Bestseller Revisited

MAY THIS HOUSE BE SAFE FROM TIGERS (374 pp.)--Alexander King--Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

Ex marks the spot of Alexander King. He is an ex-illustrator, ex-cartoonist, ex-adman, ex-editor, ex-playwright, ex-dope addict. For a quarter-century he was an ex-painter, and by his own bizarre account qualifies as an ex-midwife. He is also an ex-husband to three wives and an ex-Viennese of sufficient age (60) to remember muttonchopped Emperor Franz Joseph. When doctors told him a few years ago that he might soon be an ex-patient (two strokes, serious kidney disease, peptic ulcer, high blood pressure), he sat down to tell gay stories of the life of all these earlier Kings.

The tales (Mine Enemy Grows Older) were tall, often funny, sometimes vulgar, and full of invective. After several plugs on the Jack Paar show, Enemy zoomed to a hard-cover sale of 150,000 copies. Its sequel, May This House Be Safe from Tigers, reached the top of the bestseller list last week, rocketed along at a clip of 1,500 copies a day. Plainly, Alexander King threatens never willingly to become an ex-autobiographer.

Angry Old Man. King is a superior monologuist, even though his prose is not housebroken and some of his stories seem to have filtered through sewer pipes. In style and substance, he is a throwback to the iconoclastic '20s, one of the last of the angry old men who picked up the idol-smashing habit from H. L. Mencken.

Like Enemy, Tigers celebrates oddballs Author King has known. The title itself comes from a Zen Buddhist pal who always uttered "his senseless little orison" on leaving King's apartment. After three years, King exploded, "What is the meaning of this idiot prayer?" "Well," said the hurt friend, "have you been bothered by any tigers lately?"

Then there was Rose O'Neill, a plumpish pixy who invented the Kewpie doll. After a wall switch broke, the lights in her house stayed on uninterruptedly for 16 years. Rosie had a favorite cat that entered her bedroom each morning through a private little six-inch door and dutifully placed a dead bird at the foot of her bed.

The most poignantly comic weirdie of the lot was Waldemar Schindl, a soulful inventor living in an isolated hamlet in the Austrian Alps. When King visited him in the late '20s, Schindl unveiled a machine that looked like a badly made cast-iron bird cage. The contraption gave an enormous heave and one of the wires stabbed at a piece of paper. It suddenly dawned on King that "that poor old chowder-head had -- all by himself up here in this moonstruck eyrie -- reinvented the typewriter."

The Sausage Machine. The chief character in Tiger is, of course, Author King. He is occasionally graced with a valid in sight, but it is his hates that King truly prizes, and he has collected an awesome passel of them. He loathes beatniks ("clinical psychopaths, overt pansies or fulltime dope fiends") and millionaires. He detests TIME, LIFE (where he was once an associate editor) and FORTUNE, closely followed by The New Yorker ("frequently stinks up the neighborhood") and Look. Art critics are "rapacious vermin," and modern art is in a "putrescent coma." The theater world is full of "exhibitionistic freaks" and "cold blooded connivers."

He hates Billy Graham, Perry Como, Southerners, Mother's Day, dogs ("vulgar love proletarians"), advertising ("a soggy, overripe fungus"), Guy Lombardo, Ernest Hemingway, and Harry J. Anslinger, the head of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics. TV is in the hands of "lentilheaded sponsors' wives" and represents "some sort of gargantuan hoax," with one or two exceptions. (His own talk program, Alex in Wonderland, which is now being syndicated nationally, "is as refreshing as a breath of stale air in a vacuum.") As for people in general, they are "adenoidal baboons" caught in life's "erratically op erated sausage machine."

Operating his prose sausage machine at full tilt, Author King finally seems to squeeze only venom out of all the joy, beauty and wonder he professes to find in the world.

For a man whose verbal policy is not massive retaliation but massive assault, Alexander King is startlingly wispy in physique and disarmingly gentle in manner. His droopy white mustache straggles for existence on a face that frequently crinkles with shrewd, sloe-eyed smiles. King (original name: Koenig) came to the U.S. just before World War I with his father, a research chemist, and a lovably scatterbrained mother.

Young Alex was an only child and is still waspishly glad about it: "What would my brother be doing? He'd be a horrible ass of some sort--a terrible gland case." Alex was "rocked" by the urge to paint when he first saw the works of Brueghel, but he modeled himself on George Grosz with a dash of Salvador Dali. The walls of his Park Avenue apartment are lined with pictures that look like bad dreams. King switched to illustrating books for bread-and-butter money, then bolted to journalism, and after his LIFE stint became managing editor of Stage. "Then I really hit bottom," says King. "I started writing plays." None of them were notably successful.

From Morphine to Coke. Starting in 1945, King hit the lower depths of a decade of drug addiction. A doctor prescribed morphine for his kidney ailment, and Alex was soon hooked. He is bitter about U.S. treatment of addicts, which he believes to be medievally retarded, and attributes his cure to that hallowed remedy, the love of a good woman--his fourth and current wife, Margie Lou Swett, 26, a svelte and self-possessed singer who sometimes doubles on snare drums on his television show.

King's work day begins with a deep-think session in a hot tub followed by ten hours at a hot desk. Nothing, apparently, can silence his own snare drums of opinion, or keep him from lapsing into double negatives when excited. Sample, on religion: "I think there is no religious revival at all. Fra Angelico kneeled to the Madonna because he was going to paint her, and she was his God. We don't kneel down to nothing any more, not even to a cash register."

On the 20th century: "We had our century and we muffed it. We put Coca-Cola bottles in Old Vienna. It couldn't be sadder."

$100,000 & Up. As an old boy from Old Vienna, Alex King is too savvy not to know that his brand of nonconformity is a hotter commercial item right now than togetherness. Before Mine Enemy grows weeks older (it just appeared in a paperback edition), the royalties from that book alone will cross the $100,000 mark. The third volume of King's memoirs is under way, and will contain no anecdotes ("It is about me"). Perhaps he has been wounded by a recent sally. "I notice," said a fellow wit, "that you are not going to ruin your autobiography by putting your life into it."

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