Perelman Tonight: On the town in Hong Kong -- Part 3 of "Mama Don't Want No Rice" (Chapter 4 of "The Swiss Family Perelman")

A pair of laughing almond eyes cajoled me onto the dance floor.

"Before long a pair of laughing almond eyes cajoled me to the dance floor, where my 1922-vintage toddle excited wide admiration, especially from those who had never seen a man dancing with a pair of laughing almond eyes."

-- from tonight's conclusion of "Mama Don't Want No Rice"

by Ken

Last night, still in Hong Kong,the family saw some of the sights, including Tiger Balm Gardens at Causeway Bay --

at once a potpourri of Madame Tussaud's waxworks, the castle of Otranto, and a theatrical prop shop, the whole tinctured with fumes of the Mexican drug called mescal. Just what its eighteen acres of nightmare statuary, turrets, grottoes, mazes, and cloud-borne pagodas signify, nobody on earth knows -- not even its proud parent, upon whom I called for a fast exegesis next morning at his headquarters in Wanchai Road.

That "proud parent" was "the noted patent-medicine taipan and philanthropist" Aw Boon Haw, and in last night's installment we indeed made the acquaintance of Mr. Haw himself:

Prior to our interview, Mr. Haw's interpreter, a Celestial version of Russell Birdwell, coated me with the customary schmaltz about his employer's humble origins, business genius, and benevolence. He then expanded with equal tedium on the virtues of Tiger Balm itself, which he unhesitatingly hailed as a specific for everything from St. Anthony's fire to milk leg. Apparently this was the universal belief, for I afterward observed Chinese air passengers rubbing it on their foreheads to forestall airsickness, at the same time smearing it furtively on the fuselage to insure the plane's staying aloft. For a preparation consisting largely of menthol and balsam, it undoubtedly has extraordinary powers. They may derive from Mr. Haw himself, a mettlesome old party in carpet slippers, who gripped my hand with such extraordinary vigor that I was forced whimpering to my knees.

Which is where we pick up, with the master's interview with Mr. Haw about to take a surprising turn.


SO HOW DOES OUR MR. P GET ON WITH
MR. HAW? TO FIND OUT, CLICK HERE

THE SWISS FAMILY PERELMAN: OUR STORY SO FAR

Chapter 1, "Rancors Aweigh"
Part 1 -- Launching yet another journey
Part 2 -- San Francisco-bound
Chapter 2, "Low Bridge -- Everybody Down"
Part 1 -- The journey begins!
Part 2 -- Hooray for Hollywood!
Part 3 -- "Move over, Asia"
Chapter 3, "The Wild Blue Yonder"
Part 1 -- "Aboard the President Cleveland"
Part 2 -- Putting on the feedbag
Part 3 -- Hawaii to Hong Kong
Chapter 4, "Mama Don't Want No Rice"
Part 1 -- Breaking news!
Part 2 -- "You rat!"

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Perelman Tonight: "You rat!" -- Part 2 of "Mama Don't Want No Rice" (Chapter 4 of "The Swiss Family Perelman")

"The terminal point for our soiled laundry
will be Bali," I announced masterfully.

"'In the hands of Disraeli, irony can be a formidable weapon.' I rejoined. 'In a lout it becomes merely offensive.'"

-- from tonight's installment of "Mama Don't Want No Rice"

by Ken

Last night we dived into Chapter 4 of The Swiss Family Perelman, "Mama Don't Want No Rice." which finds the family experiencing Hong Kong, and in which the eponymous "Mama" and the Perelman offspring launched a food revolt.

"I refuse to taste another spoonful of that excelsior!" announced the margravine in a ringing voice. "We've been on this blasted reef four days and all we've eaten is barnacles and boiled string! I want something that sticks to the ribs."

"Hamburgers!" the children caught up her refrain. "We want flapjacks with maple syrup -- chicken enchiladas -- apple pandowdy!"

In the ensuing hubbub the unwary paterfamilias let slip a hitherto closely concealed secret: that the ostensible destination of the journey, Siam, was on the itinerary or anywhere close, that in fact they were headed for the island of Celebes.

"Just a second, Jocko," she interrupted, quivering with anger. "Do I interpret this to mean that you inveigled me all the way to Siam and then switched the deck on us?"

"Of course not," I said placatingly. "It's a little extra dividend -- kind of a warm-up for Siam, so to speak. By the time you get back from the Moluccas -- if you ever do come back -- Siam will look like Rockefeller Plaza."

Exactly as instinct had warned me, the poor thing kicked up the most preposterous fuss. She drew a ghoulish picture of a remote and unexplored archipelago swarming with vampire bats, anthropophagi, and virulent diseases; cited some absurd fiddle-faddle about the war in Java (a grotesque designation for the minor police action in which the Dutch, to preserve order, had unavoidably bombed Djokjakarta and were being forced to kill a few thousand extremists); and having pilloried me as irresponsible, a delayed juvenile, and an erotic dreamer nourished on Terry and the Pirates, flung her arms around the children and defied Lucifer himself to drag her to the East Indies.

Which is where we pick up tonight, with an even more fraught itinerary fact about to be spilled.


FOR MR. P'S ATTEMPTS TO PACIFY MRS. P, CLICK HERE

THE SWISS FAMILY PERELMAN: OUR STORY SO FAR

Chapter 1, "Rancors Aweigh"
Part 1 -- Launching yet another journey
Part 2 -- San Francisco-bound
Chapter 2, "Low Bridge -- Everybody Down"
Part 1 -- The journey begins!
Part 2 -- Hooray for Hollywood!
Part 3 -- "Move over, Asia"
Chapter 3, "The Wild Blue Yonder"
Part 1 -- "Aboard the President Cleveland"
Part 2 -- Putting on the feedbag
Part 3 -- Hawaii to Hong Kong
Chapter 4, "Mama Don't Want No Rice"
Part 1 -- Breaking news!
Part 2 -- "You rat!"

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Perelman Tonight: Breaking news! -- Part 1 of "Mama Don't Want No Rice" (Chapter 4 of "The Swiss Family Perelman")

A quartet of foreign devils
manifestly aching to be plundered

"Certain obscure indications tended to establish them as an American family. In typically Yankee matriarchal style, the party was headed by a well-preserved woman of thirty-odd, her features distorted by an insensate craving for bargains and an iron resolve to paper the Thieves' Market with her husband's money."

-- from tonight's installment of "Mama Don't Want No Rice"

by Ken

In last night's installment, the Siam-bound Perelman clan descended on Hong Kong, which is where we rejoin them tonight, with our narrator trotting at his wife's heels,"as obedient as a coach-dog, . . . bearing in his arms the gallimaufry of opium lamps, snuff-bottles, door-knockers, sandalwood fans, and ceremonial scrolls she had bartered for his heart's blood."

In just a moment, however, an unintentional revelation will shake the family expedition to its very fiber.


WHAT THUNDERBOLT LIES IN WAIT FOR
THE FAMILY? TO FIND OUT, CLICK HERE

THE SWISS FAMILY PERELMAN: OUR STORY SO FAR

Chapter 1, "Rancors Aweigh"
Part 1 -- Launching yet another journey
Part 2 -- San Francisco-bound
Chapter 2, "Low Bridge -- Everybody Down"
Part 1 -- The journey begins!
Part 2 -- Hooray for Hollywood!
Part 3 -- "Move over, Asia"
Chapter 3, "The Wild Blue Yonder"
Part 1 -- "Aboard the President Cleveland"
Part 2 -- Putting on the feedbag
Part 3 -- Hawaii to Hong Kong

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Perelman Tonight: Hawaii to Hong Kong -- Part 3 of "The Wild Blue Yonder" (Chapter 3 of "The Swiss Family Perelman)

"Do you know what I had to pay
for a box of beauty clay here?"

"To what degree the destruction of Manila and the anguish her inhabitants had endured shook the equilibrium of some of our fellow travelers was made clear soon after our arrival there. 'Do you know what I had to pay for a box of beauty clay here?' I heard an elderly dragon with a resurrected face indignantly demand of her companion."

-- from tonight's installment of "The Wild Blue Yonder"

by Ken

As we left them last night, the Perelman clan is still chugging across the Pacific on the President Cleveland, but tonight they will put in at ports from Honolulu to Hong Kong. As the master notes:

It demands hair-trigger caution on a trans-Pacific cruise, not to say the reflexes of a circus aerialist, to dodge the sightseeing which becomes epidemic the moment the ship touches port. Before the screw has quite stopped revolving, busloads of tourists begin disappearing into the scrub to eavesdrop on some rachitic aborigine at his vespers or gape at the headstone of a forgotten conquistador.

