence were and things that once happened and never will again. But listen a little more to Mrs. Atherton: "I don't think I'll go to night clubs. I dOnt like to dance. You know, I never came out properly, because I was siting. I simply sort of sidled into sociSty and, ones I started, I danced like a mad thing- I danced so much that, at 22, I had danced myself back into the sickbed. 'My dear,' my mother said to me, 1 want you to promise me you will not dance again until you are 25.' I promised and I kept my promise, and, at 25, I discovered I didn't like dancing any more at 411, eo I haven't danced since. Disgraceful of me, isn't It?". "Mikes Me Fssl Like a Monument." Besides, she had a Charley-horse recently. "It didn't come from athletics, though. Posture. Gracious, I hadn't heard the word since the last scolding from my teacher. But that was it all right. I hadn't been standing properly 'on my heels, and I woke up one morning with ray knee ligament hurting dreadfully. Five months in bed, getting hurisr all the time, feeling all the ambition draining out, not a thought, not an idea, simply lying there and letting California come in through the window. I had to put a stop to it. I climbed out of bed and had proper heels built, into my shoes add then came on to New York for the cold and the snow i and the rain. That's what puts sparkle 1 into yon.* And that's how the afternoon went. "Of course, I use a typewriter. My handwriting is so crabbed and cranky. . . . It onee took me five months to write a novel, but then I had to do a lot jof research. I read 200 books while . writing it ... I can't stay the season in j town. .11l have to be back in San Francisco in February. . They're having a day for me—Gertrude Atherton Day. It :«a^.i;»a > «|seiv.lilco. • monument." i Your reporter went out baffled and spent the better part of an evening checking her birth date. But there It was, in black and white, in any one of numerous reference volumes: October jwv 1857. Eighty-one, and still the town Tnratt aad toastj—N-AJ7-A.