Valley of the Dolls Salad

THE STUDIO by John Gregory Dunne. 255 pages. Farrar, Sfraus & Giroux. $5.95.

Darryl F. Zanuck seized control of 20th Century-Fox in 1962 after a lot of nasty infighting; in five years he and his son Richard turned a single-year loss of $39.8 million into a single-year profit of $12.5 million. Success, naturally, bred envy. And envy gave rise to tales of dirty dealing, venality and grossness. Two years ago, the company gave the run of the lot to a freelance writer, John Gregory Dunne. Dunne could attend any meeting, drop in on any set. He would learn the truth, and the truth somehow would set 20th Century-Fox free of gossip. Naturally, it didn't turn out quite that way.

Left to his own prose, Dunne is apt to say "vicissitudes" when he means "troubles." But he is a good reporter who unobtrusively sets scene after scene, constructing his book out of quotes that show the moviemen to be innocent of cruelty or dirty dealing, but guilty (in an engagingly matter-of-fact way) of venality and grossness.

At the commissary ("We've got a nice Valley of the Dolls Salad," suggests the waitress), the Hollywood types are naively shocked when told they will have to pay $2,500 for a week's display of Dr. Dolittle record albums in the windows of a Manhattan store. And how to get Rex Harrison to go to South America to plug the movie? Well, suggests one publicist, since the lobby-display pushmi-pulyus were made in Peru, "I think I can get him decorated by the Peruvian government for promoting cottage industry . . . The Condor of the Andes or something like that." Producer Arthur Jacobs asks: "Condor of the Andes first class or second class? You know Rex, he loves decorations."

In Dunne's telling, Production Chief Richard Zanuck reveals himself as tough, sometimes crass, but possessed of incredible patience. In one fabulous scene, he appears as the New Hollywood haunted by the Old Hollywood, which comes on as a fond, hapless parody of itself. Confronting him in his office are three William Morris agents and a portly director named Henry Koster, who wants to match a 1937 Koster triumph (Deanna Durbin and Leopold Stokowski in A Hundred Men and a Girl) with a new musical concoction. Koster outlines the story. A touring symphony orchestra is about to return to New York to put on a charity program "for crippled children." The cymbal player comes down with a contagious disease in Moscow ("We can work out the disease later"), and the whole orchestra is quarantined--all except its Lenny Bernstein-type conductor. He rushes home but cannot find a substitute orchestra and is about to give up. Suddenly, "the president of the charity comes to plead with him against cancellation. In his arms he is carrying a small boy--with braces on his legs." Lenny hastily whips together a "youth orchestra" and carries on.

"I'm afraid it's not for us at the moment," says Zanuck smoothly. "We've got a lot of musical things on the schedule right now." After Koster and his entourage leave the office, Zanuck sits lost in thought, silently chewing on a fingernail. "Jesus," he says finally.

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