FOR THE FAMILY'S PROGRESS FROM
HAWAII TO HONG KONG, CLICK HERE

THE SWISS FAMILY PERELMAN: OUR STORY SO FAR

Chapter 1, "Rancors Aweigh"
Part 1 -- Launching yet another journey
Part 2 -- San Francisco-bound
Chapter 2, "Low Bridge -- Everybody Down"
Part 1 -- The journey begins!
Part 2 -- Hooray for Hollywood!
Part 3 -- "Move over, Asia"
Chapter 3, "The Wild Blue Yonder"
Part 1 -- "Aboard the President Cleveland"
Part 2 -- Putting on the feedbag

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Perelman Tonight: Putting on the feedbag -- Part 2 of "The Wild Blue Yonder" (Chapter 3 of "The Swiss Family Perelman")

Asia-bound on the SS President Cleveland

"One of the worst offenders, though it costs me an effort to confess it, was my own good lady, who was frequently to be observed recumbent in a deck-chair following these debauches, peepers as heavy-lidded as a constrictor who has just engorged a chicken."

-- from tonight's installment of "The Wild Blue Yonder"

by Ken

Last night we reestablished contact with the globetrotting Perelman family, now safely ensconced aboard the SS President Cleveland headed west across the Pacific from San Francisco. As last night's installment concluded, our narrator was "reminded by the cool liquid notes of the luncheon gong that I had taken no cool liquids for almost five minutes" and duly "rectified that," then headed for the ship's dining room -- "we joined the other colorfully clad tax evaders streaming down for their midday carbohydrates."

In the click-through we're going to back up a bit and pick up shortly before the point where we left off last night.


THERE'S A LOT OF SERIOUS EATING GOING ON
ABOARD THE PRESIDENT CLEVELAND -- CLICK HERE

THE SWISS FAMILY PERELMAN: OUR STORY SO FAR

Chapter 1, "Rancors Aweigh"
Part 1 -- Launching yet another journey
Part 2 -- San Francisco-bound
Chapter 2, "Low Bridge -- Everybody Down"
Part 1 -- The journey begins!
Part 2 -- Hooray for Hollywood!
Part 3 -- "Move over, Asia"
Chapter 3, "The Wild Blue Yonder"
Part 1 -- "Aboard the President Cleveland"

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Perelman Tonight: Aboard the President Cleveland -- Part 1 of "The Wild Blue Yonder" (Chapter 3 of "The Swiss Family Perelman")

Six hundred escapists beyond the reach of Milton Berle
and the National Retail Credit Association

[drawing by Al Hirschfeld]

"As he perched on a stool in the Hurricane Bar, pensively sipping his aperitif and appraising his features in a small hand-mirror, he knew a moment of deep melancholy. What a chasm separated him from the trivial, shallow creatures about him, he thought sadly. Would it ever be possible to bridge the gulf, to free these poor blind grubs from their cocoons and aid them to soar with him onto the astral plane?"

-- from Chapter 3 of The Swiss Family
Perelman, "The Wild Blue Yonder"

by Ken

When, last June, we left the Swiss Family Perelman -- son Adam (12) and cello-toting daughter Abby (10) plus our narrator and his missus -- were trudging up the gangplank of the SS President Cleveland, heading west across the Pacific from San Francisco. The family had pulled up stakes from their New York City and rural-Pennslvania domiciles and were bound for Siam, based on the master's effusions, which he had already come to regret, from his earlier journey, the round-the-world jaunt in the company of his old pal Al Hirschfeld, the iconic theater illustrator and bon vivant, documented in Westward Ha! The last words we heard came from the mistress:

" 'Move over, Asia,' she said compassionately. 'Poor old continent. You don't know what's coming at you.' "


TO SEE THE PERELMAN FAMILY AT SEA, CLICK HERE

THE SWISS FAMILY PERELMAN: OUR STORY SO FAR

Chapter 1, "Rancors Aweigh"
Part 1 -- Launching yet another journey
Part 2 -- San Francisco-bound
Chapter 2, "Low Bridge -- Everybody Down"
Part 1 -- The journey begins!
Part 2 -- Hooray for Hollywood!
Part 3 -- "Move over, Asia"

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Perelman Tonight: "Move over, Asia" -- Part 5 of "The Swiss Family Perelman"

Illustrations by Al Hirschfeld

The Insurograph: A mechanism similar to a jukebox,
vending insurance at a quarter a throw

The social life of the [movie] industry . . . had changed little in two years. It still consisted of an endless round of buffets full of people one had met the previous evening, all of them exactly one day older. Dinner-party conversation in a manufacturing center like Lowell, Nashua, or Wilmington usually deals with shoes, blankets, or smokeless powder, relieved with gossip about the foreman of the bleaching room niggling up to the stockroom babes. In Beverly Hills it dealt with previews, credits, and the boudoir escapades of any couple who had failed to attend that evening.

-- from the conclusion of "Low Bridge -- Everybody Down"

by Ken

Last night we left the bound-for-the-Orient Perelman clan visiting SJP's despised old stomping ground, Hollywood, most recently visited two years earlier on his round-the-world trip (documented in Westward, Ha!). However, in tonight's installment we're reminded that this is 1949, meaning that we're in the early phase of one of the unhappiest chapters in the movie industry's history: its trial by, and capitulation to, the red-baiting witch hunts.


FOR THE CONCLUSION OF "LOW BRIDGE --
EVERYBODY DOWN," CLICK HERE

COMING UP IN DWT LATE NIGHT:

We'll catch up with our Siam-bound travelers in future "Perelman Tonight" installments.

In tomorrow night's "Sunday Classics" preview we begin preparing for a special conjunction of artist (conductor Bruno Walter) and repertory (Wagner's Siegfried Idyll).

Come Sunday night, I'm thinking it might be a good time for some more Will Cuppy -- say, from The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody.

THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, JEAN SHEPHERD, and PERELMAN TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Perelman Tonight: Hooray for Hollywood -- Part 4 of "The Swiss Family Perelman"

Illustration by Al Hirschfeld

I was privileged to overhear a couple in the
Vista Dome engaged in a vital discussion.

"No band of Polish immigrants setting foot in the New World could have displayed quite so creamy a mélange of sullenness, martyrdom, and disillusion as my little troupe that winter morning aboard the Oakland ferry. Shivering in an icy rain amid our myriad traps, the ranee and the lambkins glowered at San Francisco and filed a long, sorrowful beef. 'He said there were gonna be coconuts,' ran the chant."

-- from tonight's installment of "Low Bridge -- Everybody Down"

by Ken

Last night we left the Perelman clan wending its way on an assortment of rolling stock from Chicago westward. As the paterfamilias put it:

Of the dozen-odd transcontinental trips I have made in the past decade, the present was unquestionably the most circuitous. As nearly as I could ascertain, we reached San Francisco less by steering a westerly course than by closing in on it in decreasing circles. Every few hundred miles, our car was shunted onto a siding and attached to a railroad whose dining cars were even more unspeakable than the last.

As we're about to discover, however, eventually the train trip became less arduous.


FOR PART 2 OF "LOW BRIDGE -- EVERYBODY
DOWN," CLICK HERE


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, JEAN SHEPHERD, and PERELMAN TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Perelman Tonight: California or bust -- Part 3 of "The Swiss Family Perelman"

The journey begins!

"Friends, I'm not rich in worldly goods, but let
me say this. What's mine is mine."

[Note: You have to imagine these two halves
of the Hirschfeld drawing side by side.]

"Of the dozen-odd transcontinental trips I have made in the past decade, the present was unquestionably the most circuitous. As nearly as I could ascertain, we reached San Francisco less by steering a westerly course than by closing in on it in decreasing circles."

-- from tonight's installment of "Low Bridge -- Everybody Down"

by Ken

The last two nights we've read the first chapter, "Rancors Aweigh" (part 1 and part 2), of SJP's saga of his family schlepp to the Orient, The Swiss Family Perelman (originally published serially in Holiday magazine). Last night we left the travelers at (the old, undestroyed) Penn Station in New York, preparing for their cross-country train trip to catch the S.S. President Cleveland for the voyage across the Pacific. (The above sliced-in-two drawing is actually left over from that chapter. It depicts the actual onset of the journey, with the family bidding adieu to the hands-open building staff outside their apartment building on Washington Square, before making the cab trip to Penn Station.)

