Show Business: The Girls of Henry Orient

The official U.S. entry at Cannes is The World of Henry Orient, due for festival screening this week. It is a genuine Hollywood product and, simultaneously, an exception to the norm: bright, breezy and brimming with fun, it doesn’t celebrate sex. It thwarts it. The thwarters are two little girls who develop a crush on Peter Sellers and tumble after him all over town, inadvertently wrecking his sleazy love affairs.

Films about teen-agers almost never ring true, but Orient does. To find the girls and begin his extraordinary feat of verisimilitude, Director George Roy Hill reached into the unsuspecting halls of two Eastern girls’ schools and plucked forth two genuine specimens. Their names are Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth.

Tippy wears a decaying fur coat that all but sweeps the sidewalk behind her, and her hair hangs down so thoroughly over her eyes that she appears to be the youngest daughter of a woolly mammoth. Actually, her father is a man named Gordon Walker, who is an engineer with Allied Chemical Corp. in Manhattan. He lives in Rye, N.Y., and sends Tippy to the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, where she clings giddily to a B average and writes for the literary magazine, Panache.

“What writer do you most admire, Tippy?”

“John Lennon,” she says, probably without blinking, although with her screen of hair it is hard to tell. John Lennon, of course, is the married Beatle, and author of such poems as “On Safairy with Whide Hunter” and “Deaf Ted, Danoota (and me).”

Amiable Opposite. Elizabeth Tipton Walker is 17 and light enough to be lifted in one arm. Her speech comes forth in sporadic marvels, and her feet don’t quite brush the ground. Adults instinctively want to shield her. Merrie Marcia Spaeth, on the other hand, has hair that is always carefully waved, an unpuzzled look in her eyes, and an air of absolute balance. As on film, she is an amiable opposite to Tippy.

She is 15 and a sophomore at Philadelphia’s Germantown Friends School, where she maintains an A-plus average. She is an accomplished student of piano. She knows what she wants to do—study language at a college like Middlebury, study acting at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and then pursue an acting career.

Skirts & Sheaths. Merrie’s mother was once a fashion model, and her father is an ophthalmologist. The family lives in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia’s social ionosphere. “I don’t need to prove I’m sophisticated by wearing a bikini,” says Merrie, “if it’s in bad taste.”

“I love bikinis,” says Tippy Walker, tossing her hair away from her eyes. “I’m going to wear one some day if I get the courage.”

Merrie calls her father “Sir.” Tippy calls Walker “Daddy” and saves empty Walker-Gordon milk bottles for him because his name is Gordon Walker. In a situation when Merrie wears standard, tasteful red lipstick, pleated schoolgirl skirts and loafers, Tippy wears heels, sheath dresses and no lipstick. When Merrie walks, she moves with rhythmic and graceful steps. Tippy takes enormous, preoccupied strides. A father walking with them can only say to himself: “I’ll take one of each.”