Glimpses of a Half-Century

A KIND OF MAGIC by Edna Ferber. 335 pages. Doubleday. $5.75.

Five feet tall and 76 years old, Edna Ferber is a human word factory. Over the past 52 years she has co-authored seven plays and written 25 books. Slick, romantic and melodramatic, her novels will never win her an interview with the Paris Review. But she is an acerbic, perceptive, witty, opinionated, thoroughly delightful woman, and this second volume of her autobiography provides charming glimpses of a fascinating life.

Strictly speaking, A Kind of Magic begins in 1938 and covers the years of Saratoga Trunk, Giant and Ice Palace. But Author Ferber roams as far back as her days as a $3-a-week cub reporter with the Appleton, Wis., Crescent. Never married, she has had an exuberant, lifelong love affair with "this fantastically rich and spectacular, this gorgeously electric and vital country." Bridgeport and Ashtabula interest her as much as Berlin and Athens, and in a few incisive words she can draw an ineradicable image of a city or a country. "Gray, shrouded, crumbling" Galveston reminds her of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, and Israel is "a sort of Jewish Texas, without oil wells."

Todd in Uniform. Though Author Ferber indulges in no idle name-dropping, people like the Lunts, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Noel Coward and George Kaufman troop through the pages of her book. In her one stage appearance in The Royal Family, a savagely funny take-off of the Barrymores, which she wrote with Kaufman, Louis Calhern accidentally dropped her on her bottom as he carried her up a stage staircase. In Paris during the last days of World War II, she met Mike Todd decked out in what appeared to be a porter's uniform decorated with countless rows of ribbons, medals, and stars and bars of every rank. "Any sonofabitch Nazi catches me," said Todd, "he'll give me the VIP treatment." During the filming of Giant, the picture's co-producer appeared on the set one day, ashen-faced after a terrifying drive through the studio back lot with James Dean. "Shoot those extra Jimmy Dean scenes quick," he told Director George Stevens. "He's going to kill himself in that car."

Author Ferber gives low marks to writers who wait for inspiration to strike, tries to pound out 1,000 words every day of the week. She is justly proud that all of her bestsellers are still in print and that the early ones have been read by four generations. Shortly she hopes to post one milestone that few other authors have reached in their lifetimes; in just four years, her first book will legally be in the public domain.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.