Lay Off the Muses

He vowed he would never do it again. But last week Humorist S. J. Perelman was tinkering with a new play.

The Beauty Part has already had a late summer stock tryout--a two-week run at Producer Michael Ellis' Bucks County Playhouse (TIME, July 7). It is Perelman's first, cautious flirtation with the stage since he swore off theatrical writing after a minor disaster called Sweet Bye and Bye closed on the road in 1947. On opening night Perelman was horrified to hear Star Bert Lahr forgetting roughly half his lines, filling in the gaps with Chinese proverbs of his own invention. But Lahr eventually learned his part, and Producer Ellis began arrangements to take The Beauty Part to Manhattan this winter, bringing Perelman back to Broadway for the first time since One Touch of Venus closed 16 years ago.

Ideals & Eyeteeth. Sprung partly, and loosely, from several of his casual pieces in The New Yorker, The Beauty Part more or less concentrates on the theme that U.S. society is full of nuts who earn their living as plumbers or admen but who really think they are artists and writers; private eyes spend their free time "making collages out of seaweed and graham crackers," and "every housewife in America has a novel under her apron." Cruising around the stage by way of illustration are some of the most spectacular phonies since Piltdown man.

Into this sham-fest the playwright throws a rich young Yaleman, full of boola, moola and ideals, trying to pursue an honest artistic career. Along the way, he is buffeted by a whipcracking female magazine publisher (Lahr), a Hollywood producer named Harry Hubris (Lahr), and his own father, Milo Leotard Allardyce DuPlessis Weatherwax (also Lahr), a wild Park Avenue lecher. When his son admits a literary interest in the exotic sins suggested by Lolita and the works of Oscar Wilde, Weatherwax bellows encouragingly: "That's the stuff to cut your eyeteeth on. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk."

Corrupted Yalie. Softened by these blows, the boy sags still more when he falls in love with a full-grown nymph (not played by Lahr, but by a half-wrapped nougat named Patricia Englund). And his last ideal cracks like a bone when his friend and adviser, a dedicated artist named Goddard Quagmeyer, sells out to Hollywood, puts on a purple beret, salmon-colored suit, orange ascot, pink shirt, and develops nine simultaneous tics. He is further disillusioned when he meets the president of Charnel House, a publisher with a marked resemblance to Publisher Bennett (Random House) Cerf, who announces: "Harry Hubris and I have never met vis-a-vis, but in the aristocracy of success there are no strangers." In the end, the Yalie is so corrupted that he slips a $500,000 bribe to a California judge (Lahr) to help his sweetheart beat an indecency rap (dancing with a gorilla while scantily clad).

But The Beauty Part is not a collection of isolated gags. From Greenwich Village to Hollywood, the play is stitched throughout with the oblique, neatly sutured, thematic wit of S. J. Perelman. The display of words is, in fact, so dazzling that any mail-order Melville in the audience must get the message along with the fellow from Yale: "Lay off the Muses. It's a very tough dollar."

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