Young Valentine Winters (Joan Crawford) leaves America to join her ooh-la-la mama in Paris... and Life begins. Soon Valentine is caught up in a whirl of hot music and cold champagne, of the right clothes and the wrong men, of all pleasure and no happiness. Then she meets an upstanding Harvard man. The future looks bright, until his strait-laced parents visit Paris. They discover not only Valentine's wild ways, but a shocking secret about her mother ' and Valentine's world comes crashing down. Gloriously gowned by Adrian, the normally brunette Crawford peroxided up for the role of Valentine and scored a hit with female fans eager to share her glamorous path from good girl to party girl to a woman forged by the fires of love.