Books: Sweet Smell of Success

POOR NO MORE (706 pp.)—Robert Ruark—Holt ($5.95).

Craig Price, the financier hero of Robert Ruark’s new novel, makes such a point of drinking, uttering menaces, shooting lions and helling about with women, that one suspects him of wearing a toupee—all that chest hair can’t be real. At any rate, he is a standard literary article —the poor boy who gouges his way to wealth. The author’s account of the gouging has its moments, but doggedly lumped together, they become hours.

It is not long before the reader is benumbed and desperate, like a man trapped at a cocktail party by a character who insists on reciting everything he knows about textile mills, adultery and elephant hunting.

In part. Old Pro Ruark may have been betrayed by a compulsion to be autobiographical. Hero Price follows Author Ruark’s trail almost exactly as he grows up in a small North Carolina town (Ruark was born in Wilmington, N.C.) and gets his schooling at Chapel Hill, where he becomes involved with bootleggers (Ruark says he had “a connection with Texas Guinan’s brother, who had a connection in New Jersey”). After that, the author departs from his own life story and builds Craig Price into a villain who marries for money, fires his secretary-mistress and his best friend in a deal with a racketeering unionist, and beggars countless widows and orphans in a stock fraud—all without altering his own good opinion of himself. The odd thing is that Author Ruark seems to share that good opinion. “Cash” Price, the coldhearted moneyman, has most of the personal characteristics (villainy aside) of Robert Ruark himself: a fondness for Brioni suits, Peal’s boots and Joe Bushkin’s piano playing; a distaste for the Stork Club and ladylike male authors. Can such a man be altogether bad?

Barroom Dickens. Novelist Ruark has a sometimes fascinating knack for evoking the smell of money in print, is effectively sarcastic about such subjects as the boredom of suburban marriages. He is perhaps at his best writing about bars, which he does with all the poignancy of Dickens describing Christmas dinner at the Cratch-its’. But when Price’s comeuppance arrives—wine, women and the SEC have made him a pauper—the reader finds it hard to believe that the man is truly shattered. This may be because an ex-wife gallantly bails him out with a $1,000,000 gift. At book’s end, Craig broods, in italics: “How very rich he’d be if he owned anything except the million dollars waiting for him in Switzerland.”

A candle, burning at both ends, is printed on the cover of Poor No More. It may be intended to symbolize the state of society, or of the book’s hero, but it might just as well represent brightly burning Author Ruark. Since World War II, besides his syndicated column, old Reporter Ruark (Washington Daily News) has churned out magazine articles, movie scripts and half a dozen books, including the bloody Mau Mau bestseller, Something of Value (TIME, May 2, 1955). All this has taken its toll—several million dollars after taxes, Ruark estimates happily.

Ham All Around. Being poor no more, Bob Ruark can and does travel where he likes, maintains a house in London and two in Spain, is an ilustrisimo Knight Commander of Spain’s Order of Civil Merit. Not the least of the Knight’s luxuries is a former sergeant-major in the British army named Alan Ritchie, who serves him as secretary, listens to his plots develop, and transcribes Ruark’s massive manuscripts.

A crack shot, Ruark has given up big-game hunting, explains: “I’ve just lost the taste for seeing things die.” He still rambles off on safaris, photographing the big game and potting birds for dinner. (His barstool story is that his white hunter imitates a lovelorn female rhino, and when a nearsighted male rumbles toward the sound, Ruark hangs his hat on the beast’s horn and the hunter slaps a Ritz Hotel sticker on its behind.) Ruark will spend the next few months “doing all of Africa” for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, because “I have a hunch that 99 million natives are going to make noise in the Union around Christmas, and I want to be there.” In his hushpuppy accent (a defense mechanism, he claims), Bob Ruark adds: “You show me a guy writes a column or book and ain’t a ham and I’ll show you a bad writer. Man, I’m ham inside, outside and all around.”