Theodora’s Tap

In Hollywood’s version of The Lost Weekend, it was the dubbed-in songs of Theodora Lynch Getty that drove the dipsomaniac hero to drink. Last week, tall, easygoing Singer Theodora Getty, 30, wife of Oilman J. Paul Getty and granddaughter of Chicago’s late, famed Clothier Henry C. Lytton, was trying to drive all Hollywood to drink something else—pure Hereford water from Deaf Smith County, Texas.

In Hollywood, the drinking of bottled water has become a mark of class; only such lowlifes as $1,000-a-week writers drink tap water. Theodora thought that she would have something special with her water from Hereford, where tooth decay is almost unknown, supposedly because of fluorine in the water (TIME, Nov. 10, 1941). She sewed up commercial rights with the town of Hereford (“For all the water we’ll ever need”), and leased a 10,000-gallon railway tank car to haul the water to Hollywood at $1,100 a trip.

By last week, Theodora had more than 750 regular customers, including Humphrey Bogart, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. At $1.25 for a five-gallon bottle, Theodora sells 10,000 gallons a month in the Los Angeles area alone and sales are increasing at the rate of 1,000 gallons a month. Theodora is mapping plans to distribute the water over an eleven state Western area, hopes soon to tap a nationwide market. Says she: while the stuff is fine for children’s teeth, “it also goes wonderful with Scotch.”

-Named for Erastus Smith (1787-1838), who, although deaf, commanded the scouts in General Sam Houston’s army. “Deaf” Smith swam the flooded Buffalo Bayou, captured a courier with dispatches for Santa Anna and, on the morning of the battle of San Jacinto, burned the only bridge on which the Mexicans could retreat.