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S.J. Perelman in Hollywood
Being away from the West Coast makes me think about the West Coast. And thinking about the West Coast reminds me of S.J. Perelman. Because no one was a worse audience for the polymer charms of Hollywood than the Brooklyn-born humorist.
Perelman arrived in Los Angeles, 1931, where he was hired to punch-up scripts for two Marx Brothers movies, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. Thirty-two years later, when George Plimpton interviewed him for The Paris Review, Perelman replied with typical archness about his time in the film trade. “The closest analogy I can draw to describe the place is that it strikingly resembled the Sargasso Sea, an immense, turgidly revolving whirlpool in which literary hulks encrusted with verdigris moldered until they sank,” Perelman said.
Despite his revulsion, Perelman continued to visit Hollywood every couple years, usually on business, until his death in 1979. Here, in his essay “Back Home in Tinseltown”, he describes the people he passed on Vine Street one afternoon in the mid-1970s:
If many were Hare Krishnas, a sect undreamt of in the thirties, most of the pedestrians were the same old screwballs and screwboxes — losers of beauty contests, shoe salesmen and similar voyeurs, absconding bank cashiers, unemployed flagellants, religious messiahs, and jail bait.
—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalism | Tumblr | Twitter
