Torch Singer

280 pp. Simple but striking jacket art depicting a woman in a flowing evening gown on the front panel and the spine. On the front panel the woman appears to be pushing aside a curtain, and there is a martini glass, a rose, and the down-turned face of an older man beside her. "From the boards of a hundred theatres, from thousands of silver screens, the torch singer lures men and women into the enchantment of forgotten passion, into the vicarious emotions of their dreams. She personifies on the stage the unattained visions of all men -- a rose to some, a tigress to others, a distant but lovely image to all. And then tragedy, screaming in ugly headlines from the newspapers, comes to strip from her the glamorous mist with which she was surrounded. The demands of the public often involve sacrifice in the private life of its heroes. Torch Singer is the story of a girl who, after a brief career in the limelight, tried to retire, and who was whisked back into the public eye as an ironic joke of the gods. When Millicent Lloyd married into a wealthy, old and distinguished family, she thought she had come to a peaceful haven. But she soon discovered that her husband's blue blood had turned to water, that he had the mental abnormalities of a man lacking in sexual vigor. She tried to comfort him, to help him, but slowly and surely the wheel of fate and the heritage of dissolute living turned against her. Then came the tragedy and her complete despair. How she reconstructed her self-respect and her position in the world, how she gradually healed the wound in her psyche, is a story that is stirring and dramatic. Set against the colorful background of the theatre and of that street of song-smiths, Tin Pan Alley, the story moves through a world which forgives and forgets - a world which few writers know as well as Charles Grant, the author of Torch Singer."