It's a long and eventful trip from New York to Oakland, then down to Los Angeles, where they have ten days before the President Cleveland departs. We're going to make the trip in three parts.


FOR PART 1 OF "LOW BRIDGE -- EVERYBODY
DOWN," CLICK HERE


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, JEAN SHEPHERD, and PERELMAN TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Perelman Tonight: San Francisco-bound -- Part 2 of "The Swiss Family Perelman"

"The more charitable among our friends took it upon themselves to scotch these old wives' tales. 'He's merely had a nervous breakdown,' they said loyally. 'You can tell by the way he drums his fingers when she's talking.' Our children, they added, were not real albinos, nor was it true I had been made contact man for a white slave ring in Saigon. I was much too yellow."

-- from the conclusion of Chapter 1, "Rancors Aweigh"

by Ken

Last night we heard our hero waxing rhapsodic about his beloved Orient -- based on hisround-the-world trip, chronicled in Westward, Ha! (of which we sampled the early chapters).

I wish I were back there this minute! Those gentle, courteous people, those age-old temples, those placid winding canals overhung with acacia ----" Overhung with nostalgia and a little cordial I had taken to ward off a chll, I gave way to racking sobs.

And then, when he was "at my most vulnerable," his wife "struck off the veneer of civilization and struck like a puff adder," announcing, "Let's go!"

Once the paterfamilias grasped that his wife was actually proposing transplanting the household to Siam, he underwent an instant change of outlook toward the pestilential East, explaining "as patiently as I could that Siam was a vast malarial marsh, oppressively hot and crowded with underprivileged folk scratching out a submarginal existence."

But there was no helping it -- the Perelmans were Siam-bound. Tonight, concluding "Rancors Aweigh," the first chapter of The Swiss Family Perelman, we learn how the young Perelmans took the news of their impending adventure.


FOR PART 2 OF "RANCORS AWEIGH," CLICK HERE


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, JEAN SHEPHERD, and PERELMAN TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Perelman Tonight: Launching yet another journey, "The Swiss Family Perelman"

"In the angle of the obdurate outthrust jaw, buckwheat-flecked from the morning meal, one read quenchless resolve, a nature scornful of compromise and dedicated to squeezing the last nickel out of any enterprise."

-- from tonight's installment of "Rancors Aweigh,"
the opening chapter of Swiss Family Pearlman

by Ken

In case you haven't gotten it yet, tonight we're going to launch our man, this time accompanied by his family, on another travel odyssey. Like the round-the-world trip of Westward Ha!, this journey was originally chronicled for Holiday magazine, with illustrations by Perelman's old friend and collaborator, the great theater illustrator Al Hirschfeld.


FOR THE OPENING SALVO OF THE SWISS
FAMILY PERELMAN, CLICK HERE


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, JEAN SHEPHERD, and PERELMAN TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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[9/24/2011] Perelman Tonight: On the town in Hong Kong -- Part 3 of "Mama Don't Want No Rice" (Chapter 4 of "The Swiss Family Perelman") (continued)

Mr. Haw's Tiger Balm Gardens, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong

"Mr. Haw has presented to various hospitals and deserving charities an amount in excess of eighteen million Hong Kong dollars," replied the spokesman. "He is a beloved figure, asking nothing for himself but the right to serve his fellow man." . . .

"Has Mr. Haw given any inkling yet as to who will inherit his moola? If not, I should like to include my name among the legatees."

-- from the conclusion of "Mama Don't Want No Rice"

The Swiss Family Perelman
Chapter 4, "Mama Don't Want No Rice,"
Part 3 of 3

"Now exactly what do you wish to know?" the interpreter began. Feeling that some preamble was required, I teed off with salutations from several American mandarins of comparable importance -- Eugene S. Grace, Lee Shubert, and the chairman of the New York State Boxing Commission.

"In a few badly chosen words, how would you sum up the theme of the Tiger Balm Gardens?" I inquired.

"Mr. Haw has presented to various hospitals and deserving charities an amount in excess of eighteen million Hong Kong dollars," replied the spokesman. "He is a beloved figure, asking nothing for himself but the right to serve his fellow man."

"He exudes an aura of goodness," I agreed courteously, cracking a sunflower seed between my mandibles, "but to return to the meaning of the Gardens. I sensed a definite surrealist influence, as though Max Ernst and the St. Louis Cardinals had collaborated on their design."

"The purely material is no longer of any consequence to Mr. Haw," the interpreter explained. "Spiritual salvation alone can save mankind from the abyss, as he points out in today's editorial in his three Chinese-language newspapers."

"I am hastening home to read it," I assured him. "But before I do, may I be allowed to put one more query?"

"What is that?"

"Has Mr. Haw given any inkling yet as to who will inherit his moola? If not, I should like to include my name among the legatees."

"I am afraid there is a fundamental cleavage between the East and the West," apologized the subordinate. "This way to your rickshaw, please." Nevertheless, as I bowled back to the Repulse Bay Hotel, gently flicking the coolie with a switch to ward off the flies, the audience did not seem wholly without benefit. It had given me an insight into the complexities of the Oriental mind such as one never gets from the sixty-five-cent luncheon at Chin Lee's and it had enabled the family in my absence to dream up a brand-new batch of complaints.

The most grievous, predictably, came from the missy, who was loud in her accusations that I had withheld her from the night life of Hong Kong. "What did I pack my evening dresses for, to wear in a Malay prahu?" she blubbered. "If I were Alexis Smith you'd be in a cummerbund fast enough." She contemptuously brushed aside my protest that Catteraugus, New York, was more diverting by far; she knew all about the evil waterfront haunts, the swarthy lascars, and the Eurasian adventuresses from the novels of Achmed Abdullah.

The upshot was that at midnight we found ourselves in a titanic, murky cabaret almost devoid of heat and customers, watching the only untalented Negro in the world execute a cakewalk to the music of a Filipino fife and drum corps. At its conclusion, as though my hair was not sufficiently streaked with silver, he broke into "Mammy's Little Coal Black Rose." I pushed away the plate of stone-cold spaghetti and signaled to the waiter.

"Bring me a check and a steel-blue automatic," I directed. My wife plucked at my sleeve, but I ignored her. "Also, please ask that minstrel to wait for me in his dressing room."

"Listen," she said insistently, "some people in that corner are waving at you." The arrivals proved to be an old college classmate now in the consular service and two extremely decorative chickadees, from Canton and Outer Mongolia respectively. A coalition was quickly arranged, half a dozen bottles of Polish vodka burgeoned from the tablecloth, and in a trice we were yoked in close harmony, warbling "Brunonia, Mother of Men" in pidgin. Before long a pair of laughing almond eyes cajoled me to the dance floor, where my 1922-vintage toddle excited wide admiration, especially from those who had never seen a man dancing with a pair of laughing almond eyes.

I had just consented after considerable suasion to call on the fair Tartar some afternoon and inspect a rare old sheepskin which had been in her family since the reign of Kublai Khan when my wife was stricken with one of her infrequent migraine headaches. There was no possible remedy but to frog-march me into a cab, drive to the hotel, and bind my hands to the bedpost with a sheet. This relieved her suffering somewhat, and soon the only sound in the corridor was her uneven breathing, interspersed with maledictions I had not dreamt she possessed.

Three days later, in a freezing wind that turned our noses blue with cold, we swayed up the accommodation ladder of the Kochleffel, buffeted by coolies groaning under our trunks. The harbor traffic flowed on briskly around the ship, oblivious of the importance of the occasion; toplofty little steamers bound for Macao rocked up-river, Kowloon-side ferries scraped past the bows, and quaint junks wallowed by, laden with Parker pens, self-winding Rolexes, and other imports vital to China's existence.

Free of her buoy at last, the vessel moved at half speed past the bare brown hills; the last cluster of government buildings dropped astern, and we were at sea. Already the bar had begun to echo with guttural commands of "Jonges! Bring me here a Bols!" and toasts to Wilhelmina. Knocking the embers from my pipe into a lifeboat to prevent their scattering, I descended to our cabins. My three companions sat in the quickening gloom amid jumbled suitcases. It was obvious that their moral barometer was falling fast.

"Chin up, friends!" I adjured them jovially. "Before you know it, you'll be in Java."

