Private Number (1936)

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Private Number (1936)

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Private Number (1936)

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Private Number (1936)

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Ellen Neal a beautiful and upstanding girl of seventeen, arrives at the Winfield home to take a job as a maid, her first foray into the domestic profession. Ellen quickly receives a promotion to Mrs. Winfield's personal maid, and when Dick Winfield arrives home from college, he falls in love with the graceful and charming Ellen. At the family's vacation home in Maine, Dick asks Ellen out on a date, but Ellen refuses on the grounds that the two are not social equals. Dick finally convinces Ellen that her ideas about social class are old-fashioned, and she begins to fall in love with her employers' son. They eventually secretly marry before he departs to finish his senior year at college. Wroxton, the Winfield's manipulative and calculating butler, confesses to Ellen that he is obsessed with her and wants to marry her, but she informs him that she loves another. In revenge, Wroxton, suspecting that his rival is Dick, tells the Winfields that Ellen is pregnant, which he has heard from another maid. The Winfields confront Ellen, who admits that she is pregnant but also that she is married. However, Ellen refuses to divulge the name of her husband, and when Mr. Winfield is about to fire her because he does not believe her story, Ellen's friend Gracie, who is also a servant, reveals that Ellen is married to the Winfields' son. Wroxton then tells the Winfields that Ellen engineered the marriage in order to blackmail them and, to prove his charge, reveals that Ellen has a police record for an arrest that occurred when she was innocently taken to a gambling house by a rakish gentleman named Coakley. The Winfields decide that she is an unfit wife for their son and offer to give her a cash settlement, which she turns down in disgust. Ellen leaves and has her baby, which she cares for in a secluded farmhouse belonging to friends of hers. Wroxton, with Mr. Winfield's consent, intercepts and destroys Ellen's letters to Dick, who, after learning that his parents drove Ellen away, has left them in anger. When detectives come to the farmhouse and bring Ellen a letter, which states that Dick wants to annul the marriage on the grounds of fraud, Gracie convinces Ellen to fight back, if only for the sake of her baby's name. Sam Stapp, Ellen's lawyer, suggests that they seek a countersuit. To establish Ellen as Mrs. Richard Winfield, Stapp sets her up in a fancy Park Avenue apartment and sends the bills to Dick, who has refused to sign the annulment papers. Now that he knows her address, Dick visits Ellen, but when he asks her about the raid, she becomes upset that he doubts her and does not deny his charges. Dick then agrees to sign the annulment papers. At the trial, Coakley lies on the witness stand and says that Ellen propositioned him. After Gracie informs Stapp that Ellen was only seventeen on the night in question, Stapp asks the judge for Coakley's arrest. Fearing a jail sentence, Coakley admits to Dick that Wroxton paid him to lie, and after Dick knocks Wroxton over a table, he gives the courtroom a moving speech in which he requests that the case be dismissed. Dick finds Ellen back at the farmhouse, and after he reiterates his pledge of love, they embrace

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Private Number (1936)

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Private Number (1936)

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