Cabaret Philosopher

WINE, WOMEN AND WORDS (295 pp.) --Billy Rose--Simon & Schuster ($3 cloth, $1 paper).

Like one of his cabarets, Billy Rose's first book has a dish for almost every taste. Smeared over most of them is a thick paste of sentimental egotism; the reader can no more escape Billy Rose ("I'm a ham--boned, hickory-smoked, and sugar-cured") than he could escape himself if he were locked up in a padded cell. One chapter, "Holm, Sweet Holm," tells the reader how wonderful wife Eleanor is, how she makes him behave like a gentleman, stops him from buying candied apples on sticks (because they have "nine million calories"), and even prods him into picking up porous fragments of Culture. Another chapter, containing warmed-over stories of the kind O. Henry froze into a formula, is called, modestly enough, "Move Over, De Maupassant."

Soft-Shoe Routine. A wise old man in the vaudeville arts, Billy Rose has worked out quite an act for himself: he is the gullible little guy just trying to learn the ropes, and always being outsmarted. With all the self-depreciation, Billy lets it be known that he is a pretty clever fellow. From Socrates to Will Rogers it has been a good routine when done right, and Billy makes a fairly successful stab at it.

Rose is at his best when he forgets that he is now a V.I.P. and just chews the fat. His most readable chapter, "Some of My Best Friends Are News," is a collection of sketches of wacks he has met between Broadway and the East River. Among them:

P: Ted Healy, the actor who adopted a chimpanzee and a pygmy "with a head like an inverted ice-cream cone" and would never explain the chimp other than by saying solemnly: "He's muh pal."

P: Nick the Greek, the legendary gambler who once lost $240,000 in a card game and then calmly got into a discussion on art with Billy, who is also something of an amateur in the field.

P: Yonkel the Jink ("A jink is a fellow who used to be a jinx and graduated"), the "hardest luck guy on the East Side." Dozens of people, reports Billy, "make a living by checking his selections and betting the opposite . . . When he discusses past achievements it's always 'The day I beat Army' or 'The night I knock out Graziano.' " Billy tells how Yonkel was once outjinxed by one Timothy Whitehead, who had lost $5,000,000 in the '29 crash. "That's diffrunt," said Yonkel, "winnin' from dat kinda fella don't mean I'm all washed up azza jink. I wuz outclassed, dat's all . . ."

Man With a Message. One of Rose's best yarns is about Jimmy Durante on a fishing trip. Durante was awakened at 3 a.m. to drive out to the ocean. "On the way to the garage, I noticed he was smacking every tree he passed. 'When I'm awake,' Schnozzola explained, 'no boid sleeps.' "

But when Billy grabs the spotlight for himself, he falls into the most hoary and outrageous of cliches ("What I don't know would fill a book. And, dear reader, it's going to"), the coy, confidential familiarity of a thoroughly disciplined husband, the schmaltz-coated reflections of a Broadway philosopher ("I wish the engineers would keep their slide-rules out of the bits of fairyland left in this bolixed-up world. . .").

But when all this is said, it must be added that Billy is almost always readable, which is the prime necessity for a writer. When he first began writing pieces like these, he paid to have them published, as ads for his nightclubs. Soon papers were picking them up free, then paying him handsomely to write a syndicated column. Now he has wrapped up the best of his columns, filled them out with an autobiography (already published in Look), and put them into a book which his publishers are making a costly fuss about. All of which, as Billy would say, is pretty good for a "Broadway clown with breakaway suspenders and a nose that lights up."

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