Overexposure

THE BIG LAUGH (308 pp.)--John O'Hara--Random House ($4.95).

After turning out two volumes of excellent short stories (Sermons and Soda-Water, Assembly), Novelist John O'Hara let it be known that his next work was to be something really massive, surpassing even such weighty tomes as Ten North Frederick in length but embodying the crisp authority he seems lately to have lost in the piling up of documentary detail. But plainly, The Big Laugh is not it. For a mercy, it is shorter. For a pity, it is perhaps O'Hara's worst book. In its account of Hollywood in the 1920s and '30s, trifles are sharply observed, but the whole picture is bleared and unfocused.

The Big Laugh is the story of Richard Hubert Ward, a rascal who became an actor "because there was almost nothing else for him to do." At 14, Hubie had swiped his uncle's car and run down an old woman. Expelled from various prep schools for his double-gaited sexual activities, he muscled his way into summer stock by threatening to expose the director as a homosexual, then slithered off to Hollywood.

At first, Hubie played the "real yellow-belly" that he was and became famous in films. But his agent, promoting a new image, advised: "Stay out of trouble, stay out of the nightclubs, and you'll be a second Ronnie Colman." Hubie did. He went so straight that his wife took to adultery out of boredom. And then there was a divorce, and a couple more marriages--all crammed onto the last two pages as O'Hara's chronicle dribbles to a stop. Hubie Ward was the frankest of phonies, but the moral is, or so the author says, that "people know when you are trying to be something you are not." In his short stories, O'Hara can knock chips off the old Hollywood chopping block with his eyes shut. But in The Big Laugh he writes as if Nathanael West, F.

Scott Fitzgerald and Budd Schulberg had never reported on Hollywood mores. With an air of almost embarrassing innocence, O'Hara introduces the cigar-chomping Hollywood producer who speaks in broken English, the star whose bed is in the public domain. His hero Hubie is something less than an ersatz, goyische Sammy Click.

He does not even run; he saunters.

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