Quote of the Day (S.J. Perelman, on the Effort of Writing)

“I generally feel astonished at whatever I put down in the first place. The effort of writing seems more arduous all the time. Unlike technicians who are supposed to become more proficient with practice, I find I’ve grown considerably less articulate.”—Humorist and Oscar-winning screenwriter (Around the World in 80 Days) S.J. Perelman (1904-1979), interviewed by George Plimpton & William Cole, “The Art of Fiction No. 31,” The Paris Review, Summer-Fall 1963 issue

Quote of the Day (S.J. Perelman, on Immortality)

“Immortality is a chancy matter, subject to the caprice of the unborn.”— American humorist and screenwriter S.J. Perelman (1904-1979), The World of S. J. Perelman: The Marx Brothers' Greatest Scriptwriter (2006)

Quote of the Day (S.J. Perelman, on a Fantasy Created by a Hitchcock Classic)

“In my waking hours in London I saw myself as Joel McCrea in Foreign Correspondent, wearing a double-breasted trench coat and hiding in windmills. I finally realized I was Perelman from Providence, Rhode Island.”—American humorist and Oscar-winning screenwriter S.J. Perelman (1904-1979), quoted in Israel Shenker, Words and Their Masters (1974)

Quote of the Day (S.J. Perelman, on a Dental Visit, or ‘Cuspid's Last Stand’)

“For years I have let dentists ride roughshod over my teeth: I have been sawed, hacked, chopped, whittled, bewitched, bewildered, tattooed, and signed on again; but this is cuspid's last stand. They’ll never get me into that chair again. I’ll dispose of my teeth as I see fit, and after they’re gone, I’ll get along. I started off living on gruel, and, by God, I can always go back to it again.” — American humorist and screenwriter S.J. Perelman (1904-1979), “Nothing But The Tooth,” in The Best of S.J. Perelman (1947)

With dentists like the crew pictured, can you blame the poor man?

(The image accompanying this post shows Moe, Larry and Curly—i.e., The Three Stooges—in one of their shorts.)

Quote of the Day (S.J. Perelman, on a Macho Husband of Liz Taylor’s)

“[Film and stage producer Mike] Todd’s machismo was that common form that afflicts all undersized men—megalomania. He freely identified himself with Napoleon, P.T. Barnum, and Carl Laemmle, Junior, not to mention the Roman emperors of the decline. Whereas the latter, however, believed in giving the populace bread and circuses, Todd gave them circuses and kept the bread. Rarely if ever has there been anyone more unwilling to fork over what he owed to those actors, writers, and technicians who aided him in his grandiloquent projects of stage and screen. The little corpuscle, in short, believed in flaunting money where it made the most impression—at Deauville, Monaco, and the gambling tables of Las Vegas. In this respect, he was a true macho. My sole souvenir of our frenetic association [the film Around the World in 8o Days] is a replica of the carpetbag Phileas Fogg carried on his celebrated journey, a thousand of which Todd distributed to Broadway companions, investors, accountants, dentists, and other sycophants. But surely, his admirers have since queried me, I must have been awed by his tremendous vitality. Only in part, I respond; Moi meme, I prefer the anthropoid apes.”—American humorist and screenwriter S.J. Perelman (1904-1979), “The Machismo Mystique,” from Vinegar Puss (1975)

There were two exemplars of machismo among his acquaintances, S.J. Perelman noted in the essay from which I’ve just quoted. One, Ernest Hemingway, remains so famous that there seems little point in my belaboring the obvious. But the other, Mike Todd, is surely less familiar to my readers, and his antics—along with Perelman’s hilarious description of him—are worth recalling. 

Perelman was used to show-business lunatics--he did, after all, help write some of the best screenplays (Monkey Business, Horse Feathers) for the Marx Brothers. But I think you can see here that, nearly 20 years after working with Todd, just the memory of Todd was enough to bring him to heights of wonderful invective.

“Flamboyant,” used most by journalists to summarize this showman’s life, is a pallid word for this would-be entertainment Napoleon. Undaunted by losing his shirt in the Depression when his construction business crashed, Todd was bitten by the show-business bug.

