The Theatre: Elmer

Twelve years ago George M. Cohan and the late, great Ring Lardner pooled their talents and their mutual enthusiasm for baseball, produced Elmer the Great, a farcical saga of a rookie pitcher with an arm like a whip and a Model T brain. A story goes when Lardner first saw the show on Broadway, he was convinced that it was terrible. He acknowledged as his own only one line of the script. He underestimated both the play and his part in its conception. Elmer spoke Ring Lardners language, proved as durable as his Alibi Ike. Last week, with a few of its gags refurbished, Elmer the Great was in the groove again at the Cape Playhouse at Dennis, Mass.

Star of the revival was shovel-mouthed, small-voiced Joe E. (for Evan) Brown, who has played the role before, both on the stage and in the movies, is a plausible and funny Elmer. Marvelous to witness was the enthusiasm with which he tore through food at each performance. In the course of an hour and a half as Elmer, he consumes a slice of ham, a batch of fried potatoes, four griddle cakes with syrup, a piece of pie, two cups of coffee, two apples, half a grapefruit, a glass of orange juice, two doughnuts, a slice of toast and a bit of shad roe. Only recently released from a Los Angeles hospital, where (after an auto accident) he spent over six months in a cast with a broken back, Brown was in fine digestive fettle, managed his stage eating with no aid from bicarbonate.

With his revival of Elmer, Brown hopes to give his career a shot in the arm. Once on a long-term contract with Warner Bros., Brown has of late years worked under a three-pictures-a-year contract with Independent Producer David Loew. Elmer suits Brown. He is himself a frustrated ballplayer who once did a training-camp turn for the Yankees. When he was with War ners, Brown organized and coached a semiprofessional studio ball team, had it specified in his contract that all players would be kept on the payroll as long as himself. A middle-aged Frank Merriwell, he neither drinks nor smokes, maintains a sporting shrine in his Brentwood home near Hollywood. Among the trophies on display in the shrine are the gloves Dempsey used to knock out Willard, the shoes Paddock wore when he broke the 100-yard dash record, the bat Babe Ruth employed when he knocked out his 60th home run in one season.

No college man himself, Brown is an athletic patron saint of the University of California at Los Angeles. He donates fancy water wagons to the U. C. L. A. football team, awards a loving cup to the university’s most valuable football player every year, frequently presides over athletic banquets. Two years ago he was taken in as a regular member of Zeta Psi, to which his sons Joe Leroy and Don Evan belong, went through the traditional initiation. He is the only nonstudent ever to get a letter from U. C. L. A., an honor that has impressed him so much that he usually wears his blue “C” on a sweater when he idles about his house. After Brown’s auto accident last year, U. C. L. A. students held a special mass meeting to pray for his recovery. He responded by showing up a few weeks later to watch a football game from a stretcher.