Books: The Hairy Jape

THE PINK HOTEL (255 pp.)—Dorothy Erskine and Patrick Dennis—Putnam ($3.50).

HOUSE PARTY (274 pp.)—Virginia Rowans—Crowell ($3.50).

Edward Everett Tanner III is the Schweppesman of U.S. letters; his books have the sparkle, and he has the beard.

Tanner bottles his bestselling fizz under polypseudonymous labels. As Patrick Dennis he created the madwoman of Beekman Place, Auntie Mame. As Virginia Rowans he examined The Loving Couple and its five-year itch. Again as Dennis, he wrote (with Barbara Hooton) Guestward Ho!, the saddle-slipping saga of a Manhattan couple turned dude-ranch managers. On the assumption that the public is now hopelessly Tanner-Dennis-Rowans-addicted, his publishers are currently offering two seasonal pick-me-ups, one a reissue entitled House Party (originally published in 1954) and the other a collaboration with Dorothy (The Crystal Boat) Erskine called The Pink Hotel. Neither equals the highly carbonated humors of Auntie Mame, but each is bubbly enough to fill the summer air with burps of spasmodic mirth.

Paging Krafft-Ebing. Built during the Florida boom, the pink hotel is “a Mistinguett, a Magda Lupescu among hotels—old and slightly raddled . . . waiting patiently for the chosen few who could afford its haughty hospitality.” The raffish oddballs who people the Dennis-Erskine hotel are pretty special, and would have raised Krafft-Ebing’s interest if not his eyebrows. There is T. J. Sturt III, a millionaire alcoholic who wears a pink girdle and phones random city fire departments to announce blazes of mysterious origin. There is seventyish L. Harvey Crull Jr., who puts under doors pamphlets announcing the Second Coming and chases upstairs maids into enclosed fire escapes. The hotel manager himself is a puffy homosexual who sleeps in “the very bed Madame Pompadour had once slept in. (Of course the mattress was new).”

What with a suicide, a normal death, an abortion, an aristocratic nymphomaniac and a wig-fetishist of an elevator operator, The Pink Hotel might have rated a black mark in any Baedeker except for Author Dennis’ quips and quiddities, e.g., anent the nouveaux riches: “Better nouveau than never.” The book also enjoys spoofing the Hippocratic oath of the hotel business. “What is a Guest? A Guest is the most important person in this hotel . . . We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a service by permitting us to do so.” After staging a hectically traditional Christmas Eve party (“Ah doan think it’s fai-yuh fo’ the Social Hostiss ta hafta plan meals fo’ eight reindeer”), the Dennis-Erskine team burns its screwy pleasure palace right down to the ground, but not before a nice boy meets a nice girl there—object, simple matrimony.

On a Par with Shakespeare. In House Party, four men and four women meet and mate. This puts Author Rowans on a par with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, apart from which House Party resembles A Comedy of Errors. To the antediluvian Ames mansion at Pruitt’s Landing, an “unspoiled” Long Island town, repairs the following partial cast of characters, some Ameses and some not: a superannuated dandy who is chauffeured about in a Hotchkiss landaulet; a Manhattan model; a frustrated young architect who works for Vahan Rabadab Associates (“All Rabadab buildings looked like banks of file cabinets with the drawers open”); a proletarian scowler (“No thanks, I don’t usually bathe until Saturday night”); a divorcee with an “I’m-a-dangerous-woman voice cribbed from old Libby Holman records”; a bristling general “who had never heard a gun fired in earnest since the Boxer Rebellion”; and a “king-sized Shirley Temple.”

In the ensuing melee, the phonies and the realies square off and pair off in what might be called drawers-room comedy. House Party is much like The Awful Truth, My Man Godfrey, and other films of that happy age and ilk, and probably the only reason Hollywood scouts have merely nibbled at the book till now is that they get the sensation of already having seen the movie.

Currently, “Pat” Tanner has little to fear from Hollywood scouts or from critical sharpshooters. For weeks last year he set a record by having three of his books on the bestseller lists at the same time. Since January 1955 the wackiest aunt since Charley’s has been Tanner’s fairy godmother. With sales of more than 1,000,000 copies in hard and soft covers, Auntie Mame’s book, play and screen loot has grossed 36-year-old Tanner most of his first half-million (“After taxes, I have an incrumb of 15¢ on the dollar”).

In pre-Mame days he kept busy patching up other people’s novels, ghostwriting and being promotion manager for Foreign Affairs. Seen on a midtown Manhattan street, tall, lean, blue-eyed Tanner decked in a midnight-blue Homburg, with umbrella tightly furled, could still pass for a refugee from the British Foreign Office. Though Pat’s grey-flecked brown beard predates Commander “Schweppes” Whitehead’s ambassadorship (Tanner grew his during a wartime stint as ambulance driver with the American Field Service attached to the French army), he and the commander have done some mutual theorizing in and on their beards: “The beard flourishes whenever there is a Queen on the throne of England. We’ve decided that when you’re bearded that’s the only eccentricity you’re allowed—no flowered waistcoats, nothing else. And you have to be much cleaner—immaculate.”

That Dow-Jones Boy. Pat allows himself one eccentricity besides the beard. He collects clocks, has “20 or 30 of them,” mostly ornate gilded continental models with trick features. Samples: a globe-shaped item with a set-in castle scene over which the sun and moon rise at appropriate times; a miniature tower clock in a living-room painting that goes off every 15 minutes (“You should be around at midnight. It’s orgiastic”).

The clocks go off in a seven-room apartment in Manhattan’s East 90s, which Tanner, his wife Louise and their two children (boy and girl) will desert in the fall for a town house. Tanner is masterminding the rebuilding of this now-gutted dream house: the brownstone front will be limestone, the ceiling in the maid’s sitting room will be knocked out to create the wall space needed to hang some heirloom tapestries “with a lot of people in codpieces out looking for something.” Tanner’s spiritual home (his father was formerly a broker on the Chicago Board of Trade) is really another decade. “I’m a pre-crash item. You know, those vulgar colored cars, baroque faucets and so on. And you should see my Charleston.”

His talent is as an entertainer, and he has the fragility of his frivolity. Perhaps he could best be ticketed as an American P. G. Wodehouse. His Mame-brained characters with their vestigial memories of wealth and lineage are certainly kin to those of the great master of total piffle. Tanner’s trade is boom-escapism; the preferred temperature for hatching one of his books is a Dow-Jones average of 500 or better. Satisfied holders of Auntie Mame can look forward to a fat stock dividend, which Tanner expects to declare on next spring’s publishing list. Auntie Mame is going to Europe, though she will scarcely be an innocent abroad. Tentative title: Around the World with Auntie Mame.