Hollywood Harlequinade

QUEER PEOPLE--Carroll & Garrett Graham--Vanguard ($2). Theodore Anthony White is a picaresque rascal, a newspaperman. He lands in Los Angeles about as broke as usual, gets a job on a morning paper, is taken drunk, loses his job, wakes up next morning entangled in Hollywood. Successively, never too successfully, he is scenario writer, press agent, blackmailer, entertainer in a bawdy house. To a friend who asks him if he likes the last job better than being in a studio, Hero White replies: "Well, you work with a better class of people."

As press agent he is once ordered by his temperamental employer, a woman, to give a tea for the press. With misgivings he obeys. After the tea is over, this is what he sees : ''A beautiful Chinese urn had been smashed. A chair had been hurled through a studio window. Someone had danced on the polished floor with hobnails. There were nine burns from abandoned cigarets in the expensive rug. A drink had been spilled in the grand piano. Someone had left a lighted cigar on a mahogany side table. An entire bottle of ginger ale had been prankishly poured on a beautiful chair upholstered in brocaded silk. An arm had been chipped from a bit of statuary Mme Clore had brought from Italy. A moustache had been pencilled on the lip of her late husband's oil portrait. Seven glasses were broken. Three spoons were missing. The second maid had been seduced. The cook had quit. "The press had been entertained."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.