Sullivan's Travels

MUCH ADO ABOUT ME (380 pp.)--Fred Allen--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($5).

If the people in Poland are called Poles, why aren't the people in Holland called Holes?

This was the first joke ever told by Fred Allen, in a grammar-school revue. Over the next 50 years, a lot of his humor did not rise much above this level, but his nasally astringent tones and the cold poached eyes with which he regarded life were to be widely hailed as the attributes of a pungent social satirist. He was both more and less than that; in his best years, he was one of the funniest comedians in the U.S.; in lesser, later years he was an embittered heckler of most post-Allen entertainment.

Rather surprisingly--for nothing can be as dreary as a comic in cold print--these reminiscences turn out to be both engaging and amusing. The book is really three in one. One subtitle might read "Up from Penury," the Dickensian tale of a poor Boston Irish boy who made good; another, "Vaudeville's Final Hour," a nostalgic total recall of the show-business tribe that was "half gypsy and half suitcase"; and the third, "The Fred Allen Joke Book," for gags are sprinkled all over--mostly outrageous gags, gags that used to be known as "forty-men jokes," i.e., it takes 40 men to keep the audience from bolting. The jokes were Allen's way of laughing at himself and his trade, and they serve as signposts to his story.

Let "X" equal my father's signature.

Fred Allen's father bound books for a living, but there is no evidence that he ever opened one. Born in Cambridge, Mass, in 1894, Fred was christened John Florence Sullivan; within three years his mother was dead, and the elder Sullivan had taken to drink. One of Allen's boyhood memories is of himself and his younger brother piloting the old man home after an all-day binge: "We looked like two sardines guiding an unsteady Moby Dick into port." He took an after-school job as runner and stack boy at the Boston Public Library at 60-c- a night. At a library employees' show, he did a juggling act that wowed his fellow workers. Soon he was haunting the dingy headquarters of a local amateur-night impresario.

My uncle is a Southern planter. He's an undertaker in Alabama.

Lines like that numbed the funnybones of Allen's pre-World War I audiences. When he wasn't twanging out patter, he pyramided cigar boxes on his chin and twirled hats through the air as "Freddy James, the World's Worst Juggler." At times he also did a ventriloquist's bit with a dummy named Jake. He had outdistanced the drag-off hooks with which managers yanked booed performers into the wings, but he was still patronizingly tagged as a "coast defender," i.e., a smalltime vaudevillian who played only Boston and such outlying provinces as Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.

The halls were so dark the mice had a seeing-eye cat to lead them around.

That one refers to Mrs. Montfort's Boardinghouse, a fleabag theatrical hotel, which was Allen's first miserable beach head on Broadway's Great White Way. It was 1914, World War I had top billing, and Allen's arrival in New York had "created as much commotion as the advent of another flounder at the Fulton Fish Market." But the day would come (The Little Show and Three's a Crowd) when Broadway would be Allen's alley.

ALLEN : What character do you portray?

PORTLAND : I'm a chorus girl. I have no character.

Fred Allen met Portland Hoffa when she was a chorus girl in The Passing Show of 1922. They were married in 1927 in the Actor's Chapel (Manhattan's St. Malachy's Church). "Portland had been a herd thespian; as a member of the chorus she had participated, unnoticed, in group singing and bevy dancing," but Allen made room for her in his vaudeville act. Portland later became the perky, indestructible nitwit on Allen's radio show. Of the early days, Allen fondly recalls that she not only fed him jokes but also quantities of salmon loaf and macaroni & cheese.

This theater is so far back in the woods the manager is a bear. The audience is so low the ticket-taker is a dwarf to make the people feel at home.

Such were Allen's tributes to vaudeville. But he loved it, despite its leeching managers and overnight hops, shoebox lunches and tank-town audiences. To him, it was a school of inventive self-reliance peopled with lovable oddballs. A gaudy branch of human botany, vaudeville finds in Fred Allen an affectionate and scrupulous botanist who cherishes every last contortionist, hypnotist, iron-jawed lady, human xylophone, one-armed cornetist, rube comedian, Hindu conjurer and clay modeler who ever played a split week east of Lompo,. Calif. or west of Maiden, Mass.

Part of the charm of Much Ado About Me is its period-piece Americana. It tells of the last fun Fred Allen had being funny. To the radio years, he brought his nagging instinct for perfectionism. TV he merely lip-serviced waspishly. To Much Ado About Me (finished shortly before his death nine months ago), Allen brought not only the fondness of his memories, but the rueful tone and the hint of deri sion that, years before, led him to write:

Hush little bright line

Don't you cry

You'll be a cliche

Bye and bye.

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