A SPECTATOR 'S NOTEBOOK
AFILM STAR'S fan mail (about which I have the second best reason for knowing something) strikes me as a social phenome- non which would give the owlish sleuths of Mass Observation a wonderful run for their money. If you imagine that it consists largely of proposals of marrage from millionaires, sonnets from struggling young poets and tight-lipped protestations of respect from lonely bearers of the White Man's Burden (that rapidly diminishing onus), you are plumb wrong. Nine hundred and fifty out of every thousand letters—and if anybody troubled to count them, they would have to count in thousands—are from adolescents, mostly female, who want a photo, photto or fOto of her whom they so much admire. Internal evidence suggests that in most cases their homage is catholic and undiscriminating. Though her name is not an exotic one, nearly 5o per cent. of them spell it wrong, a surprisingly large number congratulate her on her acting in films in which she did not act and occasional missives beginning " Dear Mr. Mason " or " Dear Miss Lockwood " have clearly found their way into the wrong envelopes. About one in 3o encloses a stamped and addressed envelope. There are, of course, comparatively few film-stars and the overall (or do you prefer global ?) waste of paper and Post Office time is not really as great as it inevitably seems to me. But a bundle of these slovenly, semi-literate effusions must, I think, strike anyone who glances through them on their way to the waste-paper basket as a vapid and curiously depressing by-product of loth-century cul- ture. There are, of course, compensations. Both the funniest and the most sensible letters come from overseas. An ill-year-old Nigerian (5 ft. 7 ins. tall, in case you are interested) wrote this morning that he was " hopping to get a reply," and a gentleman from Portugal explained his temerity in addressing the " Most Illustrious Miss X—" by recalling that " the Portugueses were in the past great adventurers." And there was the little girl—not quite good enough for Punch—who asked for a photograph because she was " saving film-stars." But on the whole there is not much to be said for this voluminous and largely unilateral correspondence.
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