‘Whoever thought I would end up like this because of an overweight dog?’ : A Lady From the South
She’s a stylish re-creation of yesterday’s dream girl, with a smile as quick and bright as sunlight through the clouds, proving that beauty and vivacity can last beyond the fleeting years of youth.
At 72, Annabelle Norman retains the glow that caught men’s eyes half a century ago and moves with a remembrance of grace that made her a dancer on two continents.
Even faced with the imminent prospect of being evicted from her apartment because of an overweight dog, she dismisses with a quick toss of her head any notion that a woman who celebrated her 19th birthday in Paris is going to toady to the edicts of fickle authority.
“Where my dog goes,” she says with the cool grandeur of a movie queen, “I go.”
Annabelle.
She sat amid the chaos of her North Hollywood apartment, waiting for the marshals to come and lead her into the street.
“I’ll live in my station wagon,” she said with a shrug. “What else can I do?”
Eviction-ready boxes were piled in the middle of the floor, on couches and on a coffee table. Two supermarket shopping carts waited at the ready for moving day.
I expected when I arrived to find a whimpery old lady with one foot in the grave, but found instead a woman of style and flair: hair dyed the color of cognac, lipstick as bright red as the rims of her tinted, oversized glasses, rings and necklaces flashing specks of fire into the fading afternoon sunlight.
Red was her color. Red slacks, red emblems on a black blouse, red lipstick, red-rimmed glasses. Even the couch she sat on was red, comprising a brassy vision of defiance I hadn’t anticipated.
I can understand how Annabelle might rankle authority. This is an independent woman, old age be damned. If she has to sleep in her 10-year-old station wagon, she will.
All this comes about because the federally subsidized apartment where Annabelle lives has a rule that no pet kept by a tenant can weigh more than 20 pounds.
About a year ago, she was given an Australian shepherd she calls Valentine, who, at the time, was a tiny puppy. Within months, Valentine weighed 35 pounds.
Annabelle was told by the building’s tenant council that the dog was too big. She either had to get rid of it or vacate her $137-a-month apartment.
“My first thought was They can’t be serious! “ she said in remembered indignation. “I thought there must be a little elasticity in their thinking.”
Annabelle at first ignored the council’s order, but when they took her to court in January, she agreed to leave in four months. Cataract surgery, she says, delayed her departure prior to the May 31 deadline, and she requested an extension. It was denied.
“I’d like to find out why they’ve got this vendetta against me,” she said with a gesture meant to convey impatience.
“One of them said people were jealous of me. Why? How should I know, dearie. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived a sophisticated life and they haven’t.”
Annabelle was born in Colorado and raised in Florida. She calls herself “a lady from the South,” though her later teens were spent in New York.
It was there that she began working as a movie extra in Paramount’s Long Island studios. “I just went there and applied,” she said airily. “I was young and pretty and had very straight legs.”
A few years later, she began modeling and, at 18, entered a beauty contest. Earl Carroll, whose “Vanities” were the hit of the day on Broadway, was in the audience. Enchanted by Annabelle, he offered her a job in the chorus line.
“I was,” she said with the whimsical self-confidence of a woman aware of her beauty, “a natural.”
Her mother at first refused to allow her daughter to join the company. Annabelle threatened to run away. The mother relented.
A wave of her hand. “I was off!”
She dug through boxes to find a newspaper clipping from the mid-1930s, complete with a picture of her in wide-brimmed hat, gloves and low-cut blouse, a dark-haired beauty frozen on newsprint as fragile and faded as the time it represents.
The story recounts her years with Earl Carroll’s “Vanities” on Broadway and then in Paris, Monte Carlo and London.
After returning to America, she quit dancing, she said, “because I was a lady from the South, and being in a chorus line just wasn’t the thing to do.”
She moved to Los Angeles and worked as a screen extra. One movie, “Let’s Dance,” starred George Burns and Gracie Allen.
“I didn’t even know who George Burns was,” Annabelle said. “He used to help me with my zipper.”
Her movie career ended and so, in the interim, did three marriages. The remainder of her working days were spent in public relations. She now lives on a $546-a-month Social Security check.
“I used to ride in Lincolns and Cadillacs in the old days,” she said with a theatrical sigh. “Whoever thought I would end up like this because of an overweight dog?”
Then, quietly, with sadness and incredulity, “Oh, mercy . . . .”
