Cookery

In his time moon-faced Comedian Joe Cook has given a million laughs, and last week he got a lot back. While playing vaudeville in Washington, D.C. he saw his life story done in a professionally paced musicomedy, Cook Book, by The Harlequins of Washington's Catholic University. Last year Catholic University's drama department got the smart notion of biographing eminent Catholic show businessmen in musical shows, began with George M. Cohan on hand to salute his imitator.

Cook Book, like Joe Cook's imagination, often detoured around established facts, but it got the idea of Cook's gaga saga across. In Evansville, Ind., in the 'gos, the boy Joe was balked from joining the circus and talked his mother into electric-lighting the Cook barn so Joe could give a show there. The Cook home itself had only gas. Joe grew to be the only claimant of 18-ball juggling and had a picture of himself doing it, the balls suspended by invisible wires. When he began talking on stage as he talked in rehearsal, his comic gift appeared. Once when he was running over the line "ugh" for an Indian part, he remarked: "I don't know if I can sustain the emotion." Cook Book included Joe's most colossal gadget -- the Fuller Construction Company Symphony Orchestra -- and carried the crackpot through vaudeville and his great .Broadway days to his famed, screwily furnished home, Sleepless Hollow, at Lake Hopatcong, N.J.

After the show, the real Joe took the stage with his impersonator, brown-eyed, flop-haired Leo Brady, 24, who co-authored Cook Book with Faculty Member Walter F. Kerr. Said Joe of Leo Brady: "He's as good as I am. He's better than I am. He's even taller than I am." In his tribute, Joe was not merely being nice to a clever amateur. Young Leo Brady, already a full-fledged dramatic professional, wrote the play version of Richard Connell's gangster story Brother Orchid, which was sold to Warner Bros., filmed in 1940 with Edward G. Robinson.

Of Cook Book's many original ditties, Joe liked best The India Rubber-Skin Girl by Harlequins Bill Coleman & Betty Healy:

I took her out wining and dining, Her arms were like wide rubber bands, The stars were romantically shining And as we bounced home we held hands. I squeezed her hand very tightly, I rather thought she wouldn't mind. But when the walk ended Her arm had extended, And she was still six blocks behind.

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