"And that's practically home," added my wife in a lifeless voice. She rose and stared thoughtfully out the porthole. "Did I ever tell you," she went on, "that in order to marry you, I jilted an explorer?"

"Honestly?" I asked. "What did you tell him?"

"I wish I could remember," she murmured. "It sure would come in handy."

* * *

AND WITH THIS GRIM TABLEAU WE ONCE AGAIN
BID THE SWISS FAMILY PERELMAN "BON VOYAGE"


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

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[9/22/2011] Perelman Tonight: "You rat!" -- Part 2 of "Mama Don't Want No Rice" (Chapter 4 of "The Swiss Family Perelman") (continued)

"'Are you implying by any chance, madam,' I asked scathingly, 'that I would deliberately haul three persons on a five-thousand-mile journey through swamp and mangrove just to catch a glimpse of a bunch of superbly formed, mocha-colored young women in their nether garments? Because if you are,' I said, rising haughtily, 'I have nothing more to say.'"

-- from tonight's installment of "Mama Don't Want No Rice"

The Swiss Family Perelman
Chapter 4, "Mama Don't Want No Rice,"
Part 2 of 3

To overcome such a hash of obscurantism and prejudice was a task calculated to intimidate a lesser man, but I flatter myself I brought it off rather well. Tapping a monogrammed Zira on the wafer-thin, solid gold cigarette case conferred on me by the Sublime Porte in connection with certain trifling services in the matter of the Missing Halvah, I pointed out with a silky smile that through a freak of bookkeeping, I alone was privileged to endorse our express cheques, which gave me what is known in sporting circles as an edge. "Do you not think, cara mia," I pursued, "that, though undeniably colorful and renowned for its hospitality, Hong Kong would not be the most ideal place for an attractive matron -- who, parenthetically, is not getting any younger -- and two helpless minors to go on the beach? I ask this, mind you, in an altogether objective spirit, knowing that your opinion will be couched likewise."

"You rat," replied my wife, employing a pet name she had found useful in domestic crises when logic failed. It being self-evident that she should never have crossed foils with so superior an adversary, I gallantly forgave her temerity and proceeded to outline our itinerary: two weeks' voyage aboard the M/S Kochleffel along the periphery of Java via the South China Sea, calling at Batavia, Semarang, and Surabaya, and thence northward to Macassar.

"What happens there?" she asked wearily, a look of dumb resignation investing her face. "I suppose we all remove our drawers and plunge into the canebrake."

"In the hands of Disraeli, irony can be a formidable weapon," I rejoined. "In a lout it becomes merely offensive. At Macassar we transfer to the Cinnabar, a snug little coaster in the interisland copra trade, which will convey us to Pare-Pare, Donggala, Menado, Ternate, Morotai, Sorong (the westernmost tip of New Guinea), Batjan, and Amboina -- in short, a sketchy circumnavigation of Celebes and the historic Spice Islands. I also plan, if the changing monsoon permits, to pay a visit to Banda Neira, that celebrated outpost of the Dutch nutmeg trade."

"There must be a gimmick in all this," she observed, moodily gnawing a piece of stem ginger. "In twenty years I have yet to detect you in a disinterested act."

"There is," I acknowledged. "The terminal point for our soiled laundry will be that jewel of the Lesser Sundas, the island of Bali."

"Aha!" she exclaimed triumphantly. "Everything falls into place. I was puzzled by the goatish gleam in your eye, but now I'm tuned in."

"Are you implying by any chance, madam," I asked scathingly, "that I would deliberately haul three persons on a five-thousand-mile journey through swamp and mangrove just to catch a glimpse of a bunch of superbly formed, mocha-colored young women in their nether garments? Because if you are," I said, rising haughtily, "I have nothing more to say."

"That," she said succinctly, "will be a relief all around -- eh, kids?" The children's reply was inaudible, mainly because they had taken a powder during our tête-à-tête and made a beeline for Pedder Street, the informal bourse of Hong Kong. On being coralled outside the Swatow Lace Store, they disclosed a flimflam worthy of Ponzi, having thimblerigged the money-changers with a dizzying parlay of soap wrappers into Portuguese escudos into Singapore dollars. I could not bring myself to reprove them, particularly since they had cleared a tidy profit, but as a lesson to cut me into their grift in future, I made them finance a tour of the Tiger Balm Gardens at Causeway Bay.

This curious nonesuch, a conceit of Aw Boon Haw, the noted patent-medicine taipan and philanthropist, beggars description; it is at once a potpourri of Madame Tussaud's waxworks, the castle of Otranto, and a theatrical prop shop, the whole tinctured with fumes of the Mexican drug called mescal. Just what its eighteen acres of nightmare statuary, turrets, grottoes, mazes, and cloud-borne pagodas signify, nobody on earth knows -- not even its proud parent, upon whom I called for a fast exegesis next morning at his headquarters in Wanchai Road.

Prior to our interview, Mr. Haw's interpreter, a Celestial version of Russell Birdwell, coated me with the customary schmaltz about his employer's humble origins, business genius, and benevolence. He then expanded with equal tedium on the virtues of Tiger Balm itself, which he unhesitatingly hailed as a specific for everything from St. Anthony's fire to milk leg. Apparently this was the universal belief, for I afterward observed Chinese air passengers rubbing it on their foreheads to forestall airsickness, at the same time smearing it furtively on the fuselage to insure the plane's staying aloft. For a preparation consisting largely of menthol and balsam, it undoubtedly has extraordinary powers. They may derive from Mr. Haw himself, a mettlesome old party in carpet slippers, who gripped my hand with such extraordinary vigor that I was forced whimpering to my knees.


TOMORROW NIGHT IN PART 3 OF "MAMA DON'T WANT NO RICE": On the town in Hong Kong


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[9/21/2011] Perelman Tonight: Breaking news! -- Part 1 of "Mama Don't Want No Rice" (Chapter 4 of "The Swiss Family Perelman") (continued)

"I refuse to taste another spoonful of that excelsior!" announced the margravine in a ringing voice. "We've been on this blasted reef four days and all we've eaten is barnacles and boiled string! I want something that sticks to the ribs."

"Hamburgers!" the children caught up her refrain. "We want flapjacks with maple syrup -- chicken enchiladas -- apple pandowdy!"

-- from tonight's installment of "Mama Don't Want No Rice"

The Swiss Family Perelman
Chapter 4, "Mama Don't Want No Rice,"
Part 1 of 3

ON A DANK WINTER'S DAY shortly after the Chinese New Year, the population of Upper Lascar Row in Hong Kong was enjoying its midmorning snack of bêche-de-mer and jasmine tea when the street was galvanized by the advent of a quartet of foreign devils so manifestly aching to be plundered that a mighty hosanna welled up the length of Queen's Road Central. Abacuses began clicking furiously, catchpenny ivories of the goddess Kwan Yin bloomed on every curio dealer's shelf, factory-fresh Ming horses were hastily baptized with dust to simulate age, and tempting whiffs of Lapsang Soochong wafted about to decoy the Outer Barbarians.

While the latter bore no placard proclaiming their nationality, certain obscure indications tended to establish them as an American family. In typically Yankee matriarchal style, the party was headed by a well-preserved woman of thirty-odd, her features distorted by an insensate craving for bargains and an iron resolve to paper the Thieves' Market with her husband's money. Trotting at her heels, as obedient as a coach-dog, came the present deponent, bearing in his arms the gallimaufry of opium lamps, snuff-bottles, door-knockers, sandalwood fans, and ceremonial scrolls she had bartered for his heart's blood. A man of rare gentleness, possessed of almost Socratic wisdom and a patience outrivaling Job's, he recognized no law but his wife's airy caprice; at her bidding (provided, of course, that he was not otherwise occupied), he was prepared to scale the snows of Everest or plumb deepest Lake Titicaca. Straggling behind and alternately whining, sassing their parents, and cudgeling each other, there followed two wiry hooligans in levis and polychromatic flannel jumpers.

It was a sight for sore eyes, this close-knit, harmonious little company sprinkling valuta indiscriminately over the crown colony, and many miraculous cures were subsequently reported by local opticians. The day dawns, nevertheless, when even the Comstock Lode yields up nothing but gravel, and finally, on the very brink of insolvency, I brought the juggernaut to a halt. Straining at a gnat and swallowing the smoke of a Camel, I slapped from my wife's hand the Sung pipkin she had purchased with our last greenback.