Notice that I didn’t say he was particularly wise—or good—at his work. By 1950, the profligate spending that Perelman hinted at engulfed Todd in a second bankruptcy. It didn’t help that four years before, a musical version of Around the World in 8o Days, starring Orson Welles, cratered after he had pulled out, losing virtually all of its investors’ (including Todd's) money.

Then, something astonishing happened. Shrugging off his horrifying involvement in staging the 19^th-century Jules Verne novel, Todd rolled the dice on the property a second time, except now as an all-star Hollywood vehicle. He not only made his investment back over and over again, but won the Best Picture Oscar for 1956. (Perelman shared a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar with John Farrow and  James Poe). 

Oh, yes, another sign of Todd’s machismo, perhaps the major reason why he is remembered at all today: the last of his wives, Elizabeth Taylor: the equivalent of today’s trophy wife, a woman at the height of her glamor—and less than half his age, as you might be able to tell in the picture accompanying this post. (He would be the third of her eight husbands.)

When he died at age 50, in a crash of his private plane, Todd nearly took down with him the one man in Hollywood who could credibly exceed him in machismo: Kirk Douglas, who, with great initial reluctance—at the behest of his wife—turned down the producer's invitation to join him on the fatal flight.

So, let’s see: A builder thirsting for the bright lights of the entertainment world, glorying in the eye-candy on his arm, spending like there’s no tomorrow, and stiffing creditors and employees—Todd was nearly 60 years ahead of his time as Oval Office material.

Quote of the Day (S.J. Perelman, Defining ‘Farm’)

“A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city.”—American humorist and screenwriter S.J. Perelman (1904-1979), “Acres and Pains,” in The Most of S.J. Perelman (1959)

Quote of the Day (S.J. Perelman, on Concealing ‘One's True Livelihood From the Kiddies’)

"The instinct to conceal one's true livelihood from the kiddies, for fear of their possible scorn, is as normal as snoring. A highly solvent gentleman in Forest Hills, a vestryman and the father of three, once told me in wine that for thirty years, under twelve different pseudonyms, he had supplied the gamiest kind of pulp fiction to Snappy Stories and Flynn's, although his children believed him to be a stockbroker."— American humorist and screenwriter S.J. Perelman (1904-1979), “How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth," in The Most of S.J. Perelman (1957)

Quote of the Day (S. J. Perelman, on City Versus Country Living)

"For my money, the most parochial, unwholesome aspect of contemporary civilization is the life led by the average urban dweller. Cooped up in a stuffy, overheated hotel suite with nothing but a bowl of cracked ice, a blonde, and a fleet bellboy poised on his toe like Pavlova waiting to run errands, he misses the rich, multiple savor of country living. He never knows the fierce ecstasy of rising in a sub-zero dawn to find the furnace cold and the pipes frozen, or the exhilaration of changing a tire by flashlight in an icy garage. No wonder his muscles atrophy as he lies abed until noon, nibbling bits of toast over the latest edition. No wonder his horizons shrink and his waistband swells. And no wonder he'll live twice as long as I will."—American humorist S. J. Perelman (1904-1979), Acres and Pains (1947)

Quote of the Day (S.J. Perelman, on ‘Imperious’ Lillian Hellman)

[Lillian Hellman is] “a curious mixture, part imperious yenta who throws her weight around and part amusing old friend when she and I and the Hacketts talk about old times in the movie biz and Broadway. She has a sense of her importance that frequently burns your ass….We all get on together…though every so often I’m tempted to order Lillian to knock it off. (Should have said that I got here right in the middle of her being filmed by Bill Moyers.)”—S.J. Perelman, letter to a friend quoted in David L. Goodrich, The Real Nick and Nora: Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Writers of Stage and Screen Classics (2001)

S.J. Perelman—who over the course of 75 years amused millions, whether through his short humorous pieces for The New Yorker or his screenplays for the Marx Brothers—died on this date in New York in 1979. The great humorist could be wildly funny in a way that even elicited the admiration of his targets (such as Raymond Chandler, who is said to have deeply appreciated the parody “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer”).

For all his brilliance, however, little of his writing cuts as sharply as his late-life comments on playwright Lillian Hellman (pictured), whom he had known from the late 1920s. In the winter of 1974, the two shared a rented house for several weeks in Sarasota, Fla., with two other old friends, husband-and-wife screenwriting team Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.

