Word: perelman
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Some people just cannot seem to take no for an answer. For the third time in less than a year, Ronald Perelman, chairman of the Revlon Group, is reviving his efforts to take over Gillette. Last week Perelman offered $5.4 billion in cash and securities for the Boston-based razor-blade concern. That is nearly $800 million more than his last bid, in June, which the company rejected as inadequate...
Coming upon the prose of his young New Yorker colleague John Updike, Perelman is "overtaken by the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed page." Lawrence Durrell is "one of those Englishmen whose eye is especially made for spitting into." A publisher's catalog contains "only a few horrors like Tom Wolfe (of whom I suspect they're secretly ashamed...
...Even Perelman's enthusiasms are vinegary. He had famously collaborated on Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, but when an editor plans to anthologize portions of the film scripts, their scenarist responds, "If illiterates and rock fans (synonymous) can only be led to purchase my work by dangling before them the fact that I once worked for the Marx brothers, then let us find some other publisher." James Agee and Dorothy Parker were friends of Perelman's, but readers would never know it from his keyhole view of the beach house the two shared: "They both exist...
Dorothy Herrmann's recent biography, S.J. Perelman: A Life, points out what any sensible reader already knows: humorists are not a sunny breed. They pick up their tribulations by the wrong end, and that provokes mirth. But after the audience leaves, the anguish remains. Perelman's boon companion and brother- in-law, Novelist Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts), died young (36) in a car crash. Perelman never fully recovered from the blow, nor did his wife Laura, who descended into alcoholism. Many of his best letters deal obliquely with the disappointments he felt with his family and his work...
...letters refute that claim. Those that gripe are bitterly amusing; but it is when they fail to disguise sorrow that they become poignant. Perhaps the most moving aspect of Don't Tread on Me is a negative one: Sidney Joseph Perelman promised an autobiography, and here is the only one he got around to writing. He died in 1979 at the age of 75, and wordwise, this is his last...