The day came when I received my first contract...

 The day came when I received my first contract as a costume designer with one of the big motion picture studios in Hollywood. Although Christian Science had been a help to me before, the desire for more and more money, more importance, more fame, grew in my thought, shutting out everything else.

I spent much time and effort in pursuit of the people and things which I felt would make me important. I became resentful of other people's success, and began running around trying to do everything I could to get my human personality admired and sought after. I had my office painted shocking pink, and hired a publicity agent. I worked very hard to know all the press people. I would take them to lunch, and cultivated everyone I could think of in this line. I was in night clubs three and four nights a week, because I thought one had to be seen. My husband tried to assist me in everything I wanted. Now, I realize he suffered patiently, silently, and quietly. This went on for about eleven years.

When something didn't go right or I was pushed aside in favor of someone else, I would call a Christian Science practitioner and I'd get out a [Christian Science] Sentinel or a [Christian Science] Journal and read a little till things quieted down. Then I would go on. I felt I was being very sophisticated and I did everything that I thought I wanted to do.

When all my “striving and contriving” failed to accomplish all I had hoped for I decided to extend my activities. Designers who had their own business appeared to me to be very successful and sought after, so I decided that I must do this, too. I opened my own wholesale business in better dresses with a big splash and for a little while I had tremendous success. Then the studio decided that my interests were divided, and they certainly were, and so my contract wasn't renewed, which was a great blow to me. The business was on such a shaky foundation that it had to be terminated, amid much bitterness. I was told by a great many stores that nothing connected with my name would ever interest them again. Within a period of about eight months everything in my carefully self-arranged world fell apart. All of it just disappeared under my feet. Not only everything for which I had worked for years was gone, but my name which I had tried so hard to make important now stood for failure.

I couldn't get a studio job, I couldn't get a manufacturing job, I couldn't get anything. For about two years I stayed at home without a single offer of work of any kind and struggled with pride and shame and deep regret. I had always cared for my mother and my sister out of my earnings, and my mother, who was not a Christian Scientist, suffered a stroke at this time. She couldn’t accept anything but medical care, which soon took all the money I had saved.

With the financial problem we couldn’t do any of the night clubbing that I’d felt so essential to life. Every single morning I got up and got my Lesson (daily Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly) and sometimes I'd study until noon.

One night I was in utter despair. I picked up Mrs. Eddy's book Miscellaneous Writings, and it fell open to the statement: “The nature of the individual, more stubborn than the circumstance, will always be found arguing for itself,—its habits, tastes, and indulgences.” Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896, p. 119

I would never read that before, because every time I read it I got resentful, saying, “I can’t help my nature, I was born this way.” This time I made myself read it and say, “Every single solitary one of your troubles is the result of the ‘nature of the individual,’ not of the outside circumstances or the people you feel have been so unkind to you and all the things you feel have happened to you.” I began to see that what I had wanted was wrong and that I hadn’t been willing to be upright, orderly, humble, good, and obedient; and then I was on a better track. The basic uncovering was the fact that I could say, “Yes, ‘the nature’—my wants and my desires and my false ambitions and my pride—caused all this and would have to go.” It was at last a matter of being willing to admit that to myself. I think that's probably the hardest thing that one has to do. When I finally said, “Yes, You're right, and I will be obedient,” many wonderful things happened.

I received an offer for a job. There were lots of struggles that first year because it seemed to me that many snarls had to be unwound. Every day I would spend noon hours in [Christian Science] Reading Rooms in Beverly Hills. And I worked to be loving, something I’d never done before. All those years when I was so filled with resentment at seeing others ahead of me or more important or better, I was always tired. Gradually, I saw that each person is complete, a complete unit of reflection of the divine. I began to turn away from a sense of competition, to look to my true self and say “Thank Thee, Father, I have all that I need.” I tried to look to Mind, Soul, for the sense of beauty I was created to reflect. I learned just to express the joy that I see and the joy that I feel and the beauty that comes to me.

I have worked with that same studio, off and on, for all the intervening years. In the last few years a way has opened for me to combine world-wide travel and work in a way I would never have thought possible. I do not say that I have completely overcome all false ambition, but I’ve been taught that the closed fist can’t receive. The ambition “to get” has been replaced with the wish “to give.” I have a real desire to help others turn to Christian Science to find what it has brought me—the comfort, the joy, and the understanding of God as Father-Mother, Love always.