When S. J. Perelman was growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, his father worked as a machinist, ran a dry goods store, and tried unsuccessfully to raise poultry. "It was the American dream," he told New York Times Magazine interviewer William Zinnser in 1969. "If you had a few acres and a chicken farm there was no limit to your possible wealth. I grew up with and have since retained the keenest hatred of chickens."¹

For over fifty years Perelman was a professional humorist. During this time he wrote approximately 500 prose pieces (over 440 of which were reprinted in his twenty volumes of collected works), eleven stage plays, and eleven film scripts. The innumerable topics of his satiric attacks included pretentiousness, the battle of the sexes, advertising, travel, bad writing, misbehaving home appliances, films, books—all of the minutiae of contemporary life. He was a society writer rather than a writer on social concerns, however, and this is evident in his treatment of one subject that ran through his entire canon, money.

Perelman has said, "I regard myself as a species of journalist," and he described himself as a writer of "feuilletons" (a writer of little leaves).² He consciously avoided serious subjects such as politics, preferring instead to write about topical subjects that are timeless only because they represent the annoyances that have always plagued mankind. He seldom even alluded to events such as the Second World War, or the development of the atomic bomb. Thus, despite his protestation that "I don’t believe in kindly humor,"³ when he turned his attention to monetary matters, it was usually only an incidental glance, and then merely to poke fun quickly at taxi drivers overly concerned with tips or servants who command large salaries yet feel imposed upon if asked to earn their wages by working. He was not concerned, therefore, with economic theory; his comments were directed at the superficial but constant impact of money on the lives of his contemporaries.

Perelman’s family was not particularly well off when he was young, he had to go to work at an early age, and his writing evidences an acute interest in money throughout his career, In fact, he accepted some assignments purely because of the money offered even though he disliked the work, especially that related to his career as a Hollywood film writer. The short essay intended for magazine or newspaper publication does not lend itself to the kind of development that would have allowed him to expand much beyond the superficial and to engage

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in a serious consideration of the effects of money on American culture and society; still, money was a topic that he wrote about from the earliest period in his career to its end. Though always present in his writing, money is a major topic in only one of his long works.

Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge was published in 1919. Many of the chapters, some of them originally published in the humor magazine Judge, include a mention of money in passing, but generally Perelman’s attitude toward money is conventional and, indeed, fairly representative of the attitude expressed in films and poplar writing throughout the 1930s. To a large extent, this simply meant that the author indulged his imagination and created opulent settings for his action. In one scene, for example, Dawn is discovered lying in an "enormous four-poster bed,"⁴ and elsewhere her room is described as "large enough for the whole Sixty-ninth Regiment. To tell the truth, the Sixty-ninth Regiment was in the room, in undress uniform."⁵

In Parlor, Bedlam and Bath, a novel co-written with Quentin Reynolds the following year, this escapist fantasy of decorating sets luxuriously is extended by adding more details about the furnishings. In Chapter Two, for instance, the novel’s hero, Chester Tattersall, meets Cherry La Rue, the rental agent, at the Endocrine Arms, an apartment building where he intends to rent an apartment. A majority of the chapter is devoted to depicting the lavish suite of rooms and the furnishings of the apartment. Again, it is almost as if the authors give their imaginations carte blanche and unlimited funds in decorating a dream house as a way to temporarily excise the stark world of the Depression. Although Cherry informs Chester that the apartment rents for $325 a month, he grandly declares that he would be willing to pay more, if he could get what he wanted. Given the room-by-room description of the dwelling, it would be hard to guess what else he might want. The elevator opens on an elegant small square lobby with white walls and no furnishings other than an African wood-sculpture. The studio off the connecting corridor

"was dazzling with pure light; square in shape, one whole wall was a glass skylight. A large divan covered by a throw of Rodier fabric banked with black bolsters and pillows occupied a corner, the walls of which held aluminum bookshelves of varying sizes. Two small chromium tables with black glass tops flanked the bed. A low comfortable love-seat and deep arm chair, both in figured green tapestry, claimed opposite corners of the room, while two green, black, and cream-colored rugs signed by Da Silva Bruhns slept superciliously on the floor. A box-like oblong lamp overhead, swung from chromium chains, commanded the ceiling and an original wood-block by Paul Nash, a still-life print of Cezanne, and a watercolor of Franz Macreel shared honors on the walls."⁶

