S(idney) J(oseph) Perelman Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on S(idney) J(oseph) Perelman

Sidney Joseph Perelman was born in Brooklyn, New York, to immigrant Joseph and Sophia Perelman. When Perelman was still a child his family moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where his father worked as a machinist, a dry goods merchant, and a would-be poultry farmer. Young Perelman, whose ambition was to become a cartoonist, practiced his drawing on cardboard from his father's dry goods store and spent many hours reading popular novels and going to movies; these books and motion pictures later helped influence his satiric style and his choice of subject matter.

From 1921 to 1925 Perelman attended Brown University as a premedical student. One of his classmates was Nathanael West, who's sister Perelman married. While in school, he began contributing cartoons to the campus humor magazine Brown Jug; he later became its editor. After graduation he became a regular contributor to the humor weekly Judge, and it was for this magazine that he first began writing humorous essays. But his satiric style did not develop until he went to work for College Humor in 1930. Influenced by such writers as Donald Ogden Stewart, Ring Lardner, and Robert Benchley, Perelman's work was a mixture of parody, puns, and non sequitur; his gift for wordplay, evident in his books, plays, and scripts, helped shape twentieth-century American humor.

In 1929 Perelman married Laura West, who collaborated with him on his screenplays Paris Interlude (1934), Florida Special (1936), Boy Trouble (1939), Ambush (1939), and The Golden Fleecing (1940), and on his plays All Good Americans (1933) and The Night Before Christmas (1941). The Perelmans had two children, Adam and Abby Laura.

Perelman's first book, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, was published in 1929, and it was this book that led to Perelman's film writing career. Groucho Marx had been asked to provide a blurb for the book's dust jacket; two years later, when the Marx Brothers were searching for a project for radio, Groucho remembered Perelman and hired him to write a script. Working with Will B. Johnstone, Perelman devised a story of four stowaways on a luxury liner. The Marxes read the treatment and decided to use it for their next movie rather than for a radio show; Perelman and Johnstone were brought to California and put on Paramount Studio's payroll. Their screenplay went through several drafts (with another writer, Arthur Sheekman, eventually brought in) before the Marxes were pleased; the movie, Monkey Business, was finally released in 1931.

Like most of the Marx Brothers' movies, Monkey Business is virtually without plot--for the first half of the film, the brothers stow away on a ship and wreak havoc on the unsuspecting crew and travelers, and in the second part they go ashore and somehow become involved with gangsters. But plotting is clearly not important here; humor is, and the Marxes proved to be ideal performers of Perelman's material. He could introduce characters and situations at will, with no regard for logic, and Groucho Marx in particular was well suited for Perelman's wordplay.

Monkey Business, the Marx Brothers' third film, was well received by critics and audiences, and Perelman, who had mixed feelings about Hollywood and the Marx Brothers, worked on another picture for them, Horse Feathers (1932), the next year. Groucho played the head of Huxley University; desperate for a winning football team he attempts to recruit some new players and winds up with Chico and Harpo. Some gangsters who have wagered on the final game of the season take the new players prisoner, but they escape and win a zany game. Directed by Norman McLeod, the screenplay was a product of the work of Perelman, Bert Kalmar, and Harry Ruby.

Never happy in Hollywood--he once called it "a dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth,"--Perelman wrote only one more screenplay before leaving Paramount, Sitting Pretty (1933). The movie is a Hollywood satire that allowed Perelman to display some of the low regard he had for the film community. Two aspiring songwriters (Jack Haley and Jack Oakie) hitchhike to Hollywood hoping for movie careers. They meet a series of eccentric characters, including a producer (Lew Cody), an agent (Gregory Ratoff), and a vampish actress (Thelma Todd).

After returning to New York, Perelman began writing for the stage. He began with two collections of sketches, The Third Little Show (produced in 1931) and Walk a Little Faster (produced in 1932) which he wrote with Robert MacGunigle. He wrote his first full play, All Good Americans, in 1933. The story of Americans living in Paris was a mild success, and when M-G-M optioned it for filming, Perelman and Laura Perelman wrote the screenplay. He returned to work for Paramount in 1935 and remained there until 1940; all of his films during this period were written with Laura Perelman. Their first screenplay was for Paris Interlude, which they adapted from their play All Good Americans. Next came Florida Special, a vehicle for Jack Oakie that was conceived as a comic Grand Hotel in a railroad setting. On a Florida-bound train, salesman Bangs Carter (Oakie) meddles in the affairs of most of his fellow passengers, including a group of thieves trying to get the jewels of greedy Simeon Stafford (Claude Gillingwater).

Partly because Perelman had other commitments, including regular contributions to The New Yorker, and partly because some film projects fell through, it was three more years before another of Perelman's scripts was filmed. In Boy Trouble, a childless couple, the Fitches (Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland) take two orphan boys (Billy Lee and Donald O'Connor) into their home. At first Mr. Fitch is unable to accept the boys, but finally the four become a family. Boy Trouble is a sentimental film, unusually so for Perelman, but was highly popular nonetheless.

Ambush was Perelman's final script for Paramount. A group of bank robbers escape after taking a secretary (Gladys Swarthout) hostage. They hijack a truck, and she falls in love with the driver. After completing this film, the Perelmans wrote a screenplay more typical of their style for M-G-M: The Golden Fleecing, a witty comedy. Insurance salesman Henry Twinkle (Lew Ayres) sells a policy to gangster Gus Fender (Lloyd Nolan), then must secretly protect Nolan from encountering the violent end he is almost sure to meet.

Perelman contributed to only two more films before leaving Hollywood again. He worked on the screen story for Larceny, Inc. (1942), which was based on his play The Night Before Christmas. It was a well-received comedy about a trio of ex-convicts (Edward G. Robinson, Broderick Crawford, and Edward Brophy) whose luggage store is a front for their crimes. With his wife, Perelman worked on an M-G-M musical, Greenwich Village (1944), in which a serious musician is forced to write songs for a Broadway revue. Perelman called the movie "loathsome" and declined any screen credit.

For over a decade, Perelman stayed away from Hollywood, devoting his time to essays and plays. He was finally lured back in 1956 when producer Mike Todd hired him to rework James Poe's adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days. The story of Phileas Fogg and his bet that he could make the trip around the world provided much opportunity for Perelman to develop a variety of comic vignettes, and David Niven's urbane portrayal of Fogg allowed Perelman's wit to shine through. The script is intelligent and amusing, though most of the success of the picture may be attributed to the nearly four dozen famous performers who took cameo roles in the film. In any case, collaborators Poe, Perelman, and John Farrow received an Academy Award for their work, and the film was voted best picture.

Around the World in 80 Days was Perelman's final screenplay. He had found working on the film to be an extremely unpleasant experience (as he revealed in "Around the Bend in Eighty Days," a series of six articles he wrote in the early 1970s) and firmly decided to have no more to do with Hollywood. He spent the remainder of his life working on essays and articles, publishing eight more collections before his death. When Laura Perelman died in 1970, Perelman immigrated to England, but returned to the United States a few years later. In 1978 he was presented with a special National Book Award for his contribution to American letters. S. J. Perelman died in October 1979.