The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [53]
“Blair, where did you sleep last night?” I asked him one day at lunch.
“The staircase of the Etats-Unis. Why?”
“There’s a very strange odor about you. Dank, musty. I don’t know——” I almost said “dirty.”
“I used to think that was the smell of Russia, but now I know it is the smell of poverty the world over,” guffawed Mrs. Wire good-naturedly. She was our rich Patron of the Arts, on whose money the company was largely operating.
I started to look shocked, but Blair just threw back his head and roared, at the same time helping himself generously to my bread (it was a very cheap restaurant and every item was separate), and sprinkling it liberally with his bottle of Lea and Perrins Sauce. He always carried this bottle around with him. It was one of the familiar bulges in his suit. The trouser knees. were two others, and the elbows two more. The reason for the bottle was partly to prove his anglophilism (it was supplied to him free by some English friends who worked at the British Embassy), partly because the food he ate was of such inferior quality that it couldn’t help being improved by the sharp disguising taste of Worcester sauce, and partly, I am sure—in many ways he was the most childish of us all—because he shared a name in common with that distinguished label: the Original and Genuine Worcestershire Sauce manufactured at their factory in Worcester, England.
Blair and I spent most of the lunch time arguing. It generally began with Saroyan. Blair thought Saroyan was a marshmallow. I thought Saroyan was a writer who had written me a large and lovely part in the little one-act Prison Drama we were doing, and I also thought I was not going to be able to get on stage to do it with a straight face if Blair didn’t stop his parodies of the Saroyan Style. He always managed to goad me into a rage where I’d find myself hotly defending Saroyan as a stark realist and demanding to know just what the hell Blair knew about jail anyway, since he’d never even seen the inside of one as I had (by then I really believed that Jim and I had spent the night behind bars), and then I’d exclaim triumphantly, “Well I can tell you this play is just how people do behave in those circumstances— that’s life.” “That’s not life,” he would reply irritably, “that’s Saroyan.’’ And somehow this led us directly into our argument over the Method. You know, the Stanislavsky Method; working for realism through improvisations and sense memory, and emotional recall and all that sort of—oh well, never mind, a lot of technical stuff. I was devoted to it. Anyway, if there was anything Blair was more contemptuous of than Saroyan it was the Method. Noel Coward himself couldn’t have been more contemptuous. Nevertheless, along about this time, Blair began treating us to his homemade improvisations. The third play we were doing, the one by Shaw, had a butler in it—one of those announcing and handing-things-around butlers—and Blair was it. He would call upon us, those of us not in or connected with the play, at the end of each rehearsal, to guess what the new improvisation was about. “What was I being today?” he would ask.
“I don’t know. Some sort of dope fiend I suppose.”
“Your friend Crazy Eyes asking people to dance with him.”
Once he was Groucho Marx breathing lecherously into the women’s bosoms. Once he played it blind, once lame and once drunk. The game caught on; it had tremendous popularity, and