The bedroom was adorned with large French windows; "a fireplace with a Hunt Frederich screen before it and a mantelpiece which rose to a graceful flattened arch dominated one end of the room. The bed was square and low, without head or foot-boards; two small armchairs like the one in the studio, a sycamore chest of drawers, and an inlaid maple table with a bottle-lamp upon it comprised the rest of the furniture." There was also a "cedar-lined wardrobe fitted with a satisfying number of cupboards and shirt-racks." The bathroom, "a paradise of silver handles," is similarly described: "white metal racks, sprays with thousands of regulating appliances, and ingeniously arranged tilework. There was a square sunken tub of green stone, a magnificent glass-enclosed shower, and a shaving mirror with hidden lights." A second bedroom contained as its chief feature a "square dressing-table with two fantastic and semi-circular wings." In this room, clearly designed for the mistress of the house, "were full-length mirrors, deep clothes-presses, and a small alcove intended for a powder-room." The kitchen is furnished down to the last important detail, containing even a cocktail shaker.⁷

By the time that "Waiting for Santy" was published in The New Yorker six years later on December 26, 1936, Perelman’s attitude toward the subject of money was obviously less whimsical. In this parody of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, a drama about a union organizer, the tone is bitingly satirical. No longer is money something simply to be enjoyed; now it is so important that its absence or presence centrally influences the lives and attitudes of Perelman’s characters. As in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, in Perelman’s fiction everyone becomes perverted by money sooner or later, and the writer’s satire spares no one, not even Santa Claus.

A "playet," "Waiting for Santy" is set in "The sweatshop of St. Claus, a manufacturer of children’s toys, on North Pole Street."⁸ When the curtain rises, seven gnomes (who are "interchangeable," according to the stage directions) are discovered making toys and complaining about working conditions. In the opening lines of dialogue Riskin, the major instigator, describes the boss as "A parasite, a leech, a bloodsucker—altogether a five-star nogoodnick!"⁸ "Starvation wages we get," says Riskin, "so he can ride around in a team with reindeer!" Ruskin calls his co-worker a Karl Marx, and in keeping with stereotyped characters and parodic dialogue filled with leftist rhetoric, Riskin labels Ruskin a "scab. Stool pigeon. Company spy!" The other gnomes include Briskin, a fatalist, Panken, who is accused of having a "slave psychology," and Rivkin, who is in love with Stella, the boss’s daughter.

Perelman focuses on his topic with an allusion to "Economic determinism" and by referring to Rivkin’s financial status when he asks

if his name is "J. Pierpont Rivkin," obviously an allusion to the multimillionaire J. Pierpont Morgan. In contrast to Morgan, Rivkin cannot even afford a "bottle of Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic." When the boss returns, it is obvious why conditions at the toy factory are what they are. First, Sanford (a.k.a. Sam) Claus is accused of playing "mumblety-peg" with Rivkin and Stella. Then he is described as "a pompous bourgeois . . . who affects . . . a false air of benevolence."¹⁰ While his workers have been suffering, Claus has been visiting a medical specialist. "The biggest professor in the country . . . the best cardiac man that money could buy. . . . I tell you I was like a wild man," he exclaims. Unfortunately, his "adhesions, diabetes, sleeping sickness, and decalcomania" will force him to "cut out climbing in chimneys," but the day is saved when Claus appoints Rivkin his successor and partner in the firm and blesses his relationship with Stella. The playlet ends happily with Claus’s announcement that when the gnomes open their Christmas pay envelopes there will be a "a little present from me—a forty per cent pay cut." And, he says, holding up a tear-gas bomb and beaming at the gnomes, "the first one who opens his trap—gets this," a statement that is met by cries of joy and dancing by all except Riskin and Briskin, who go underground." The imagery and language used (including Yiddish phrasing and timing) are Perelman’s trademarks, but usually he creates humor at least in part by applying financial phrases to non-economic matters. In "Waiting for Santy" he applies economic terms to economic matters.

