BROTHER CAN YOU SPARE A DRAMAMINE?

 

The well-considered man of letters and abstruse counter of numbers, S. J. Perelman, reposed 43 years ago on the morrow. Although the exact date is hard to pin down with a Lepidopterist’s factuality because Groucho Marx kept digging Perelman up to micturate on the storied essayist. A feat even more impressive when you consider Groucho had a prostate the size of Margaret Dumont’s mammilla and pissing on anything had been a Herculean task for the old vaudevillian for almost a decade. Plus, Groucho himself had passed two years earlier.

 To say the two old men’s relationship was a cabalistic complication would be an understatement of Emperor Hirohito-ish propositions, although neither man had Hirohito’s experience on the business end of a nuclear warhead, but not for lack of trying. 

A fan of Perelman’s first novel, Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge, Groucho had commissioned Perelman to cobble together a radio script, which evolved into the screenplay for the pre-code movie Monkey Business in 1931, as well as a flagstone walkway in his garden, which evolved into a disused stack of debris and abatis. Groucho considered Perelman’s script (written with Will B. Johnstone) to be too intellectual for a Marx Brother’s movie and brought in three gag writers to dumb it down. The gag men were also told to remove the flagstone and Perelman’s bicycle from the property; although Groucho then retained Perelman, along with Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, to compose the brother’s next film, Horse Feathers.

Perelman demanded the return of his two-wheeler, which never happened, but he was later gifted with an Oscar for his diegesis Around the World in 80 Days, which felicitous actress Hermione Gingold prudently consummated for him, informing the assemblage that Perelman only wrote the script under the express understand that the film would never be shown. 

Groucho also procured an Oscar in 1974, abet an honorary one. His speech could best be incarnated by a Professor Wagstaff quote from Horse Feathers, which may or may not have been written, sans bicycle, by Perelman, depending on who you believe, ‘Well, I thought my razor was dull until I heard his speech. And that reminds me of a story that’s so dirty I’m ashamed to think of it myself’.

As time passed like golden water through a spavinedly envious penis, both great wits gathered dust on the mizzen shelf of the zeitgeist, replaced by the mentally dexterous aptitudes of your Tracy Morgans and your Jimmy Fallons, spinning flaxen feuilleton to the waiting masses.

Who know from whence the ill will between Perelman and Groucho came. By all accounts, and countesses, all the Marx Brothers could be a royal pain in the mizzen shelf to work with, but then, so could Perelman. Peradventure Perelman was just plan ennuied of questions about the Marx Brothers in every catechism he gave the press, while having only worked with them not more than a jot of his prodigious oeuvre. Not impossibly, did Groucho impute Perelman for the Algonquin Round Table misprizing him while infolding his brother Harpo? 

Perhaps an inkling, or even a full-grown ink, to the riff can be found in a section of what was thought to be a long-lost Neil Simon play, Bissel Zatz. Written in 1972, between The Prisoner of Second Avenue and The Good Doctor, Simon’s Bissel Zatz concerned the misadventures of a hoary vaudevillian struggling to be relevant in the modern theatre, and reaching out to an old friend, a writer, to help him excogitate a new act and move some furniture to the crawlway.

The theatrical manuscript was deemed irretrievable when beloved thespian Marsha Mason set the first draft ablaze in a fit a jealousy while still in Simon’s typewriter. She then climbed out of the typewriter after expressing to Simon, Doc to his friends, that he was spending too much time with his wife. In Simon’s defense, his wife was dying of cancer at the times, and while Simon was not a real Doctor, undoubtedly, she appreciated her consort’s comradery at her bedside.

Rather that start all over again, Simon scrapped the project and began work on The Sunshine Boys. A carbon of a partial scene in the first act of Bissel Zatz was recovered when Simon’s papers were being turned over to the Library of Congress in April of 2022 and a slight charred page fell out of an intern. The library hadn’t asked for Simon’s papers, but Doc’s wife at the time of his passing, Elaine, needed the room in their apartment for her Peloton Bike.

The chanced-on page contained a soliloquy by the main character, Zatz, given, as is the nature of the Simon folio, on the telephone to his mother, and opens a door to what might have been the nature of the relationship between Perelman and Groucho. Neil Simon had written in his notes that Agnetha Faltskog of the band ABBA might be approached to play Zatz on Broadway, which made no sense because Agnetha was a willowy, Teutonic blond woman and Zatz is described clearly in the play as a 70-year-old, short, fat Jewish man, but like all of American in 1972, it was obvious Simon had also fallen under the spell of ABBA insanely danceable sweet meats of music, and the chanteuse’s skin tight cat suits.

SCENE: The apartment of Zatz, on West 10^th, between 5^th & 6^th with a view of Central Park afforded by angling three mirrors just right. Katz is, a 70-year-old, short, fat Jewish man wearing a silky white cat suit that leave little to the imagination. With nothing to imagine, he picks up the telephone and barks into it.

 

Zatz: Hello?.... Hello, Operator? Get me Gevalt 3-3847… What do you mean you don’t use prefixes anymore? Oy Gevalt! Just get me J.J. Pearlstein on the blower… Well, his number was Gevalt 3-3847, but apparently that was too convenient for Ma Bell. Just get me J.J. Pearlstein, please… What do you mean, you’re not an Information Operator. You work at Ma Bell don’t you?... Well, ask around the office. I’m sure someone there has J.J. Pearlman’s phone number. He’s an Oscar winning screenwriter for crying out loud. You know, I have an Oscar myself? No, it’s not a saltwater tank. What the hell are you talking about?… Yes… I’m aware an Oscar can be fish, yes, but in this case I’m talking about the penultimate award an actor can receive from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences… What?... It is so a science… How do you think they get all the people in front of the camera inside the camera? Science… No, I don’t know the exact way they do it, but it’s science, with chemicals and guys in white coats and everything. Speaking of guys in white coats, did you take your medication this morning?... Yes, I am cracking wise, but I’m out of practice. That’s why I need to get ahold of Pearlstein… J. J. Pearlstein. Could I spell it? Which part, the Pearlstein or the J.J.? You know what, forget it. Just get me my mother on the horn.

 

The rest of the page was, unfortunately, burnt beyond readability, but as you can clearly conceive from that passage by a playwright that had a working knowledge of the existence of both S.J. Perelman and Julius ‘Groucho’ Marx, the Gauromydas heros in the ointment of their friendship, as it all too many times is, was a lack of communication.