Jack Diamond and his sickly brother arrive in prohibition New York as jewelry thieves. After a spell in jail, the coldly ambitious Diamond hits on the idea of stealing from thieves himself and sets about getting close to gangster boss Arnold Rothstein to move in on his booze, girls, gambling, and drugs operations.

An Iowa pajama factory worker falls in love with an affable superintendent who had been hired by the factory's boss to help oppose the workers' demand for a pay raise.

To save his career, an ad man wants a sex symbol to endorse a lipstick but in exchange, she wants him to pretend to be her lover.

Jerry Mulligan is an exuberant American expatriate in Paris trying to make a reputation as a painter. His friend Adam is a struggling concert pianist who's a long time associate of a famous French singer, Henri Baurel. A lonely society woman, Milo Roberts, takes Jerry under her wing and supports him, but is interested in more than his art.

Tacey and Harry King are a suburban couple with three sons and a serious need of a babysitter. Tacey puts an ad in the paper for a live-in babysitter, and the ad is answered by Lynn Belvedere. But when she arrives, she turns out to be a man. And not just any man, but a most eccentric, outrageously forthright genius with seemingly a million careers and experiences behind him.