"That's enough rubbish for one day, sweetheart," I hinted. "Back to the carbarn before I touch a whip to your flanks." My sally, as I anticipated, awoke no response from the stolid creature, whose sense of humor seldom rose above the Punch and Judy level. Flushed with resentment, eyes akimbo, she planted herself squarely in my path and declined to move. Fortunately, I happened to recall an apothegm of the T'ang dynasty to the effect that more flies may be captured with honey than with vinegar. I adroitly introduced the subject of food and suggested that we have a spot of tiffin in a tiny Szechuanese restaurant nearby, where the sweet-and-sour squid and gedämpfte kelp boasted an international reputation.

"I refuse to taste another spoonful of that excelsior!" announced the margravine in a ringing voice. "We've been on this blasted reef four days and all we've eaten is barnacles and boiled string! I want something that sticks to the ribs."

"Hamburgers!" the children caught up her refrain. "We want flapjacks with maple syrup -- chicken enchiladas -- apple pandowdy!"

By now a crowd of several hundred Chinese was pressing in on us, eager to miss none of the fireworks; so, distributing to them a rough translation of the proceedings in the Fukien dialect, concluding with an impassioned appeal never to marry, never to have children, and never to travel abroad with their wives and children, I made our adieux. We dined sumptuously on triple-decker sandwiches and quadruple malteds at a busy soda fountain off Chater Road, whose neon lighting and ulcerous tempo afforded a reasonably repugnant facsimile of our neighborhood drugstore.

Over the postprandial Bisodol tablet, I bade my bride close her eyes and placed in her outstretched palm a bulky envelope. Her wee brow wrinkled in perplexity as she spelt out the destination of the steamer tickets within. "What's this?" she asked suspiciously. "Why does it stand 'Macassar' on these?"

"Because that's where the steamer goes, honey," I smiled. "It's the principal port on the island of Celebes."

"Is that anywhere near Bangkok?" she demanded. "Come on, answer me -- none of that Eric Ambler stuff!"

"Well -- er -- vaguely," I hedged. "About twenty-seven hundred miles as the crow flies, more or less. Naturally, we won't ---- "

"Just a second, Jocko," she interrupted, quivering with anger. "Do I interpret this to mean that you inveigled me all the way to Siam and then switched the deck on us?"

"Of course not," I said placatingly. "It's a little extra dividend -- kind of a warm-up for Siam, so to speak. By the time you get back from the Moluccas -- if you ever do come back -- Siam will look like Rockefeller Plaza."

Exactly as instinct had warned me, the poor thing kicked up the most preposterous fuss. She drew a ghoulish picture of a remote and unexplored archipelago swarming with vampire bats, anthropophagi, and virulent diseases; cited some absurd fiddle-faddle about the war in Java (a grotesque designation for the minor police action in which the Dutch, to preserve order, had unavoidably bombed Djokjakarta and were being forced to kill a few thousand extremists); and having pilloried me as irresponsible, a delayed juvenile, and an erotic dreamer nourished on Terry and the Pirates, flung her arms around the children and defied Lucifer himself to drag her to the East Indies.


TOMORROW NIGHT IN PART 2 OF "MAMA DON'T WANT NO RICE": "You rat!" -- the "margrave" tries subtle persuasion on the "margravine"


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[9/20/2011] Perelman Tonight: Hawaii to Hong Kong -- Part 3 of "The Wild Blue Yonder" (Chapter 3 of "The Swiss Family Perelman) (continued)

The ancient leaky Wallah-Wallah was almost scuppers awash.

"Inevitably, of course, and by that nimble club-car ratiocination in which the upper brackets engage at the drop of a bond, the true culprit stood revealed -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Great Betrayer, working with his Red cohorts in the unions, had shackled free enterprise, deflowered the American Way, and reduced us to the status of witless helots."

-- from tonight's installment of "The Wild Blue Yonder"

The Swiss Family Perelman
Chapter 3, "The Wild Blue Yonder,"
Part 3 of 3

Five days after we had slid through the Golden Gate, the ship rounded Diamond Head and there ensued a feverish twelve-hour kaleidoscope of paper leis, tanned Miami bail-jumpers chanting spurious Hawaiian Lieder, and raw fish drowned in a species of library paste called poi.

Bowed under armloads of tin ukuleles and promotional literature lavished on us by the Chamber of Commerce, we parked the striplings at the Outrigger Canoe Club with orders to acquire a second-degree burn and canvassed the shops of Waikiki Beach. The boast that they contain the world's most hideous curios is, in my opinion, pure chauvinism. True, they have managed to torture rattan, clay, and sea-shells into some extraordinarily repellent knick knacks, but I saw nothing even remotely as emetic as the worry-birds and musical toilets of my own Sixth Avenue.

The afternoon was marred by only one slight contretemps. We were just leaving Gump's, where my wife had spent an hour cooing over that shop's collection of coral and spinach jade, when Mr. Richard Gump breathlessly overtook us. With some concern, he called attention to an angry swelling in my breast-pocket, offering to summon medical assistance if necessary. I pooh-poohed his anxiety, supposing it to be merely a hernia induced by overexertion. What was our surprise, therefore, to discover that a Han jade cup, formerly the property of the Dowager Empress of China, had fallen into my clothes unbeknownst to me. As soon as the mystery was cleared up, we all enjoyed a hearty chuckle at Gump's expense and he conducted us back to the dock personally to make sure we had incurred no untoward effects from our visit.

By mid-Pacific the tropical heat had wrought a subtle transformation aboardship; the officers blossomed out in whites, passengers sorted themselves into practical jokers, self-made men, close personal friends of Mr. MacArthur, and similar bores, and a spirit of merrymaking as uncompromising as that of the borscht circuit made itself manifest. Every evening vast, frenzied cocktail parties raged in the Bubbling Well Bar, tendered by salvage tycoons and kittenish Southern harridans ablaze with diamonds. At mealtimes the public address system was constantly warbling "Happy Birthday to You" to signalize the imminence of senility, and august executives in paper hats and rompers capered grimly through the passageways, braying on horns. It was a time to try men's souls.

To what degree the destruction of Manila and the anguish her inhabitants had endured shook the equilibrium of some of our fellow travelers was made clear soon after our arrival there. "Do you know what I had to pay for a box of beauty clay here?" I heard an elderly dragon with a resurrected face indignantly demand of her companion. "Three pesos -- a dollar-fifty! Why, you can get the same thing in Grosse Pointe for forty cents!" The other Eumenides hissed sympathetically. "It's a scandal," one assented, "and can you imagine living in all that rubble the way they do? Not an ounce of self-respect." Several other disgruntled observers, whose cabs had been delayed in traffic on the Escolta owing to reconstruction, surmised that granting the islands their independence had caused the mischief. The Filipinos were not ready for it, they declared sagely.

Inevitably, of course, and by that nimble club-car ratiocination in which the upper brackets engage at the drop of a bond, the true culprit stood revealed -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Great Betrayer, working with his Red cohorts in the unions, had shackled free enterprise, deflowered the American Way, and reduced us to the status of witless helots. Now, had Dewey been elected . . . Their shoulders were racked with dry sobs.

It demands hair-trigger caution on a trans-Pacific cruise, not to say the reflexes of a circus aerialist, to dodge the sightseeing which becomes epidemic the moment the ship touches port. Before the screw has quite stopped revolving, busloads of tourists begin disappearing into the scrub to eavesdrop on some rachitic aborigine at his vespers or gape at the headstone of a forgotten conquistador.

At Manila, while we managed to by-pass the usual shrines, dungeons, and fortifications, we were cozened into visiting a cigar factory, an experience which for sheer ennui transcends even the vaudeville turn of Benny Fields. It took a sizable number of gimlets and a trip to the Miramar, the boîte de nuit favored of the moment, to dispel the effects. Anybody interested in ravishing women -- not in the Sabine sense, purely in viewing some exquisite lassies -- will find his sensibilities agreeably teased there. The dance floor swarmed with enchanting young Filipinas who wore the transparent puff sleeves of pifia cloth characteristic of the locale and danced the paso doble with the verve of Argentinita.

At the invitation of the manager, a sinister bonze straight out of Raymond Chandler sporting a mouthful of gold teeth, we passed an instructive hour in his gambling rooms overhead. I was amused to hear how quickly word spread that I had entered the establishment; the croupiers were taut with expectancy and on every hand I heard awed whispers of "There's the man who took the Greek Syndicate at Monte Carlo two years ago!"

