Un-100% American

"Your article on Marilyn Monroe," read the letter to Columnist Al Ricketts of the Pacific Stars and Stripes in Tokyo, "was just plain lousy, unfair, unjust, un-100% red-blooded American, and nuts to you." The reader's gorge had risen over an unchivalrous evaluation of the film actress in Ricketts' column "On the Town": "There are gals in Hollywood who have more sex appeal in their eyelashes than Marilyn can cram into a gownless evening strap. They can also deliver dialogue without sounding like their mouths are full of Purina."

The gorge of Al Ricketts' readers is forever rising. Of the Pacific Stars and Stripes columnists, who include Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop, Red Smith and Lovelornist Abigail Van Buren, the most widely read by far is Ricketts, a Buddha-shaped (5 ft. 4 in., 175 Ibs.) 32-year-old who chomps a long black cigar with a ferocity suggestive of filmdom's bad guy, Edward G. Robinson (see cut). The Ricketts wit is the sort that leads to lynching. As entertainment editor of the Pacific Stars and Stripes, the U.S. armed forces newspaper in the Far East with a circulation of 65,000 and an estimated readership of 200,000, Ricketts reviews some 250 movies a year.

Pin Sticker. The chore brings out the worst in him. He has called Alan Ladd "the mightiest midget of them all," John Payne "a grimacing sweat bead," and Comic Mort Sahl "the thinking man's Roscoe Ates." He summarized Ocean's 11, starring Frank Sinatra, as an "Our Gang comedy for grownups." The Fugitive Kind, a movie based on a Tennessee Williams play, was ''Tennessee Williams tromping around barefooted again in that same old Dixie cup." Dazed by an endless procession of indefatigable ants in Walt Disney's Secrets of Life, Ricketts wrote: "They know nothing but work, work, work and sex, sex, sex. Where they find the time to spoil picnics, we'll never know." Now and then, in rare moments of softness, the Ricketts hostility wanes: "We-we liked-liked Can-Can."

Such observations, appearing daily, have established Ricketts as the leader of a Far East cult whose followers exist mainly to revile him. "Your tastes coincide with a slob," raged one such. "I stick pins in your column only in the hope that you will not sleep at night." An American film exhibitor in Tokyo, infuriated by Ricketts' reviews, made him a standing offer of free air passage home; when Ricketts allowed that he found Elvis Presley's "hiccuping" intolerable, students at Yokohama High School wrathfully formed a Send Al Ricketts to Mars Club. Recently, the irate husband of a belly dancer whose abdomen Ricketts had impugned challenged the columnist to a duel; Ricketts escaped the field of honor by inviting his prospective adversary to even the score by insulting Mrs. Ricketts.

Passing Mood. Albert Davis Ricketts Jr. ("Whoever heard of a columnist named Albert Davis Ricketts Jr.?") was born in St. Louis, broke up a foundering nightclub comedy team--he played straight man--to enlist in the Army in 1952. Sent to the Orient, he drifted onto the Pacific Stars and Stripes as a second-string movie reviewer, a job he regarded as license to torpedo everything he saw.

In the course of earning a reputation as "that fat character with guts," Ricketts began his daily column, did so well that the paper offered him a steady job after his Army discharge. Today the Pacific Stars and Stripes is inclined to view its civilian entertainment editor much as the New York Yankees view Slugger Mickey Mantle--although the paper pays him only $7,600 a year plus a cost-of-living allowance.

Ricketts sometimes chafes at the restrictions, however mild, of working for what is essentially a serviceman's newspaper. But such moods pass. Married to a Canadian-Nisei whom he met at a party, tooling around Tokyo in his crimson MG, demolishing a movie or some visiting star, reading with great pleasure the latest stack of scurrilous mail, Al Ricketts has everything he wants. Says he: "I'm doing a job I love in a town I love."

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