After Many a Summer .. .

"Come on, my graceful nymphs," cooed a leotarded physical culture-vulture named Anne Marie Bennstrom. The "nymphs" who heaved into action at her command were a score of Hollywood refugees, ranging from Novelist and sometime Scriptwriter Aldous Huxley (6 ft. 4 in., 143 1/2 Ibs.), who looked like a long, gaunt crane, to 341-lb., 6 ft. 2 1/2 in. Actor Victor Buono, who looked like a healthy hippo. As they puffed around the swimming pool to the recorded strains of the River Kwai March or splashed through the 'Balinese Water Dance" to the tune of the Volga Boatman, they were all pursuing the traditional Hollywood ideal of a wealthy mind in a healthy (or at least good-looking) body.

Scene of their exertions: the Golden Door, a sort of rich woman's Vic Tanny, which last week opened its $300-a-week rooms, whirlpool baths and scented steam chambers to men. All week, the youth seekers submitted to facials, manicures, pedicures, aromatic oilings, honey packs and pummeling by a benevolently mechanical Iron Maiden. Actor Jim (Mr. Magoo) Backus, 46, his intricate schedule pinned to his sweatshirt, worked up special enthusiasm for lip-stretching, wrinkle-reducing maneuvers that pulled his mouth from ear to ear. Actor and Health Faddist Robert Cummings, 50, gyrated in a wild tangle with Boy Scout staves.

Over it all hovered Golden Door Keeper Edmund Bordeaux Szekely (pronounced Saykay), a bald, round-bellied Transylvanian who obviously shuns his own exercises. Entrepreneur Szekely is a sometime archaeologist, philosopher, biochemist and author (he claims 69 books). By his own admission, he speaks 14 1/2 languages, the 50% lingo being English. His cosmetics, says he grandly, are drawn from history, e.g., General Potemkin's letters taught him the oils used by Catherine the Great (Siberian fir needles, hay, geranium and lilac), and Anne Marie's exercises are supposedly based on a calisthenics drill devised by Leonardo da Vinci. "It is not a lesser masterpiece than his Mona Lisa."

Author Huxley, 65, was one of the few guests seeking rejuvenation by trying not to lose weight but to gain it. At one point he started to giggle under his mudpack, and Anne Marie warned sternly: "Don't laugh. If you do, it cracks." Just possibly, what Huxley was laughing at was the fact that, amid all the scented oils and raw vegetable lunches, no one thought of trying Huxley's own recipe for longevity set forth in his famed satirical novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. The recipe: a steady diet of carp's intestines.

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