Books: A Star Is Farrowed

DIRTY EDDIE (240 pp.) — Ludwig Bemelmans—Viking ($2.75).

” ‘Nice pig,’ said Moses Fable, who usually paid no attention to bit players and extras.” The pig, Dirty Eddie, black, underprivileged, but unmistakably talented, is the hero of Ludwig Bemelmans’ third whimsical novel. Moses Fable was the fleshy, flashy chief of Hollywood’s Olympia Studios. Bemelmans (Hotel Splendide, I Love You, I Love You, I Love You) gets more out of a pig than Swift and Armour (they miss the whimsy as well as the squeal). Dirty Eddie becomes a $5,000-a-week movie star who earns himself swill-pails of fan mail.

Discovery. Eddie’s arrival in Hollywood provided an answer to Olympia Studios’ most stunning problem: what to do with the exact duplicate of Paris’ Gare St.-Lazare which somebody had constructed on the lot. And it ended the creative impasse between Scripters Ludlow Mumni and Maurice Cassard. Mumm was a solemn, devout Manhattan liberal who was driven to picket lines by a chauffeur. Cassard was a rumpled, realistic Frenchman, who admitted to an impulse to vomit into the hats of “Stork Club Communists.” They were working together on the script of Moses Fable’s preposterous musical, Will You Marry Me?—and getting nowhere. One day, driving in the San Fernando Valley, Cassard ran over and hospitalized Dirty Eddie. Cassard had found his ideal teammate.

Working with Dirty Eddie, Cassard thought he could make a big boffola*of Will Y.ou Marry Me? The Gare St.-Lazare became Chicago’s La Salle Street Station —a more appropriate background for Eddie, who played a key role in a plot more complicated than Crime, and Punishment. Eddie was sensational. Said Producer Vanya Vashvily: “. . . the worst director can’t harm him. His left profile is as good as his right.” But trouble started when, right in the middle of shooting, the farmer who owned Eddie refused to let him act at a piddling $40 a week.

Holdout. Eddie staged a two-month holdout for $5,000 a week, got it after the studio screen-tested hundreds of other pigs, found Eddie irreplaceable. But when the film was run off, Moses Fable “uttered a wild cry of pain.” The screen showed a pig implausibly growing smaller as the film went on. The last part of the film had been shot first when Eddie was only half the size he achieved during his two-month strike.

Bemelmans himself has done time as a Hollywood scripter. The story he tells is as damply sentimental as any screened by Moses Fable. But his eye is as sharp as a vermicologist’s for the peculiar inhabitants of the peculiar Hollywood world—a world that Dirty Eddie holds in his mouth like a candied apple in a delicatessen’ boar’s head.

-Variant of the Hollywood term, “Boffo Terrif,” big box-office smash.