4. “We can weather this storm.” Memorandum from Jonathan Blashette to Dandy-de-odor-o employees, 12 February, 1930. Corporate hatch battening began with the sale of the product itself. Jonathan, determined to keep Dandy-D afloat, slashed the wholesale price of the deodorant by half. Joked vice president for marketing Vinton Kalet, “We’ve got those damned deodorant sticks so cheap now, they’re probably using ’em for lard down in Appalachia.” (Reinhold, 175-77). Other means by which Jonathan hoped to tough out the hard economic times involved cutting employee salaries by 25 percent and significantly reducing overhead. “You won’t find this company going belly-up, no sirree,” he stated with resolve. “Even a guy with a hole in his sole and a soup kitchen crust in his hand’s got a right to smell like a swell. And knowing that fact, he’ll scrape up whatever he can to purchase our product.” With the exception of radio, advertising expenditures were also trimmed. Reinhold contends that it was the popularity of radio that saved the company.
5. “You won’t find a job if you smell like a slob.” The jingle reached its peak in popularity in the mid-1930s. However, as late as 1947, the slogan was ad-libbed by Bob Hope in the only Hope/Crosby “road” picture to be dubbed an inarguable “stinker” by American film critics. Road to Irkutsk was shelved after its premiere in Hollywood and all prints subsequently destroyed. According to co-star Dorothy Lamour in an interview with Sinematic Confessions Magazine (12, no.4 [1970]:34), Hope accused Bing Crosby of having never heard of deodorant, and Lamour came close to making an unkind comment or two herself, the heavy woolen uniform the comedic crooner wore unleashing wafts of male apocrine unpleasantness “to the detriment of all of us who value an unpolluted work environment.”
6. The new director of product planning limped to the easel and took the pointer. Reinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o, 184. Arnold Haverty’s left leg had been mangled in a childhood game of blindman’s bluff. After local toughs crashed the eleven-year-old boy’s birthday party, he was blindfolded and walked right off the small bluff that marked the boundary of the backyard meadow in which the game was played. The young bullies confessed that they were only tangentially familiar with the rules of the game. The same excuse was offered following an earlier game of Snap-the-Whip, which resulted in Haverty’s young cousin being flung up into a tree.
7. Haverty had a bit of the devil in him. Ibid. Among other popular pranks perpetrated by mischievous Arnie was sneaking into Sally Rand’s dressing room at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and replacing the stripper’s body balloon with a dangerously smaller inflatable.
8. “I liked Haverty’s laugh. I wanted to emulate it.” Jonathan described it this way: “Homph, homph, heh, hickle, heh, homph.” Jonathan’s Diary, JBP, 1 March 1930.
9. “In the sum of it, a most delightful evening with the three-legged man.” Evelyn Waugh did, apparently, enjoy his late-night encounter with Jonathan at the Kensington Pub, taking the opportunity to unbosom himself of a number of deep-seated regrets and concerns. The satirical British novelist confessed profound disappointment over being forced by his publisher to excise most of the homosexual, pedophiliac, and incestuous references from his Decline and Fall, adding, as he became bolder in his admissions to Jonathan, that an earlier draft of the manuscript containing, as well, a scatologically-defiled tea party and an orgy involving several English schoolboys and two crippled milch cows, could have made for a much more controversial book. It was all, according to Waugh, simply a matter of “mores and taste. You see, I prefer a few more seasonings in my literary spice rack.” That evening Evelyn also expressed regret over having the same first name as his wife. It made for a number of confusing marital moments, especially on those occasions during which self-critical monologues were overheard and misunderstood by wife Evelyn, to the cruel delight of the hired help. Private notes, Waugh Papers, Cramlington University. U.K.
10. It was during his visit to England that Jonathan met Clara Gleason. Jonathan Blashette to Addicus Blashette, 15 March1930, JBP.
11. “I didn’t care for her at first, but she does have a way of growing on you.” Ibid., 19 March1930, JBP.
12. The old die young. Clara’s contempt for anyone over the age of fifty is best summed up in the poem which follows. Published by The Young Set, organ of the British Society for the Abolition of the Aged, “Buckie Biddle” caused an outcry at the time. Clara was sent hate mail from angry seniors throughout the world (including Jonathan’s father Addicus, who, exercising his new Yiddish vocabulary, pronounced it meshuga) and from every demographic subset, including a centenarian who mailed her his befouled bed sheets and called her a “snot-nosed ninny.” Harsh British reaction in particular was one of the reasons Clara ended her lengthy literary sojourn in England and returned to the States with Jonathan.
Buckie Biddle
Buckie Biddle made a piddle
In her panties,
In the middle.
Down her leg, dribble dribble
While down her chin wind streams of spittle—
Droolly mewlly little
Dots and spots of spinky spittle.
Spitty splat and splatter spit,
Plinking pink and wrinkly tit—
Down bony chin, jutting brittle
To droopy tit, a splishy puddle.
Buckie blinks and squints and prattle
Blurts and spurts, a mumbly muddle.
Murmur Murmur reminisce.
Buckie’s brain:
Addled mess.
Buckie’s life near to end—
Broken life, no hope of mend.
So fluids flow,
Recede and dry.
Then desiccated Buckie die.
13. “I love her because she’s dangerous.” Jonathan’s Diary, 18 March1930, JBP. The effusive entry continues:
“I love her because she grabs life by the horns, by the short hairs, by the ear lobes and doesn’t let go. She hangs on to life, wrestling with it, thrashing it about, flinging it from side to side like a terrier with a death-destined woodrat. She takes life in her hands as if it were some great sopping sponge from which she must wring out every last drop. She holds it over her beautiful upturned head and she squeezes the salty liquid from its pores and it spills into her open, thirsty mouth and she drinks of it in great happy gulps as it rivulets down her sweet, softly curved chin, from her gaping, grinning, giggling mouth. And I want to take her in my arms and celebrate her celebration of that celebratory instinct within us all. I want to lay tongue-active kisses on her winks, on her saucy secretive smirks, on her sloppy, full-barreled assaults on a world gone stale, gone dry on the vine, a world gone greedmad or complacent or afraid without cause. She stands back and whoopbelts: ’Why this? Why not? Why worry? What, me worry? Where is my life? Here it is! Splayed before you to be wholly engaged. To be put into gear. I will address the starter and watch it go. And I will adjust the setting to ‘high’ and I will fly!’ My Clara — climber of mountains and spinner of dreams, untempered, uncorralled, undeterred. My glorious free spirit. My ClaraDelicious.