Their apprehensiveness, however, was unwarranted. I was in no mood for play, and except for the trifling three or four thousand I negligently staked to humor my wife, stifling a yawn the while, I was richly content to study the passing scene. I had just become engrossed in studying a shapely, sloe-eyed mestiza with flowerlike hands who was dealing blackjack when the mem decided my eyes were overstrained and, grasping me firmly by the scruff, catapulted me into a droshky.

Amid a cataclysmic downpour that drummed against her ports like hail, the President Cleveland moved at long last into the harbor of Hong Kong. Narrowly missing Victoria and the Peak, shrouded in fog, the ship swung into its berth at Kowloon guided by the pilot and captain alone, for I was far too busy stealing pillowcases to give them the assistance they clamored for.

Eleven coolies in massive capes woven of rushes bore our baggage to the customs shed; in a lather of hysteria, scattering cumshaw about me like grain, I deposited in a bonded godown the hundred cartons of cigarettes I had laid by for emergencies ahead. Within a couple of hours, His Britannic Majesty's watchdogs had assured themselves that our gear contained no firearms, gold, or opium, and we were afloat again.

The ancient, leaky wallah-wallah bearing us to Hong Kong Island was almost scuppers awash under our luggage; bailing like madmen, soaked to the skin, the four of us beseeched the boatmen to pull for the distant shore. The little craft rose, fell, and rose again, and for a horrid instant I feared we were all foredoomed to Davy Jones's locker. Then I dauntlessly brushed the rain from my face, encircled my wife's waist, and spoke the words that give a woman the courage to go on.

"You got me into this rat race, sweetheart," I said. "I'll never forget as long as I live." A few simple words, and yet they gave her the stability she lacked. I saw her lips frame the phrase, "You utter, utter darling," but she was too moved to pronounce it. And so, hand in hand and neck in noose, we rode forward into the promise of a new dawn.

* * *

TOMORROW NIGHT: Part 1 of Chapter 4 of The Swiss Family Perelman, "Mama Don't Want No Rice"


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[9/19/2011] Perelman Tonight: Putting on the feedbag -- Part 2 of "The Wild Blue Yonder" (Chapter 3 of "The Swiss Family Perelman") (continued)

"The barrage of vittles that bombarded the President Cleveland's passengers on her sixth Pacific crossing was indescribable; the closest analogy I can offer is the Homeric fodder the Hoosiers were wont to stow away in Indiana at the turn of the century, as described by George Ade in his immortal 'Fable of the Waistband That Was Taut Up Till the Moment It Gave Way.' The chief steward apparently felt that unless every man jack of us was carried groaning with heartburn from the table, mutiny would sweep the ship."

-- from tonight's installment of "The Wild Blue Yonder"

The Swiss Family Pearlman
Chapter 3, "The Wild Blue Yonder,"
Part 2 of 3

The décor of the President Cleveland had little in common with that of the ocean greyhounds we remembered from the early Thirties, nor, indeed, with any recognizable nautical tradition. Industrial designers and interior decorators had blown their tops, investing her public rooms with a profusion of monel metal, formica and glass plastics, and splashy murals depicting generously endowed nereids sporting among the billows with dolphins. Through those refined and ruthlessly air-conditioned precincts moved phalanxes of cat-footed waiters dedicated to anticipating your every wish. It was overpoweringly functional and as hygienic as a brain clinic, but every so often you felt a catch in your throat at the memory of those antebellum French cabin boats, with their matchless bouquet of lavabo, spilt Pinard, hot salt water, and garlic.

Once the napkin was furled under the jowls and you started tucking in the groceries, though, nostalgia died like a dog. The barrage of vittles that bombarded the President Cleveland's passengers on her sixth Pacific crossing was indescribable; the closest analogy I can offer is the Homeric fodder the Hoosiers were wont to stow away in Indiana at the turn of the century, as described by George Ade in his immortal "Fable of the Waistband That Was Taut Up Till the Moment It Gave Way."

The chief steward apparently felt that unless every man jack of us was carried groaning with heartburn from the table, mutiny would sweep the ship. To this end he plied us at each meal with eighteen or twenty recherché appetizers like caviar, herring filets, soused mackerel, North Sea sprats, cracked crab, sardellen, and Philadelphia head cheese; an array of soups, broths, and bisques distilled from every crustacean, fowl, and quadruped ever classified by Buffon; fish snared the width and breadth of the Seven Seas; eggs and rarebits innumerable; entrées employing the flesh not only of common edible animals but of bears, wolves, stags, boars, hartebeests, springboks, and wapiti; cold buffets and salads of endless variety and ingenuity; and sweetmeats, savories, and cheeses that made the head ring with their succulence and scope.

Personally, I am an ascetic type boy; just give me a soupçon of pâté de foie gras, a cup of vichyssoise, a filet of Dover sole, a small entrecote about the size of a longshoreman's hand flanked by potatoes Anna and hothouse peas, a galantine of capon in spiced jelly, a mixed green salad, a pot de crème au chocolat, a few fragments of Pont l'Évêque, and a touch of Brazilian coffee -- give me little else, I repeat, and I can curl up on the bare floor with my tartan wrapped around me. But I do think there is no more appalling sight than people stuffing themselves indiscriminately, and there were times in that dining saloon, particularly after I had finished eating, when the gluttony of my neighbors forced me to avert my eyes.

One of the worst offenders, though it costs me an effort to confess it, was my own good lady, who was frequently to be observed recumbent in a deck-chair following these debauches, peepers as heavy-lidded as a constrictor who has just engorged a chicken. I would chide her lightly, throwing in joking allusions to Kate Smith and the three-toed sloth, but no entreaty could dissipate her lethargy. As a result, I was invariably forced to interrupt work I should have been doing, such as reading aloud extracts from the Kamasutra to an inconsolable divorcee behind a lifeboat, and go below to supervise the children's lessons.

Our initial sessions, truthfully, were none too rewarding. The bulk of the problems in their arithmetic dealt with an unattractive dullard named Farmer Brown who had cut up his lower forty into rhomboids or isosceles triangles and was unable to compute the square of the hypotenuse. After breaking my nails on his dilemma, I explained to the cubs that if, instead of mousing around with Euclid, Brown would set out a little marijuana in his fields, he could check both erosion and foreclosure.

Rather than rehash poppycock of no conceivable use in Southeast Asia, I got down to brass tacks. With the aid of a blanket and Nick Scarne's admirable treatise on dice, I gave the young a bit of instruction in calculating odds, fading, and supplicating the bones. I also taught them a few simple methods of smuggling contraband past customs officials, the technique of haggling with pedicab drivers and rickshaw men, and the minimum provocation needed to kick or cuif one's native boys.

We concluded with several rudimentary exercises in black market manipulation, at which they showed an adroitness and chicanery that would have shamed a weasel. I could not help but feel a glow of fatherly pride subsequently in Hong Kong when I met them skulking along Ice House Street, pockets stuffed with rupees, Straits dollars, and Indonesian guilders, for I knew that at last my drudgery had borne fruit.


TOMORROW NIGHT IN PART 3 OF "THE WILD BLUE YONDER": Hawaii to Hong Kong


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[9/18/2011] Perelman Tonight: Aboard the President Cleveland -- Part 1 of "The Wild Blue Yonder" (Chapter 3 of "The Swiss Family Perelman")

"If you happened to be an albatross, booby, or kestral
winging on graceful pinions west of the Farallones . . ."

"There would have been one emigrant whose savoir-vivre and Apollo-like fairness set him as far apart from his fellows as Spinoza from a swineherd. Blessed with a disposition as tractable as a cougar's, possessed of the rare ability to comprehend only that which redounded to his own advantage, he had literally lifted himself to insignificance by his own bootstraps."

-- from "The Wild Blue Yonder"

The Swiss Family Perelman
Chapter 3, "The Wild Blue Yonder,"
Part 1 of 3

IF BY SOME ODD QUIRK OF CIRCUMSTANCE you had happened to be an albatross, booby, or kestrel on the morning of January 23, 1949, winging on graceful pinions west of the Farallones, you might have descried out of your wicked little red-rimmed eyes a white pinpoint on the horizon. Inquisitively wheeling closer on the chance that it might be other boobies, you would have been chopfallen to discern a trim gray vessel of approximately twenty-three thousand gross registered tons, steaming S.S.W. on the Great Circle route from San Francisco to Hong Kong and swiftly bearing six hundred escapists beyond the reach of Milton Berle and the National Retail Credit Association.

