Who's the Fairest of Them All

Well, here's something: ER with a group of "ballet dancers" in a photo taken by Anton Bruehl some time around 1950.  But surely these ladies aren't anorexic enough to be ballet dancers?  I wager they must be some of the gal pals ER took up with once she and the journalist Lorena Hickok had ceased, alas, to be a hot item.

In 1934, at the height of the ER/Hickok romance, Time magazine described Hickok as "a rotund lady with a husky voice, a peremptory manner, and baggy clothes."  Didn't seem to faze ER, however.  Indeed: "No matter how plain a woman may be"--or so the 14-year-old future First Lady had written in a diary (long before she met Hickok),"if truth and loyalty are stamped upon her face, all will be attracted to her."