A SHAKY START

WASHINGTON'S scruffy Ambassador Theater, normally a pad for psychedelic frolics, was the scene of an unscheduled scatological solo last week in support of the peace demonstrations. Its anti-star was Author Norman Mailer, who proved even less prepared to explain Why Are We in Viet Nam? than his current novel bearing that title.

Slurping liquor from a coffee mug, Mailer faced an audience of 600, most of them students, who had kicked in $1,900 for a bail fund against Saturday's capers. "I don't want to grandstand unduly," he said, grandly but barely standing.

It was one of his few coherent sentences. Mumbling and spewing obscenities as he staggered about the stage--which he had commandeered by threatening to beat up the previous M.C.--Mailer described in detail his search for a usable privy on the premises. Excretion, in fact, was his preoccupation of the night. "I'm here because I'm like L.B.J.," was one of Mailer's milder observations.

"He's as full of crap as I am." When hecklers mustered the temerity to shout "Publicity hound!" at him, Mailer managed to pronounce flawlessly his all-purpose noun, verb and expletive: "**** you"

Dwight Macdonald, the bearded literary critic, was aghast at the barroom bathos, but failed to argue Mailer off the platform. Macdonald eventually squeezed in the valorous observation that Ho Chi Minh was really no better than Dean Rusk. After more obscenities, Mailer introduced Poet Robert Lowell, who got annoyed at requests to speak louder. "I'll bellow, but it won't do any good," he said, and proceeded to read from Lord Weary's Castle. By the time the action shifted to the Pentagon, Mailer was perky enough to get himself arrested by two marshals. "I transgressed a police line," he explained with some pride on the way to the lockup, where the toilet facilities are scarce indeed and the coffee mugs low-octane.

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