Interestingly, there is stylistic evolution in Perelman’s work that parallels his thematic development. In the eight years after Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge the author matured both as a humorist and as a stylist, perhaps at least in part as a result of his move from Judge (then edited by Harold Ross, later the founding editor of The New Yorker). The extremely short format favored by humor magazines had prevented him from developing either his characters or his themes very fully. Although he seldom wrote anything long enough to encourage elaborate development of characters or themes, the pieces written after he left Judge do exhibit greater depth and expansiveness. His use of language became much sharper, too, and his attitude toward his subject matter lost most of the sophomoric tone that had colored some of his earlier writing, though he still maintained an exuberant tone. The transformation is something like moving from the dance style of Gene Kelly to that of Fred Astair. As time went on, Perelman’s style approached elegance.

The most interesting work in Perelman’s canon that addresses money as its main subject is The Beauty Part, a full-length play that premiered

at the Music Box Theatre in New York City on December 26, 1962. The most sustained and one of the most outrageous of his writings, the play was well received, but ironically it never had a chance to attract an audience because of a newspaper strike in the City that prevented playgoers from reading the reviews; the play closed after a run of only 85 performances. It was decidedly not a financial success.

In 1933 Perelman and his wife, Laura, had written All Good Americans, a comedy about Americans living in Paris. The play opened at the Henry Miller Theatre in New York City on December 5, 1933, and ran for 39 performances. The main plot concerns a chic fashion designer who has to decide whether to marry a struggling writer or a successful businessman. When he wrote The Beauty Part almost thirty years later, however, Perelman’s focus was more clearly on the serious aspects of business, although the themes of marriage and the arts versus business are still significant.

Actually, The Beauty Part is not a play in the formal sense of the word; it hearkens back to the revues to which the author contributed early in his career, and it attempts to achieve its goals in a more innovative way than does, say, Abe Burrow’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Both plays were on the boards at the same time, and much of their satire was directed at similar objects, but Burrows elected to fashion a conventional story line while Perelman chose to approach his subject matter through a sequence of blackout-like scenes held together by common characters and themes.

With Bert Lahr in five characterizations, The Beauty Part lampooned the "cultural explosion" that seemed to make it "incumbent on everyone to express themselves in words or paint" or "to leap around in homemade jerseys," as Perelman explained in a pre-production intervjew.¹² "Culture," in this play, is a by-product of economic drives and abundance. The two-act (eleven scenes) comedy is set in New York and California. It opens in the luxurious Weatherwax triplex on Park Avenue, where we are introduced to multi-millionaire Weatherwax, his wife, and their Yalie son Lance. Humor results from premises such as the implication that Milo Weatherwax’s interest in money overcomes everything else (several times when his wife mentions Lance, he asks, "What Lance is that?"). Upon finding out that the family fortune (which is so great that "There’s loose rubies all over the foyer")¹³ is based on the Weatherwax All-Weather Garbage Disposal Plan, the embarrassed Lance declares that he is separating from the family and will pursue two goals, his love, April Monkhood, and a life as a creative artist. The rest of the play concerns Lance’s efforts to realize these goals; the many interrelated characters and themes woven in and out of the plot line parallel his efforts.

Money is the major concern. April abandons Lance because he renounces his family ties to the Weatherwax fortune, and several other characters (notably Harry Hubris) show an interest in Lance only after they become aware of his financial connections. Hyacinth Beddoes Laffoon’s interest in Lance as a member of her editorial staff is based on finances and ends when she learns that the Weatherwax Trust and Loan Company will not give her a loan.

