Rave’s Autobiography, Part III, Beverly Hills High School in the 1930s
A continuation of a longer reminiscence from Rave about the high school years she loved, back whenBHHS was relatively new. Here she launches into what was a perpetual lament about being misunderstood when she was young. This alludes to the huge cultural chasm she also describes elsewhere between the teachers who commuted in long distances, and the privileged, pampered students.
There was deep skepticism, I believe, that Rave wrote her own papers. Although she doesn’t say it outright, I often wondered if her teachers thought she was cheating by getting help from professional writers on movie sets. Her family knew W. Somerset Maugham, and he did become something of a mentor to her, as did Preston Sturges. They both thought she could write. She was wise beyond her years, and probably a bit of a brat, so this episode describes a typical run-in with a cranky writing teacher. Full disclosure… I had these, too. Writing teachers didn’t like me much, and now I write and publish for a living, and guide others to do so. Rave was comforted to know that my writing teachers didn’t think much more of me than hers did of her.
[There was just] one flaw: my first-year creative writing teacher was a pill, and we did not hit it off. Everything I turned in — short stories, the first act of a play — anything was shredded (verbally) by this woman. Nothing I submitted was graded above a C. So — one day I copied a half page out of W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Painted Veil” and put my name to it. Back it came marked C-minus. Too good to pass up? Yes, indeed. In front of the entire class I hollered “Hey — that’s a paragraph from a W. Somerset Maugham novel!”
I still got a C on the last exam and I moved on — to “Journalism ‘3_” (year obscured to protect her identity, editor), and that was pure heaven. I got As as fast as I could, and graduated in 193_ with an “A” average. There was a huge to-do in our lovely auditorium with all of us in evening gowns and our parents in the front rows. One young man’s mother had married four times in four years (I exaggerate again), and showed up with four ex-husbands. And all the graduates drove over to the Cocoanut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel, yes, the famous Ambassador, to celebrate our freedom.
