Lost and Found in the Stars

By R.Z. Sheppard

SHOW PEOPLE by Kenneth Tynan; Simon & Schuster; 317pages; $11.95

The age of mass entertainment is but a blip on the screen of evolution; yet the process of changing Homo erectus into Homo sedentarius is well under way. We sit; we watch; we listen. We sit, talk and read about what we have seen and heard. As a drama critic and former literary director of England's National Theater, Kenneth Peacock Tynan knows what keeps readers and audiences in their seats. He did, after all, conceive and produce Oh! Calcutta! Tynan can be glib, self-serving, tricky and loosely digressionary. But he is never dull. At 52, the graying provocateur describes himself as "a cricket-loving radical" and misses few opportunities to tease the bourgeoisie about the joys of the flesh.

Show People is mainly about the joys of talent and the satisfactions of professionalism. It is a collection of long profiles, originally published in The New Yorker, which reflect what the author calls "my abiding obsession with the skills that enable a man or woman to seize and hold the rapt attention of a multitude." His current choices: British Actor Ralph Richardson; Czech-born British Playwright Tom Stoppard; Johnny Carson, board chairman of the American talk show; Comedian and Movie Producer Mel Brooks; and Louise Brooks (no relation), film beauty and sex symbol of the 1920s.

Tynan seems to move easily and confidently on both sides of the Atlantic. He should. In addition to many friends on the London stage, he has connections in New York and Los Angeles, where he has lived for the past two years. He is one of the few journalists who actually keep a daily journal, which he employs here as a film director might use jump cuts. He has the panache to handle the first person singular, although the effect can be cloying when he immodestly quotes himself: "Above all, there was the voice [Sir Ralph Richardson's], which I once described as 'something between bland and grandiose: blandiose, perhaps.'

Or, as I wrote in another context..." Elsewhere, after noting that he made last-minute cuts and transpositions in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, Tynan proudly quotes from one opening-night review: "As gay and original a farce as we have seen for years."

Tynan pays his respects to criticism in shrewd analyses of Richardson's performances and brief exegeses of Stoppard's plays. But mainly the author aims to please both his subjects and his readers. He is dazzled by Stoppard's stylish pessimism and flashy wordplay, yet wisely blocks him from the company of Beckett, Nabokov and Oscar Wilde. Deftly, Tynan puts his judgment of Stoppard in the book's foreword: "A uniquely inventive playwright who has more than once been within hailing distance of greatness." The piece itself is an adulatory delight, especially a scene in which Stoppard emerges as a game-saving hero of Harold Pinter's cricket team after Pinter and his lover, Lady Antonia Fraser, retire to a nearby pub to avoid a confrontation with Pinter's wife.

Running into Johnny Carson can be trouble too, especially if one is an anxious guest on his Tonight show. Tynan has been there on what he calls "two vertiginous occasions." His impression: "The other talk shows in which I have taken part were all saunas by comparison with Carson's. Merv Griffin is the most disarming of ego strokers; Mike Douglas runs him a close second in the ingratiation stakes; and Dick Cavett creates the illusion that he is your guest, enjoying a slightly subversive private chat. Carson, on the other hand, operates on a level of high, freewheeling, centrifugal banter that is well above the snow line. Which is not to say that he is hostile. Carson treats you with deference and genuine curiosity. But the air is chill; you are definitely on probation."

Tynan smartly cracks the code of Carson's durable popularity. What you see is what you get: a complete professional, as fast on the draw as any who share his spotlight; a neatly dressed Midwesterner whose underlying rectitude is beamed to millions of weary nine-to-fivers as a conspiratorial wink indicating that show people may be glamorous, but they are not to be taken seriously Tynan, the great appreciator of rare abilities, can explain the aggressive surrealism of Mel Brooks' ethnic humor, but it does not quite appear to be the Briton's cup of tea. There is a hint of distance in the title of the Brooks piece:

"Frolics and Detours of a Short Little Hebrew Man." There is admiration for the creator of the 2,000-Year-Old Man, but it is undermined by the portentous remark that "by playing a character who was immortal, Brooks may have staked his principal claim to immortality as a comedian." And why, after recalling the freebooting hilarity of Young Frankenstein, does Tynan resonate like a Viennese psychiatrist? "We have seen that Brooks is driven by a fear, amounting to hatred, of mortality; and what is Young Frankenstein but the story of a man who succeeds in defeating death?"

Tynan is best when he unreservedly gives his heart away, and Louise Brooks is his ideal recipient. He visits the actress, now seventyish and living in a small Rochester apartment; he finds her arthritic and surrounded by volumes of literary classics. "Most beautiful-but-dumb girls think they are smart, and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter," she tells him. Smitten with images of Louise's dark, gamy sexuality in such films as Pandora's Box and Prix de Beaute, Tynan is now thoroughly captivated by the frail star's reminiscences of her fast, libidinous life. It is an erotic meeting of minds. "When we were talking on the phone," she says, "some secret compartment inside me burst, and I was suddenly overpowered by the feeling of love -- a sensation I'd never experienced with any other man. Are you a variation of Jack the Ripper, who finally brings me love that I'm prevented from accepting -- not by the knife but by old age?" She also tells Tynan that, in her rich experience, Englishmen made the best lovers. What more could a star-struck boy of 52 ask for? --R.Z. Sheppard

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