Review

Armstrong Circle Theater: When the Brooklyn Museum started clearing out its west wing storeroom a year and a half ago, Dr. John Cooney, curator of Egyptian art, decided that a 1,600-year-old mummy of undistinguished pedigree had to go. First he suggested burning it, but a museum technician objected, as a Roman Catholic, to destroying a human body. Next Dr. Cooney tried to bury the mummy, and found that he could get no city burial permit. Then he tried to ship it out of town to a small museum, only to be turned down by Railway Express for lack of the physician's death certificate that would have qualified him for the burial permit. When Dr. Cooney made known his quandary, he had no trouble hitting Page One. Last week, over-cutely swathed as The Complex Mummy Complex, Dr. Cooney's story got into TV as the Armstrong Theater's first comic dramatization-from-life. Stretched far too thin in an hourlong script, the joke was not nearly so funny as it must have seemed on paper or in real life. But it did make the 1,600-year-old hero the most popular mummy in Brooklyn. As callers swarmed on him, Dr. Cooney explained: "We still can't get rid of it. We've had requests for it from all over the world, and it would take a Solomon to make a decision. Also, as a matter of fact, I'm getting rather fond of it." But when a colleague suggested that the museum display it in a show next fall, Dr. Cooney, keeping his standards high, retorted: "Over my dead body." camera on a high crane zoomed from a great distance upon a spotlighted Betty Furness, making her Hollywood debut as a Westinghouse saleslady after a TV career spanning Studio One's nine years in Manhattan and 308 dresses of her own. Aglow in a white linen sack with appliqued taffeta flowers, Betty brightened one commercial with Guest Star Conrad Nagel, who told how a washer-dryer combination had lightened his load at Malibu Beach. "With as many as ten guests in the house," said Nagel, "you can imagine how many sheets and pillowcases we had, not to mention towels." Studio One's commercials were so colossal ("We used every single bit of the whole studio," said Betty) that they had to be taped in advance so there would be room to do the rest of the show live. "Isn't that funny," exclaimed Betty, "after they move us out here because the facilities are so much better?" Unfortunately, Betty's commercials kept being interrupted by long stretches of something called Brotherhood of the Bell, a pretentious melodrama about a conspiratorial fraternity in 1976, which posed a question for the producers: Was it really worth making Betty pack those ten boxes of clothes and 18 pieces of luggage and leave her roomy apartment on Manhattan's smart East Side?

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