What Do the Real Secretaries Think?

There’s one scene that was filmed for “Working Girl” that viewers will not get to see. In it, Wall Street female executive Katharine Parker, who is throwing a party for her fellow executives, lifts up her skirt, hands a can of static-free spray to her secretary and orders imperiously: “Spray me down. I don’t want to go to my party clinging.”

That, says screenwriter Kevin Wade, happened to a woman he knows while she was working for a Hollywood studio executive.

“The only reason we cut it out of the movie,” he says, “was because it didn’t work in the storytelling.”

Don’t worry. There are plenty of other scenes in the film opening Wednesday that are equally realistic. At least, that was the overwhelming opinion of some real-life secretaries who were invited by 20th Century Fox to preview the contemporary comedy/drama about Tess McGill, a secretary on Wall Street. Desperate to move up the corporate ladder into an entry-level job in management but thwarted at every turn by Harvard and Wharton MBAs, especially her female boss, Tess finally resorts to deception to get what she wants.

“I thought it was accurate. Very accurate,” said Elaine Dotson, 30, a secretary in the project management department of First Interstate Bank in Los Angeles.

“People look at secretaries as just nobodys. ‘Fetch coffee. Do this. Do that.’ But a lot of secretaries know a lot more than they really are given credit for.”

Nancy Beacham, a 40-year-old secretary at Los Angeles magazine, recalls how for many years “I took a lot of abuse because the truth is, I’m a single parent and I had to raise two kids alone and I was afraid I couldn’t take care of my kids.”

And even though she’s “treated very well right now, I think there’s a lot more I could do. What the movie said to me and what made me cry was that it’s really up to you.”

In an attempt to build word-of-mouth for the film, Fox targeted an estimated 20,000 secretaries as part of 30-city marketing campaign. Each studio field executive developed lists of secretaries from various industries and sent her five promotional items: a “Working Girl”-emblazoned Post-It note pad, coffee mug, paper clip holder and button that reads: “Working Girl: There’s More to Life than Smiling, Filing and Dialing.”

Last, the secretaries received a screening invitation. “We wanted to have fun with it,” says a Fox executive, “by giving these people who don’t usually get appreciated these little things and at least one invitation she didn’t have to pass on to her boss.”

Still, at the Los Angeles screening at the AMC complex in Century City Marketplace, one man said he’d gotten the screening ticket from his secretary. “Oh no,” exclaimed a Fox executive. “That wasn’t supposed to happen!”

Screenwriter Wade, a 34-year-old New York playwright (his “Key Exchange” was made into a movie), wanted to find a “contemporary equivalent to the story of the little immigrant called Giuseppe who sells umbrellas and then 20 years later becomes the head of Macy’s. . . . But this is a little more than that. It’s a story about the American Dream’s implicit promise that the door is open to anybody who has the smarts, and how America has evolved into a class system where white Anglo-Saxons run the country and how hard it would be for someone like Tess to break through that.”

Tess, played by Melanie Griffith, is supposed to be a secretarial Everywoman with blue-collar roots and white-collar ambition. She has a boyfriend who reads Motor Trend, a girlfriend weighted down with industrial-strength eye shadow and a female boss who quotes Coco Chanel and admonishes her to “rethink jewelry.”

But there’s more to Tess than her good looks, hidden under a bouffant hairdo and not-so-hidden by mini-skirts. She also goes to speech class to learn to lose her Staten Island accent, attends a seminar on “Emerging Markets” and spent five years in night school to earn a college degree with honors. And, still, when she follows a male executive into the bathroom to tell him he has a phone call waiting, she suffers the indignity of having another boss there bark at her, “Get me some toilet paper!”

Another point of the movie is that while male executives engage “in that chasing-around-the-desk crap,” as Tess calls it, a female boss can be worse. The reason is that Katharine, played by Sigourney Weaver to patrician perfection, pretends to be interested in Tess’ welfare when she’s only looking out for No. 1.

Katharine treats Tess like her personal lady-in-waiting, while another female executive, learning that Tess reads the society pages,” exclaims incredulously, “ You read W?”

That, said veteran secretary Jean Shiner, is the part of the movie that didn’t ring true for her. “I’ve worked for three bosses in a row, and I’ve never been treated badly,” says the 49-year-old aide to the fashion director at the Broadway. “And if I’m going to change and move up from what I’m doing, she’s the one who’s going to help me do it.”

But Dotson agreed with the movie’s point of view on this issue. “A lot of them (female bosses) are hard. You find that males are the best to work for.”

Though “Working Girl” already has been criticized as a decidedly non-feminist movie (because of the women pitted against one another), Wade claimed that the story is more about “two modern women who are forced by the system into using traditional combat techniques.”

He never meant to stereotype all successful corporate women as “sharks,” he said.

“I don’t want to have women in suits and pearls throwing things at me on the street.”