Already, in this letter, as the above quote indicates, Perelman’s patience was being tried. Four days later, he had had enough. Hellman, he wrote, “deserves to have her ass kicked roundly” for exhibiting “all the grandeur of Queen Isabella, Empress of Spain, and the Indies, Mexico and the Iberian Air Line.”

I came across Perelman’s account of his vacation from hell after I watched Brian Richard Mori's Hellman v. McCarthy last week on PBS. I had missed this play about the legal fallout from novelist Mary McCarthy’s negative comments concerning Hellman in a 1979 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show when the drama had been staged Off-Broadway by the Abingdon Theatre, so I was delighted to see it aired on public television’s new Theater Close-Up series. I already knew that its climax—a meeting between the two women to see if a settlement of the lawsuit could be arranged—never actually transpired. I began to research to see how much else in the play was accurate.

As it turned out, a good deal. The name of Hellman’s lawyer was changed, but the real-life version, like the one in the show, was a good friend of the playwright-memoirist (good enough to pursue her libel suit against McCarthy without charging fees). And, as in the show, Hellman had been restlessly roving from channel to channel with her nurse beside her at home when she caught McCarthy’s obviously hyperbolic statement that “every word she [Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

(It is ironic, given the lawsuit that Hellman threw at Cavett and PBS for allowing McCarthy’s statement to go unchallenged, that when Perelman met Hellman on his visit, she was busy being lionized by Moyers, a fixture of public television for decades.)

In the play, Hellman (played by Roberta Maxwell) was endlessly patronizing and abusive toward her nurse. In real life, Hellman was hardly better, and may, if possible, have been worse with, as they say, "the help." She would threaten to scream if her nurse didn't furnish her with a cigarette.

Similar testimony was offered in A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman, by Rosemary Mahoney, a 17-year-old who had been hired by the playwright in the late 1970s as a part-time live-in housekeeper-cook in her Martha's Vineyard home. When Hellman wasn’t haggling with Mahoney over pay and time, she was scolding the teen for trivial or imagined mistakes.

To an extent, the abusiveness to her nurse and Mahoney might be chalked up to Hellman’s admittedly fragile physical and mental condition of the time: alone, regarded as a has-been for more than a decade by the theater community, visually impaired, unable to give up cigarettes, and constantly drinking. But more shocking, for a playwright who, in works such as The Little Foxes, had demonstrated sympathy with minority groups and labor, was how condescending she could be—to Mahoney’s large Irish-American family, and even  to African-Americans, whom she privately slurred.

The family of Hellman’s mother had made a small fortune in the banking industry. Whether as a result of this family environment, the fame she achieved in adulthood, or both, Hellman had, by her seventies, exhibited an unbecoming sense of entitlement. If even longtime friends such as Perelman felt annoyed by her, you can imagine what it must have been like for those whose employment depended on her caprices.

Even two decades after Nikita Khrushchev had denounced predecessor Josef Stalin for his purges of the late 1930s, Hellman—who had been visiting Moscow at the time and should have known better—was reluctant to admit she had been wrong, claiming that U.S. Communists and fellow travelers had not caused the same kind of damage as Joseph McCarthy. But in how she treated others, she might as well have been the haughtiest of capitalists, even worse than the cunning brothers of The Little Foxes for being so hypocritical.

In Hellman v. McCarthy, Cavett wonders if either of the two aging literary lionesses really came out the better for Hellman's protracted and expensive libel lawsuit. But I would argue that Hellman lost more than McCarthy. Partly as a result of the litigation, the playwright's considerable gilding of her life in her memoirs had been mercilessly exposed.

Subsequent biographers have inevitably had to deal with the fallout from this. Yet, even aside from her supposed nonfiction, Hellman had created, through her plays, a public persona wildly at odds with the way she lived her life. Time and again, she carried on with all the haughtiness of the one percent. 

What was Hellman in the end? An “Unfinished Woman,” as one of her memoirs proclaimed her? I don’t know. 

A "Difficult Woman," as a 2012 biography by Alice Kessler-Harris termed her? Better, but still not quite there.

An impossible woman? Now you're talking.