Going round the bend in a bunch

If you had a friend who was an actress, and she was on the brink of a nervous collapse, what would you do to cheer her up? Or rather, what wouldn’t you do? I bet you wouldn’t take her to New York to visit a mutual friend, another actress, who was starring on Broadway — after all, that would be a bit vindictive, wouldn’t it? I mean, what’s more likely to give an actress a nervous breakdown than the success of a close personal friend?

Well, Cissie O’Brien is a comedienne (ghastly, unfunny word), so perhaps she does it as a joke: she whisks her depressed actress friend, Maggie Salt, off to Manhattan to visit their pal Helena Cassidy who is the current toast of the theatre world. Nice work, Cissie. Before anyone has had time to say ‘darling’, Maggie’s lost it. She’s given her friends the slip and is ‘out of her tree’ in a bar somewhere.