Unable to get help from either April or Mrs. Laffoon in his effort to become a writer, Lance turns to the renowned painter Goddard Quagmeyer to serve an apprenticeship with him. But he is disillusioned when Quagmeyer "sells out" his artistic sensibilities and principles for the money offered by Hollywood producer Hubris. Hubris is a businessman, and he pays for value received. "We don’t expect anything free gratis. I’m buying a reputation, and I’m prepared to lay it on the line," he says—though his definition of laying it on the line is a little hazy. Quagmeyer wants to know what his "selling out" will bring, and Hubris replies, "One-fifty a week, a four-week guarantee, and your transportation," terms that sound as though the offer is being made to a prospective housekeeper. When Quagmeyer observes "That doesn’t seem like very much," Hubris immediately raises the offer to fifteen hundred a week, and Quagmeyer just as quickly accepts—"We’re in business." Lance reacts to this transaction by stating the theme of the play: "How can you lend yourself to such practices? I thought you had some integrity—that you stood for something clean and straight and fine. But there’s nothing people won’t do for the almighty dollar, is there?" Act One ends with Hubris proclaiming that Lance will become a movie director—"To show my faith in you, I’m going to let your folks put up the money for an independent production!"⁴ Now it is revealed that Lance too has his price.

In Act Two, Lance and Hubris, disguised as a Chinese houseboy and his father, are in Santa Barbara trying to steal the manuscript of a Civil War novel that they intend to adapt to the screen ("Nobody before ever looked at the Confederacy through the eyes of a Creole callgirl"). Everything becomes farcically confused when the author’s jealous husband tries to substitute his wife’s work for his own so that he can sell it to a pornographic book publisher. Next, Lance becomes involved in an outrageous television project in Pasadena. The "Communist Plot" and problems with unions and blue collar workers are included in a series of adventures that conclude with April ("an attractive girl in her early twenties given to self-dramatization and endowed with magnificent secondary sexual characteristics and practically no sense of humor")’⁵ being hauled into court by the vice squad for popping out of a fake pie "clad in the world’s scantiest bikini."⁶

The court is presided over by Judge Herman J. Rinderbust, who uses the televised proceedings to advertise products in which he has a financial interest. The bailiff describes Rinderbust as "the foremost jurist in Southern California," a man who is "all show biz" and "a real trouper."⁷ When the judge arrives on the scene he confirms this depiction, for he is primarily concerned with his make-up and how his new toupee will be received ("The women viewers’ll eat it up," announces his bailiff/stage manager).¹⁸ Justice is allocated according to how it might affect the judge’s personal finances. For instance, when told that the day’s docket contains "a murder charge and a conspiracy to come out of a pie and dance with a gorilla," Rinderbust is delighted. "Urn—gorilla dancer—not bad. I’ll throw the book at her. Should goose the rating. What’s the commercial for today?"¹⁹

Appropriately, the judge does temper justice with a sense of decorum, as evidenced in the following exchange:

CAMERAMAN: Thirty seconds to air, and we’ve got a new advertiser, the Elysian Fields Cemetery Guild in the 1100 block on Lankershim Boulevard.
JUDGE: Cemetery? What are you talking about? I own a row of stores on that block.
HANRATTY: It’s the property out back.
JUDGE: Out back is a bog, ten feet under water. A stiff wouldn’t last a day in there.
HANRATTY: They’re piping out the water into fountains, with colored lights. It’s a great effect—Like Mardi Gras.
JUDGE: Well, that’s different. I’ll buy it, so long as it’s dignified.²⁰

April’s case is dismissed when Lance produces some "relevant and germane evidence," a check in the judge’s name in the amount of five hundred thousand dollars,²¹ and the play ends with the traditional fertility ceremony celebration of comedy—April and Lance are married. The curtain falls as Milo Weatherwax exclaims, "in this weary old world, there’s one value that transcends all others." "Friends," he says, "this little bundle of happiness is everybody’s joy,"²² and he showers everyone, including the audience, with greenbacks. In the acting edition of the play,²³ Weatherwax tosses the money only on Lance and April, presumably to avoid production difficulties. The inclusion of the audience in the original version is a nice comedic touch, is theatrical, and is appropriate, given the dramatist’s theme.

