Million Dollar Nurse

By Rebecca Marsh (pseud. William Neubauer ),
©1966 Cover illustration by
Darrell Greene   When pretty Dorothy
Malloy left Buttrick Hospital to become wealthy Andrew Bossart’s private nurse,
her orderly world changed overnight. Young and handsome, Andrew Bossart was
recovering from an accidental gunshot wound. His reputation as a dangerous
ladies’ man made some people wonder if the shot had been an accident after all
… Despite Dorothy’s determination to remain uninvolved, she was too attractive
a girl to escape Bossart’s attention—and too good a nurse to ignore the needs
of her patient. Before long she found herself entangled in an unexpected
mystery, a strange romantic triangle—and a scandal that would rock the city …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES: “There’s more to conversation than attractive legs.” 

“Even a hospital should be hospitable.”

“Like all career girls, you get flustered when someone
behaves like you’re human.”

“I don’t think it helps a man’s innards when a bullet is
shot into them.”

“There are proper and improper ways to go about achieving a
desired object. You learn that quickly in surgery. You don’t incise down from
the shoulder to remove an appendix. Similarly, you don’t club someone in order
to reason with him.”

“In our special ways we’re all ill.”

REVIEW: Author William Neubauer, here writing as Rebecca Marsh, is
one of my favorites. His plots are usually more intricate, and his heroines are
smart, hard-working, sassy gals who put up with little nonsense. The problems
with his books are that the romance part of the book is usually just crammed in
around the margins, barely visible; the plots can sometimes get overly
confusing; and the boyfriend is sometimes not especially desirable. Here he has
done pretty well, as the plot is mostly navigable, but he did stick us with a
middling man. At least we scored an amazing cover illustration.

Dorothy Malloy is a surgical nurse at Neubauer’s classic
Buttrick Hospital—this noble, California coast–institution has hosted at least three other of his VNRNs ( TV
Nurse , Pam
Green Rehabilitation Nurse , and Recovery
Room Nurse ) and some peripheral characters in this story (Dr Lee
Vaughan, with whom Dorothy lunches one day, for example, is the alleged hero of
TV Nurse ) are stars in other books,
which is a fun bonus for the die-hard Neubauer fan. She is an ambitious lass,
hoping to be promoted to assistant chief—and her ambition is viewed with some
skepticism around the hospital, because why would a woman want to be promoted?

Anyway, she’s called to special Andrew Mark Bossart, a
devilishly handsome playboy who has gotten himself mixed up with Lisa Locatelli,
a 17-year-old student nurse at Buttrick, as well as Catherine Cowell, the owner
of a large corporation in town. The young gal swears Andy proposed to her, but
then dumped her for the wealthy Catherine, so she calls Catherine to give her
the down-low about Andy’s sneaky dealings, and then tries to kill herself—but
is saved due to fast action on the part of her nursing school roommate.
Catherine calls Andy over to her beach house—and the next we see him, he’s on
the OR table with a bullet in his gut, and Dorothy is part of the team
commissioned to dig it out and repair the damage.

She’s then transferred to the recovery ward unit
(unfortunately we didn’t cross paths with Jane
Kemp while we were there) to special Andy—but this puts her out of the
running for a promotion, because “in the surgical suite she had status, even a
type of seniority. Logically, the longer she remained there, the better her
chances would be to make the jump to rank as a junior executive. But if she
were popped into a recovery-room suite, she’d be the low girl in an area where
promotions were few and far between.” The transfer is happening, we learn, because
the chief of the surgical unit, Miss Sipsie, is dating Joe Elyot, an orthopedic
tech, who is also seeing Dorothy, whom he might possibly prefer.

The head of the recovery room, Clara Dendrock, likewise
recommends that Dorothy should be transferred to another department. Clara, it
turns out, is upset that Dorothy didn’t sign a petition like all the other
nurses opposing the expulsion of Lisa Locatelli, who has been deemed too
unstable to go on with a nursing career. Dorothy has been one of Lisa’s chief
mentors, so her “betrayal” of Lisa doesn’t sit well with the other nurses, but
Dorothy is an astute player, and has already discussed her opinion that Lisa
should be allowed to continue with Mrs. Dolezal, the superintendent of nurses, and
feels that signing the petition might undercut her chances for promotion and
won’t accomplish Lisa’s reinstatement.

Caring for Andy Bossart, Dorothy has a front-row seat to the
drama. Though there is no proof that Catherine shot Andy—the gun has not been
recovered, without which she apparently cannot be arrested—Andy, who’d been
working a high-paying job ($25,000 a year!!!) at Catherine’s company is suing
Catherine for a million dollars for loss of his career and, oh yeah, that hole
in his gut. When he’s finally out of the hospital, he invites Dorothy to dinner
to thank her for her hard work—but has also invited Catherine and the local newspaper
columnist, Millicent Haight, to the party, and Catherine beans Dorothy on the
head, giving her a black eye. This injury—plus her current political situation
at the hospital—leads Mrs. Dolezal to give Dorothy two weeks off to recover,
and Catherine, out of gratitude that Dorothy has not pressed charges, offers Catherine
use of her beach cottage—the house where Andy was shot—to recover.

There she has lovely meals and walks on the grounds, sails
on Catherine’s yacht, and pleasant conversations with Catherine’s housekeeper,
who is another of the locals deeply devoted to Catherine—like Dorothy’s
boyfriend, Joe Elyot, who was rescued from a life in the slums when Catherine,
a high school classmate, offered to pay for his schooling to fit him for the
job he currently holds.

Eventually all the threads are neatly tied up—the story of
what happened to the gun, the alibi that is going to get Catherine off the hook
for the shooting, Lisa’s reinstatement at the hospital, and Dorothy’s career—in
a manner that is mostly understandable. We even wrap up Dorothy’s love life
when she announces out of the blue—many Neubauer women have this annoying habit—that
she is going to marry Joe. While we are certainly happy for almost everyone,
and for Dorothy’s clever playing of her career and hospital politics, I wasn’t too
please to see her end up with Joe.

Joe is clearly very devoted to Catherine out of gratitude
for her help—to the extent that he helps fabricate her alibi and plant false
evidence, basically abetting a felony assault—but he starts out the book as
something of a cad, telling Dorothy on a date that he’d kissed Catherine once and
dates other women, Miss Sipsie in particular. This hurts Dorothy’s feelings, so
“he condescended to lean forward quickly and give her left cheek a greasy peck.
As she drew back, flushing, he laughed.” It’s so amusing to be a jerk! Later he
tells Dorothy that he’s chatted with several nurses who are upset with her
about the petition business and that he’d defended her “because I like you,”
but then complains that feeling like he wants to defend her can push him into
marriage, and he doesn’t want to get married—and somehow Dorothy takes this for
a compliment, but then gets mad when he tries to persuade her to sign the petition
instead of supporting her decision. Next time we see him, he’s hanging out at
the beach house with Dorothy and sighing that he should have tried to marry Catherine.
Two pages after that, she decides to marry him while he’s not even present. So
you see we don’t have a lot to admire in him.

Another odd thing about the book is that both Catherine and
Andy end up getting inpatient psychiatric care—but Lisa, the would-be suicide
who clearly needs it way more than anyone, does not. Instead, everyone refers
to her suicide attempt as a “goof” that she shouldn’t be punished
for. Overall, though, as I have said, this is a brisk, interesting, enjoyable
book with an excellent heroine to admire. If William Neubauer here has not given us his best work, it's still better than most VNRNs out there, and  easily   worth an afternoon of your time.