Nothing Sacred

An eccentric woman learns she is not dying of radium poisoning as earlier assumed, but when she meets a reporter looking for a story, she feigns sickness again for her own profit. Hazel Flagg of Warsaw, Vermont receives the news that her terminal case of radium poisoning from a workplace incident was a complete misdiagnosis with mixed emotions. She is happy not to be dying, but she, who has never traveled the world, was going to use the money paid to her by her factory to go to New York in style. She believes her dreams can still be realized when Wally Cook arrives in town. He is a New York reporter with the Morning Star newspaper. He believes that Hazel's valiant struggle concerning her impending death is just the type of story he needs to resurrect his name within reporting circles after a recent story he wrote led to scandal and a major demotion at the newspaper. He proposes to take Hazel to New York both to report on her story but also to provide her with a grand farewell to life. She accepts. Wally's story results in Hazel becoming the toast of New York. In spending time together, Wally and Hazel fall in love. Hazel not only has to figure out what to do about her relationship with Wally, but also how to conclude her now very public story, which all of New York expects will be a public and imminent death. Others, however, may conclude the story for her. —Huggo To redeem himself after a hoax, reporter Wallace Cook proposes a series of stories on doomed Hazel Flagg. Hazel discovers she really doesn't have radium poisoning, but still accepts the big fling in New York that Cook offers her. At first, she has a great time, but complications arise when she and Wally fall in love, and an Austrian specialist discovers that Hazel is faking. —Rod Crawford <puffinus@u.washington.edu>