Word: herrmanns
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SMITH (52): Marcella Zallot 4-2--10; Colleen Lahart 2-0--4; Georgianna Streeter 1-2--4; Betsy Herrmann 1-0--2; Hilary Fink 1-4--6; Cindy Corbett 2-4--8; Michele Grogan 3-8--14; Mary Jane Favazza...
Perelman's parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who raised poultry on a small Rhode Island farm. In one of many psychobiographical pole vaults, Herrmann says, "As soon as he could afford it, he began buying only the most expensive custom-made English clothes. They were so beautifully tailored they gave the impression their wearer had never suffered poverty, hardship and the terrible smell of thousands of chickens dying." That Perelman's similarly attired literary colleagues were not all fleeing from the aroma of guano is irrelevant; once the feather complex has been formulated, all facts must bend...
...antic gesture were indispensable parts of his technique. Another campus satirist derived from the same origins: Nathan Weinstein, soon to be better known as Nathanael West, the author of Miss Lonelyhearts. The two men were close friends, then relatives when Perelman married West's sister Laura. It was not, Herrmann reports, a conventional union. Early on, the Perelmans went to Hollywood, where a fellow scenarist, Dashiell Hammett, once noted, "Last night I ran into Sid . . . and wound up by doing a little pimping for him." Soon afterward, Hammett and Laura had a brief fling. It was, Herrmann speculates, "perhaps...
...Herrmann's thesis is a stubborn one, and her subject must play Pagliacci to the end. Editors and women friends are brought on to recall a "contained," "testy, easily depressed man," "cranky to be considered this 'national treasure' and not sell." Herrmann adds that after the failure of his last play, The Beauty Part, in 1963, "(Perelman) began to lose the comic writer's most precious gift -- a sense of humor." This will come as a great surprise to readers who enjoyed Perelmania in five later collections of essays as well as a number of saline interviews and commentaries...
...future scholars, Herrmann provides a number of valuable interviews. But her prying litany of misery displays few insights about her subject and little analysis of his unique combination of spontaneity and polish. The famous collection The Most of S.J. Perelman offers a series of works that are far more revealing -- and one title that is unfortunately prescient. "De Gustibus," it says, "Ain't What Dey Used...