Perelman’s points are obvious. Money controls everything, even creativity. "Every housewife in the country’s got a novel under her apron," laments Quagmeyer before his defection to the service of

Mammon. "And the dentists are even worse. Do you realize that there are twice as many dentists painting in their spare time as there are painters practicing dentistry?"²⁴ When Mrs. Krumgold is asked what the subject should be of a painting that she has commissioned, she replies, "Oh, who cares? So long as it doesn’t clash with the drapes. They’re silver blue."²⁵ The superficiality of modern American culture is summed up in an exchange between Lance and Hubris about the actor hired to play the title role in a picture about the life of John Singer Sargent:

HUBRIS: Mentality’s one problem you won’t have with Rob Roy Fruitwell. Stictly a matzo ball.
LANCE: But John Singer Sargent was a genius.
HUBRIS: (Triumphantly): That’s the beauty part. This cluck is a sensitized sponge that he’ll soak up the info you give him and project it. . . .²⁶

The use of the phrase "the beauty part" in this context is a clear statement of the point that Perelman is making throughout the play—we are a nation with little or no cultural depth inherent or evident in the common person on the street, and our economic greed both perverts and transcends art.

The first act of The Beauty Part is dramatically superior to the playwright’s One Touch of Venus, written in 1943. It is more solidly written, almost Shavian in quality and tone, and it is funnier; it is a comedy of character and situation, not just jokes strung together, and there is some social commentary, delivered humorously, but with a touch of seriousness. The second act falls apart and becomes empty farce that is more concerned with diverting than with being unified, though it is funny on stage. It is not clear why this disparity in tone occurs, but in some ways it epitomizes Perelman’s writing. Exposing the insidious influence of money is an important concept developed throughout his writing, important enough that he felt impelled to devise a full-length play around the subject, and perhaps the seriousness of this motivation was sufficient to produce a first act superior to One Touch of Venus, which was written entirely to entertain. Thus, Perelman also exercises the social function of dramatic comedy of educating his audience by getting it to laugh at social foibles. Still, he was unable to extend this tone through the entire play. His failure to do so probably indicates more about the nature of humor and the suitability of money as a subject for comedy than it does about Perelman’s talent. Whether or not the author recognized the limitations inherent in humorous writing about money, he did not often address the topic as his primary theme. The subject concerned him even before he became a writer, though, and it carried with it the suggestion that money perverts to the extent that

acquisition of wealth has become an overriding American dream and that the pursuit of money brings unsatisfactory results. Later this concept became a frequent part of his general commentary. When he did write about money, Perelman was as effective on the subject as any other humorist and funnier than most.

¹"That Perelman of Great Price," The New York Times Magazine, (January 26, 1969), p. 26.
³Zinnser, p. 76.
⁴S. J. Perelman, Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge (New York: Liveright, 1929), p. 12.
⁵Ibid., p. 14.
⁶Perelman, Parlor, Bedlam and Bath (New York: Liveright, 1930), pp. 31–32.
⁷Ibid., pp. 33–34.
⁸Perelman, "Waiting for Santy," in The Most of S. J. Perelman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), p. 3.
⁹lbid.
¹⁰Ibid., p. 4.
¹¹Ibid., p. ¹²Quoted in Paul Gardner, "S. J. Perelman Will Attack ‘Cultural Explosion,’" The New York Times (October 9, 1962), Sect. L, p. 47.
¹³Perelman, The Beauty Part (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), p. 24.
¹⁴Ibid., p. 69.
¹⁵Ibid., p. 79.
¹⁶Ibid., p. 31.
¹⁷Ibid., p. 126.
¹⁸Ibid., p. [l29].
¹⁹Ibid., p. 130.
²⁰Ibid., p. 131.
²¹Ibid., p. 136,
²²Ibid., pp. 141–42.
²³Published by Samuel French (New York) the same year that Simon and Schuster issued this version, p. 95.
²⁴The Beauty Part (Simon and Schuster), p. 53.
²⁵Ibid., p. 56.
²⁶Ibid p. 62.