Laughter's Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley

Benchley may be remembered best for a line he did not write but which he delivered to Ginger Rogers in the 1942 Billy Wilder comedy The Major and the Minor: ""Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?"" He once told his friend Harold Ross of the New Yorker that he was not a writer or an actor; this despite 12 books in addition to 20 years of theater criticism for Life magazine and the New Yorker and appearances in 40 motion pictures, as well as starring roles in about 50 of his own short subjects, one of which won an Academy Award. Alas, he never needed the excuse of a rainy day himself, and died in 1945 at 56 of cirrhosis of the liver. A half-century later, Benchley does not get a lot of laughs for his sophisticated humor, and Altman, a New York journalist, quotes him to sometimes self-defeating length. Benchley's instinct for the absurd, which served him well in New Yorker skits and drama reviews, made him much more money in films and reached the moviegoing public in such vehicles as The Sex Life of a Polyp (banned in Detroit) and How to Sleep. By the early 1930s, Benchley was taking Hollywood jobs to keep up his drinking and womanizing, while his wife, Gertrude, back East, pretended not to know. Benchley became more of an absentee legend than a presence at the fabled Algonquin Hotel ""Round Table"" he helped create. The ""dementia praecox field,"" as he called it, had been taken over by more gifted aspirants. Once the life of many parties during Prohibition and afterward, Benchley does not come fully to life here, yet Altman offers a vivid portrait of the society in which he thrived. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Apr.)