Plot

A cabaret singer takes up with a millionaire to pay for her gravely-ill husband's operation.

American chemist Ned Faraday marries a German entertainer and starts a family. However, he becomes poisoned with Radium and needs an expensive treatment in Germany to have any chance at being cured. His wife Helen returns to nightclub work to try to raise the money, and she becomes popular as the Blonde Venus. In an effort to get enough money sooner, she prostitutes herself to millionaire Nick Townsend. While Ned is away in Europe, she continues with Nick, but when Ned returns cured, he discovers her infidelity. Now Ned despises Helen, but she grabs their son Johnny and lives on the run, just one step ahead of the Missing Persons Bureau. When they finally catch her, she loses her son to Ned. Once again she returns to entertaining, this time in Paris, and her fame once again brings her and Townsend together. Helen and Nick return to America engaged, but she is irresistibly drawn back to her son and Ned. In which life does she truly belong?—Gary Jackson <garyjack5@cogeco.ca>

While hiking in the Black Forest with a group of students, American chemist Ned Faraday meets German artist Helen and soon they get married. Years later, they are living in New York and have welcomed son Johnny, but Nick becomes ill, poisoned by 12 years of exposure to Radium in his experiments. His doctor tells him that in Dresden he would have a chance of healing, but the treatment would cost the fortune of US$ 1,500.00. Helen decides to work in a night-club under the pseudonym of Blonde Venus to raise some money for his travel. When she meets the playboy millionaire Nick Townsend, she decides to ask for money to have an affair with him. Ned goes to Germany and Helen becomes Nick's mistress. When her cured husband returns 15 days ahead of schedule, he finds that she had been unfaithful to him. Ned decides to take Johnny from Helen, forcing her to run away with their son with the police on their tail.—Claudio Carvalho

Helen Faraday is a nightclub-singer-turned-homemaker, but when her husband needs money to have a life-saving operation and she decides to resume her career as a singer to raise money, she undergoes a chain of events that separate her from her husband and force her to make a choice between her lucrative singing career, and her role as a wife and mother.—Andrew Hyatt <dres@uiuc.edu>