Guys And Dolls

In close circles, senior family members often whispered and teased father and grandpa on their unabashed crush on Hollywood movie stars. The old gentlemen, avid movie-buffs, were enamoured no end by sultry stars of their time, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. I wondered how the old boys would have reacted to the news that their dream girls, the perfect women, were really not women in the light of new revelations! No doubt this shocking news would have had them falling off bar stools in the officer's mess or wherever they were hanging out in old Lahore.Luckily for them there was little sex testing in those pre-partition days, and certainly no certain professor Wiebke Arlt, Dept of Medicine, Birmingham University, to play spoilsport. If you haven't heard, Arlt is the researcher who has 'found out' that many a 'tall, slender, very beautiful with peachy skin' glamour queen has 'mismatched chromosomes'. To cite an example, the prof holds up Garbo and Dietrich as cases in point glam dolls who were, well, technically born male!
'They would look and behave like a girl,' Arlt says, 'But they do not have a uterus... They can't bear children.' In every other way, they exude sizzling femininity, though. That information may be hard on fans of the famous femme fatales. Millions of hot-blooded males in the WWII era who saw Garbo had their bifocals fogged up when the sultry Swedish screen siren went `Gimme a whiskey with ginger ale on the side and don't be stingy with the whiskey, babe', or when the other blonde bombshell in a low-cut, sequined black dress, pencil-thin eyebrows, and bedroom eyes crooned 'Falling in love again' in the movie Blue Angel. Sitting with long legs straddling the back of a chair, she sent pulses racing and had the guys in a sweat. Would this have happened if the intrepid Arlt had brought this news to earlier generations? "Then again one never knows... about men," says the wife enigmatically, adding a twist to the disturbing scenario. Remember that funny dude chasing Jack Lemmon dressed as a woman in the movie Some Like It Hot? Try as Jack might to put off the guy, he doesn't succeed even after he pulls off his wig and yells, "I am not even a woman!" The dude, Osgood, famously said, and got firmly embedded in cinematic lore, with the line, "Well, nobody's perfect!"