Favorite Passages

THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY  

   Her father was a foreman in a Pennsylvania coal mine, and her mother was a fat and pretty Polish woman who always wanted the best for her daughters . . . .
   Her home was a clean little house in  a dirty little town . . . .
   Mary was tall and beautiful, crafty, quiet and passionate. She suddenly leapt from Film Fun to Michael Arlen's books and stories in Cosmopolitan. And she went from me to Philadelphia and an artist of a certain local reputation. I saw her a short time after she first began to pose in the nude. "You know, Doc, if Mom - Mother ever knew that, she'd die, so don't you ever let on. But it isn't anything. I mean he don't look at me as a person. He just sees the lines of my body. You know. The contours. That's the way artists are, Doc."

From "Mary." 1931