Eccentric's Eccentric

MINUTES OF THE LAST MEETING (277 pp.)--Gene Fowler--Viking ($3.75).

Who was Sadakichi Hartmann? Even his cronies found him hard to define. To John Barrymore, Sadakichi was "a living freak presumably sired by Mephistopheles out of Madame Butterfly." To his biographer Gene Fowler, he was "a bamboo bridge connecting the art of the 1880's with . . . our own time." His short-time employer Douglas Fairbanks Sr. called him "an intelligent spittoon." W. C. Fields, who insisted he understood Sadakichi best, steadfastly referred to him as "a no-good bum."

Whatever Sadakichi was when he began, by the late '30s and early '40s he was a prince of moochers and a court jester to an aging band of once rollicking Hollywood musketeers who met irregularly in the studio of West Coast Painter John Decker. Barrymore. Fields, Decker and Sadakichi each had one foot in the grave and one hand on the bottle. In the guise of Sadakichi's biographer. Fowler drops many a footnote to their bibulous, gay-gallant last stand in his sprightly Minutes of the Last Meeting.

The Hope of Walt Whitman. The idea of chronicling Sadakichi's wayward life and times began as a club gag. But Fowler took it seriously, and raked together the few known facts about this eccentric's eccentric. When he was not with his mock-worshipful pals, Sadakichi lived on an Indian reservation, posing as an Indian. Actually, he was the son of a German coffee merchant who had married a Japanese girl. His first name means "steady luck" in Japanese. Fields contended that it meant "Gimme some dough!" And Barrymore stoutly maintained that "Sadakichi is the mating call of rabid, though sacred monkeys, playing among the . . . towers of Angkor Wat."

Proof exists that Sadakichi heard a fairly powerful mating call from somewhere, for he married twice and fathered 13 children, one illegitimate. But his first love was poetry, and he always carried a testimonial to his early genius in the form of a tattered newspaper clipping of 1888. In it Walt Whitman said: "I have more hopes of Hartmann, more faith in him than in any of the boys." Few connoisseurs today would show such faith in Sadakichi's poems, e.g., the couplets that Biographer Fowler uses as chapter headings. Samples: "I made a bed of sun and sand / Beside some vanished stream"; "In this torn sea of arabesques / Looms there no isle of peace?" Nonetheless, this kind of thing, plus two art books and a blasphemous play about Christ that was banned in Boston, was enough to make Sadakichi the king of Greenwich Village at the turn of the century.

Something for the Pigeons. All the while. Sadakichi sharpened the talent for gratuitous insult that later so endeared him to his Hollywood buddies. When he met dapper Industrialist Henry Clay Frick, he told him to write his autobiography and call it The Tom Thumb of the Coke Ovens. Of some blueprints of Architect Stanford White he said: "To be improved upon only by pigeons, after the drawings become buildings." One figure escaped his misanthropic venom: Mary Baker Eddy. He called the founder of Christian Science "the greatest spiritual expression of the century," and was writing a verse drama about her when he died in 1944 at 78.

When Fowler knew him, Sadakichi was already in his 70s, a bony "fugitive from an embalming table." Yet he could uncurl his null frame to dance "like a faun" or demonstrate judo. He always said hello when he meant goodbye, wore a bulging, homemade truss, and told Fowler that the most beautiful words in the English language were Sadakichi Hartmann. When he was not bumming or gnawing a ham sandwich, he would transfix his fellow club members with oracular dicta, e.g., "The great artists are always the great givers"; "If you think vaudeville is dead, look at modern art."

Man in the Bright Nightgown. Author Fowler has already written Barrymore's story in Good Night, Sweet Prince, and a good part of his own in A Solo in Tom-Toms. He seems to have no immediate plans for writing up Fields (he tins his hat to Robert Lewis Taylor's W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes--TIME, Oct. 17, 1949). But he does have a pitcherful of stories to pour about the late great misanthrope, who was renowned as "Uncle Claude" to the other members of the club.

Fields brooded on the idea of death, which he dubbed "the Man in the Bright Nightgown." Parsimonious by instinct, he was distressed that others might get his money. "If I knew the day and the hour the Man in the Bright Nightgown was coming to get me," he told his friends, "I'd put all my dough into bills of large denomination, stand beside it on a balcony, and summon my dear relatives to watch me as I tore it into little pieces and strewed it like confetti to the winds."

It was Fields's view that the world was a vast conspiracy against him headed by doctors, lawyers, servants and dogs. (Dogs he hated because they "lift their legs on flowers.") During a case brought against him by his doctor, Fields swigged Martinis in court from a paper cup. When the judge decided for the doctor, the comedian risked contempt of court to cry out: "Rooked! Rooked! I've been had!" On the way home he complained to his chauffeur: "Why didn't someone tell me this judge was a teetotaler? . . . Next time I'll get a change of venue to the jurisdiction of some trustworthy sot." Servants were "lardheads." Of a new manservant whose small head came to a visible point, Fields said in his famed nasal rasp: "I can't understand why he's content to work as a domestic. With a head like that, he should own Hollywood."

Joe's Garbage Pail. Fields's low regard for the film capital was fully shared by John Barrymore. Once when Fowler twitted the actor on knowing Macbeth almost word for word and yet needing a prompter board on his film sets, Barrymore said: "I remember Shakespeare's words because he was a great writer. I can't remember Hollywood lines; just as I may well recall a wonderful meal at Delmonico's many years ago, but not the contents of the garbage pail last Tuesday at Joe's Fountain Grill."

Painter John Decker, the club's host, scores more often in Fowler's book for his good cooking than for his repartee, but he perhaps best expressed the spirit and sentiments of the group in his dying request. He asked that his corpse be laid on the living-room bar for the funeral ceremony.

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