Unless you were inherently a masochist, one glance at the passengers would have satisfied your curiosity. On the boat deck far below there would have been visible twenty or thirty retired wowsers in flowered lanai shirts and Lundberg caps, variously engaged in honeycombing their livers with bourbon, tickling skittish widows and cheating each other at shuffleboard, and reviling the Securities and Exchange Commission. The juxtaposition of their fuchsia-colored phizzes and the implausible turquoise sky, of the dazzling white superstructure and the emerald sea, would have produced an effect strikingly akin to a Kodachrome off register; and feathers screaming, you would have gone into a steep bank and made for Pitcairn with the conviction that you had had a pretty narrow squeak.

Overlooked in your quick scrutiny of the President Cleveland, however, there would have been one emigrant whose savoir-vivre and Apollo-like fairness set him as far apart from his fellows as Spinoza from a swineherd. Blessed with a disposition as tractable as a cougar's, possessed of the rare ability to comprehend only that which redounded to his own advantage, he had literally lifted himself to insignificance by his own bootstraps. From every fold of his radiant, saintly face (which by another odd quirk of circumstance happened to be my own) shone forth the man's passionate credo: take nothing but what is not actually nailed down. As he perched on a stool in the Hurricane Bar, pensively sipping his aperitif and appraising his features in a small hand-mirror, he knew a moment of deep melancholy. What a chasm separated him from the trivial, shallow creatures about him, he thought sadly. Would it ever be possible to bridge the gulf, to free these poor blind grubs from their cocoons and aid them to soar with him onto the astral plane?

I had had several ponies of Reckitt's Blue and was feeling tolerably well starched when my wife entered, rudely short-circuiting my reverie. She exuded the special aura of triumph women display after spending several hundred dollars of other people's savings at the hairdresser's, and her coiffure, each serpent tightly finger-waved, fairly gleamed. "Here's a cable for you, bub," she said pompously.

While I busied myself opening it -- I was at the stage where envelope flaps showed a tendency to fight me -- she apprised me of an announcement on the loudspeaker that all passengers would be retarded as the ship proceeded westward.

"Hm-m-m, I thought they had reached their nadir," I commented. "Hot ziggety -- what's this?"

"Good news, dear?" she asked eagerly.

"Wait till you hear," I chortled. "Remember that tiresome old barn of ours in the country we remodeled into a playroom at ruinous expense? Well, it seems that your nephew was fooling with some matches and now we have space for the tennis court I've always dreamed of."

"Yes, and think of all the charcoal we'll have for our wienie roasts in future," she agreed joyously. A tiny cloud momentarily overshadowed her even tinier face. "I do wish it could have been one of our children who was responsible. They never seem to have any enterprise."

"There, there," I consoled her. "They'll be just as toxic as that big lunkhead after they've lived in the Orient. Where are they, by the way?" A hasty catechism of the deck stewards revealed that Abby was dealing fan-tan with three Chinese bust-out men in the cardroom, while Adam, assisted by another supercharged delinquent, had tied up Sparks and was sending out distress signals to the Asiatic Squadron. Reminded by the cool liquid notes of the luncheon gong that I had taken on no cool liquids for almost five minutes, I rectified the oversight and we joined the other colorfully clad tax evaders streaming down for their midday carbohydrates.

The décor of the President Cleveland had little in common with that of the ocean greyhounds we remembered from the early Thirties, nor, indeed, with any recognizable nautical tradition. Industrial designers and interior decorators had blown their tops, investing her public rooms with a profusion of monel metal, formica and glass plastics, and splashy murals depicting generously endowed nereids sporting among the billows with dolphins. Through those refined and ruthlessly air-conditioned precincts moved phalanxes of cat-footed waiters dedicated to anticipating your every wish. It was overpoweringly functional and as hygienic as a brain clinic, but every so often you felt a catch in your throat at the memory of those antebellum French cabin boats, with their matchless bouquet of lavabo, spilt Pinard, hot salt water, and garlic.


TOMORROW NIGHT IN PART 2 OF "THE WILD BLUE YONDER": Putting on the feedbag on the briny sea


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[6/30/2011] Perelman Tonight: "Move over, Asia" -- Part 5 of "The Swiss Family Perelman" (continued)

The S.S. President Cleveland: the largest single object
our children had ever been called upon to take apart

"Throughout the next few weeks, until it deposited us on an alien shore to become targets for malaria, dysentery, Singapore foot, bilharzia, frambesia, sprue, Delhi boils, tropical ulcers, monkey pox, dengue fever, predatory shopkeepers, and Heimweh, this gleaming gray leviathan would be home."

-- from the conclusion of "Low Bridge -- Everybody Down"

The Swiss Family Perelman

Chapter 2, Low Bridge -- Everybody Down

Part 3 of 3

Reports had latterly been seeping across the snows of the Great Continental Divide that as a result of extensive legislative snooping, the film colony was racked by fear and espionage and that nobody dared express his political convictions. In the MGM commissary at least, one saw no hint of it. True, the chair I sat in had a dictaphone concealed under it and a man at the next table took down everything we said in shorthand, but all about us people spoke their minds in forthright fashion, seemingly oblivious of consequences. The names of Susan B. Anthony, Eugene Debs, and Samuel Gompers were bandied about on every lip, and one hothead, a partisan of Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Rider, even undertook to applaud the latter's dictum of "Bust the Trusts." Midway in his panegyric, he suddenly became aware of Adam listening to him with open-mouthed interest.

"Who -- who's that?" he quavered, springing to his feet and upsetting his yoghurt. I assured him it was only my son, but he was clearly unmanned. "He looks like an FBI agent to me," he muttered, sponging his forehead with a Q-tip. "Jeez, don't let this get any further. If Darryl or L.B. ever heard it, I'm out on my can."

The social life of the industry, into which we threw ourselves with the abandon of a couple of juniors home for the holidays from Miss Walker's School, had changed little in two years. It still consisted of an endless round of buffets full of people one had met the previous evening, all of them exactly one day older. Dinner-party conversation in a manufacturing center like Lowell, Nashua, or Wilmington usually deals with shoes, blankets, or smokeless powder, relieved with gossip about the foreman of the bleaching room niggling up to the stockroom babes. In Beverly Hills it dealt with previews, credits, and the boudoir escapades of any couple who had failed to attend that evening. Necks were engorged with blood and passions fanned to white heat as our screenwriter friends wrangled over their precise mathematical contributions to various current movies. "I did seventeen and one-fifth per cent of the original story idea of Wizened!" they shouted, "and thirty-two and five-sixteenths per cent of the additional dialogue of He Shot Her Bolt! Come on outside, you bastard!" Our impending voyage to the East was regarded with overwhelming envy. By turns each of the guests confessed to us that he would love to travel but the premiums on his annuities kept him in want. At the end of the meal, the ladies retired to their hostess's bedroom to compare handbags and hysterectomies, and the gentlemen, lighting cheroots, drank bumpers of Madeira to the Wunderkind of the week, typified at that point by Dore Schary. It was a piquant mixture of the Main Line, the Mermaid Tavern, and any lesser French penal colony like New Caledonia; and when, on the ninth day, we awoke with the characteristic roar in the antrums which betokens a surfeit of unreality, I knew it was time to load the felt yurts on the shaggy ponies and graze on.

Excitement was rife in the waiting room of the Los Angeles municipal airport as we straggled in. A mechanism similar to a jukebox, called the Insurograph and vending life insurance policies up to $25,000 at a quarter a throw, had recently been installed. Around it milled a dozen prospective air passengers, faces fever-flushed and chattering like ticket-holders at the Irish Sweepstakes. My attempt to curl up in a quiet corner with Peekaboo, a journal of the haute poitrine filled with angle shots of Dusty Anderson, came to naught; dragging me by the coattails, the children besought me to try my luck. Judging from the legend on the face of the Insurograph, "If good coin has been rejected, reinsert," parties unknown had already attempted to beat the machine. I fished a slug out of my change-purse and followed suit, but without success. After protracted bickering as to which portion of whom needed coverage most, I compromised by insuring my wallet, naming the Stuyvesant Cat Hospital beneficiary. Unfortunately for the grimalkins, who might today be rolling in salmon, our plane arrived in San Francisco in apple-pie order -- a demonstration at once of the folly of gambling and of removing one's eyes for even an instant from Dusty Anderson.

