Word: bart
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Tippy Drake finished her striptease for Bart Elaine, slipped into her clothes, took five bucks off the dresser, and skipped out of the room. It was a rotten way to tease a guy who had had a heart attack and whose doctor had forbidden him to chase pieces of "raw, red meat" down the hospital corridor. Bart lay in bed, clutching the panties Tippy had tossed him, and howling: "She'll kill me, that white stretch of firm-fleshed, tall, beautiful mocking bitchery...
...scenes such as this that have led Publishers Farrar, Straus & Young to ballyhoo Prince Bart as "the most explosive novel" they have ever published. So loud are the explosions, in fact, that the message of the novel is almost drowned out: Author Kennedy argues that sin is increasing in modern society, and he is against it. This puts him about midway between Philip Wylie and Kathleen Winsor, except that he lacks Wylie's literary stature and writes worse than Winsor...
...Hero Bart is a Hollywood golden boy but success has gone to his bed. When he is not too busy with call girls and his best friends' wives, Bart worries about his relations with his wife Mollie and wonders why she is growing so cold toward him "Oh Mollie!" he cries, "sing sweet across the wires to your baby." But Mollie is fed up with baby: her heart belongs to the nonprofit community center she hopes to found...
...this, Bart begins to slip His heart attack is the tipoff to the people who have been wondering how long he can keep up his pace. The studio hires stand-ins to play Bart's fighting parts, and younger bruisers are secretly screen-tested to step into his shoes. The finality of his fix strikes him when he boards a train at Los Angeles and realizes that "not even a Brownie snapshot camera was in sight...
Author Kennedy's aim, it seems, is to warn Americans that neither sex nor success is the big thing in life. He suggests that Mollie, in her concern for nonprofit community centers, is on a much sounder tack than Bart. But these didactic reflections should not seriously interfere with the sale of the book, either in hard covers or in the inevitable paperback reprints...