Books: Whoops Sisters

WHOOPS, DEARIE!—Peter Arno— Simon & Schuster ($1.75). Their weekly parade in the New Yorker (Manhattan smart-chart) has long been an event—Pansy Smiff and Abagail Flusser of the muffs and flounces and awry plumed bonnets, their potato noses high in air, their cavernous, Cruikshankian mouths thrown open in something like:

(in a Central Park row boat)

“Gor! Pipe the sailors! Comin’ right towards us, too.”

“Now you mind yerself, Pansy! Don’t ‘ave no truck wit sailors!”

“Lordy! Is that a way t’ talk about yer nation’s defenders? Ain’t yuh no patriotism?”

“Not in a rowboat, dearie— Whoops!”

They are popularly called the Whoops Sisters, having been formally christened only for presentation in this book. Manholes, gang-planks and revolving doors make you think of them. Also any raucous indelicacy where none but the innocent bystander is embarrassed.

But in book form they are not quite so funny. Artist Peter Arno created them with so few strokes of his charcoal and such a rare vein of middle-aged-female innuendo, that their gusto seems stifled when, located in a charity home, with a zither player, a retired fireman, an orphan oaf called Fester, a man with an elephant, and a Park Avenue dowager for companions, they become heroines of a story of which the dizziness does not compensate for the length. The upshot of the story is that Mrs. Flusser inherits $20,000,000 and the old gals pack up their Sunday stays and hug-me-tights to go and live in style.