In the monstrous clangor of the embarkation shed, jostled by porters trundling baggage trucks and deafened by the crash of cargo slings, we stared mutely at the President Cleveland towering above us. Throughout the next few weeks, until it deposited us on an alien shore to become targets for malaria, dysentery, Singapore foot, bilharzia, frambesia, sprue, Delhi boils, tropical ulcers, monkey pox, dengue fever, predatory shopkeepers, and Heimweh, this gleaming gray leviathan would be home. For the children it was a challenge, the largest single object they had ever been called upon to take apart. To my wife, it was the opportunity she had been thirsting for, a chance to unpack her effects and scramble them so they could never be repacked. To me it was a peaceful haven between worlds, beyond the jangle of the telephone, where I could tot up the bills I owed and worry myself into neurasthenia.

"Well, folks," I said in what began as a portentous baritone and ended as a falsetto trill. "Les jeux sont faits. Cast off."

"What's the matter?" my wife queried, with that devilish intuition her sex betrays on the most infelicitous occasions. "Getting cold feet?"

"Listen, you," I said, my eyes as pitiless as flint. "Once I set my hand to the plow ----" Exactly what dread events transpired when I did so, she never found out, for the rest of the sentence was blasted into eternity by the bellow of the ship's siren. My wife sighed deeply, shook her head, and trudged after me up the gangplank.

"Move over, Asia," she said compassionately. "Poor old continent. You don't know what's coming at you."

* * *

WITH THESE RINGING WORDS, WE TAKE TEMPORARY
LEAVE OF OUR TRAVELERS (WITH MORE TO COME)


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[6/29/2011] Perelman Tonight: Hooray for Hollywood -- Part 4 of "The Swiss Family Perelman" (continued)

"Winging over the Tehachapi Range, I prepared myself for the psychological climate of Los Angeles with a cursory inspection of its newspapers. It was reassuring to discover that the inmates assayed as high a percentage of helium as ever."

-- from tonight's installment of "Low Bridge -- Everybody Down"

The Swiss Family Perelman

Chapter 2, Low Bridge -- Everybody Down

Part 2 of 3

With the Western Pacific, at Salt Lake, the picture altered for the better. Personnel and equipment were no longer medieval, and it was agreeable again to be treated as a traveler instead of a deportee. The Vista Dome car used on this system, incidentally, was a fairly unique experience. As one lolled in its rooftop observation blister, vacuously listening to Muzak recordings of Amy Woodford Finden in the intense sunlight, the effect was indistinguishable from a California cultist funeral. On the occasion I did so, I was privileged to overhear an elderly couple, who obviously had just met, absorbedly discussing their internal functions. "I always keep regular with psyllium seed," she was saying. "It gives you the bland bulk without any of the harsh abrasives." "Ye-e-es, that's so," the old gentleman conceded magnanimously, "but for day-in, day-out performance, for real dependability, I like syrup of figs, with a good alophen tablet in case of blockage." How fundamental, so to speak, and how real, I reflected, as we whizzed along the glorious Feather River Route at a mile a minute. Here were two kinsprits, all passion spent, meeting at last on a plane of perfect understanding. Overcome with emotion, I swayed blindly downstairs to the club car for a fast aperient.

No band of Polish immigrants setting foot in the New World could have displayed quite so creamy a mélange of sullenness, martyrdom, and disillusion as my little troupe that winter morning aboard the Oakland ferry. Shivering in an icy rain amid our myriad traps, the ranee and the lambkins glowered at San Francisco and filed a long, sorrowful beef. "He said there were gonna be coconuts," ran the chant. "I wanna ride in a rickshaw. I feel like a frump in these clothes. I wanna ride in a pagoda. I wanna see a fight between a cobra. You deliberately made me buy all the wrong clothes so I'd look ridiculous. I wanna mango -- he said there were gonna be mangoes. I wanna coke. I wanna hamburger. I wanna see Alcatraz."

"You'll see it soon enough," I promised, grinding my teeth to keep them warm. "Now look, where did you put those baggage checks they gave me in New York?"

"Why, in your trunk," my wife replied loftily. "You said to put them in a safe place."

"I know, angel," I said, opening a flange in my skull to allow the steam to escape, "but don't you see, if the checks are inside, the treeple won't give us the punk -- I mean, the trunkle won't give us the peep ----"

"Loosen his collar," I heard a faraway voice saying. "Stand back there -- give him room!" The buzzing subsided and I found myself looking up into a circle of anxious faces. Within a half hour, thanks to my unusual restorative powers, I was coherent enough to intimate to my wife that since the trunks had been shipped directly to the S. S. President Cleveland, it would be difficult to gain access to them before leaving for Hollywood.

"Hollywood?" she demanded. "What do we have to go to Hollywood for? Is the ship sailing from there?" I slowly counted up to seventy-five to forestall a syncope and explained that inasmuch as the steamer was not scheduled to depart for Hong Kong for ten days, I thought the sprouts ought to get a hinge at the dream factory. Mollified by my assurances that she could spend money there as freely as in San Francisco, she grumbled assent and we made for the airport.

Winging over the Tehachapi Range, I prepared myself for the psychological climate of Los Angeles with a cursory inspection of its newspapers. It was reassuring to discover that the inmates assayed as high a percentage of helium as ever. The current suspect in the Black Dahlia case, a peccadillo which involved a lady of the evening being sawed into stove lengths, was described as studying to be a midget auto racer. An inventor in Palos Verdes had constructed a machine duplicating all the functions of the human brain. When not compounding interest or daydreaming about Billie Dove's shape, the mechanism lay by his fireside and purred like a cat. A group of taxpayers domiciled near a small training field in Burbank were up in arms. It appeared that the runway was adjacent to a disused cemetery and that when student pilots failed to become airborne fast enough, their planes plowed through the sepulchers, sending up a shower of knee-caps and femurs. Spurred on, no doubt, by the Southland's continual preoccupation with mortality, a local travel agency was advertising its facilities under the terse admonition, "See the World Before You Leave It."

Our entry into Los Angeles was fortuitously timed; the choking layer of smog which has earned the community the sobriquet of "The Pittsburgh of the West" was nowhere in evidence. However, the city was digging itself out of a snowfall that had attained a depth of three-quarters of an inch at some points, and emergency crews equipped with hot Sanka and soy-bean poultices were being rushed to the stricken area. Moving with its customary energy, the Chamber of Commerce issued a statement declaring the outrage to be Communist-inspired and posted a reward of ten thousand figs for the apprehension of the ringleaders. Nevertheless, it was not until Major Jack Warner had consulted a geomancer on Pico Boulevard and sacrificed three scenario writers to appease the elements that public confidence was finally restored.

As the parents of two passionate admirers of Lassie, the wonder collie, it was naturally our obligation to arrange a rendezvous with all possible speed. The meeting took place several days later on a sound stage at MGM, where the dog (who, parenthetically, is not a dog at all but a cunning simulacrum animated by two dwarf actors) was making a film about sheep-stealing in Scotland. Aquiver with anticipation, the children waited outside their idol's dressing room until he concluded a conference with his agent, business manager, and lawyer. At length the animal appeared, clad in smoking jacket and yellow Ascot muffler and puffing an imported shell briar. His manner, though cordial, was a whit abstracted; it was plain to see that he was dissatisfied with the script and felt that the writers had let him down. At a command from his handler, Lassie extended a languid, manicured paw to us all, wiped it fastidiously with a Kleenex, and strolled off. I inquired of the handler whether it was true as reported that his charge possessed almost human intelligence.

"He's the equal of any producer on this lot," he replied ambiguously. "Excuse me, but I have to go and see a dog about a man." On a near-by stage, a company was engaged in shooting Madame Bovary, Flaubert's classic, and we were permitted to watch Jennifer Jones acting the title role, an experience American moviegoers would be denied for many months to come. Appetites sharpened to the vanishing point, we now betook ourselves to the commissary, passing en route the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Building, which houses most of the studio's executives and creative sparkplugs. It was in this noble structure, familiarly known as "The Iron Lung," that the memsahib and I had languished throughout a good part of the Thirties, and as our step quickened, we caught again the infallible fetor of balderdash, fatuity, and self-abasement that rises when the mountain labors to bring forth a scenario.


TOMORROW NIGHT IN THE CONCLUSION OF "LOW BRIDGE -- EVERYBODY DOWN": "Move over, Asia" -- the flight back to San Francisco and, finally!, embarkation on the S.S. President Cleveland


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