Laid-Back Camaraderie

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A COUPLE OF COMEDIANS by Don Carpenter

Simon & Schuster; 220 pages;

$9.95

In A Couple of Comedians, Narrator David Ogilvie--gagman of the title team --makes a list, in descending order of status, of the Los Angeles hotels favored by showfolk. He does it perfectly, beginning with the Bel-Air, ending with the Montecito. This may seem a small felicity, but it is precisely the sort of thing that writers of parboiled Hollywood romans `a clef usually get wrong or skip altogether in their haste to get to the casting couch and the boudoir.

Verisimilitude is only one of several virtues of Don Carpenter's shrewd and tightly written novel. Comedians contains just one star other than its central comics, and she is only a walk-on. It needs no more. The cast is perfect, and the comedy unfailingly original. There are no libidinous or abusive producers, no hysterically egomaniac directors, not even a failed novelist making a rich, bitter livelihood by writing for the screen. The author has been a novelist (Hard Rain Falling, The True Life Story of Jody McKeegan); he has also been a movie and TV working stiff, and what he is offering here is an accurate, lightly ironic record of the laid-back camaraderie animating the movie business.

This does not mean that Ogilvie's account of how his straight man, Jim Larson, goes slightly bananas in the course of finishing a movie is a mere fever chart. The journey of another kind of odd couple dramatizes, poignantly and wittily, Elizabeth Hardwick's observation that performers tend to lead their lives "gregariously and without affections." There are lots of gorgeous scenes, including an incident of status panic in Schwab's drugstore with a lunchtime crowd of actors desperately vying with one another for the attention of a powerful producer, and a party where a White House staffer learns how power politics works when it leaves D.C. for L.A. Carpenter does these set pieces so well that he sometimes forgets to nail down Larson's character firmly enough.

But there may be art in these ellipses.

Performers of Larson's type are often only shadows of the carefully tailored selves they project to the public. In private, filling the empty days between engagements, they try to find an intensity to match that of their onstage moments. There is a sweet emptiness about them, a vacancy that leaves byslanders fecklessly trying to connect the dots of their personalities.

Ogilvie speaks for such stars when, finally, the team steps onstage in Vegas to a melange of light and laughter: "This is love, my friends, and the hell with the rest." Novelist Carpenter knows better; the comedians' implicit longing for normality and humanity proves that. But Carpenter also knows that the simulacrum of love with which his comics are re warded is more than most people, leading their ad hoc, late 20th century lives, ever get. There is bite here, but no bitterness. The overall, and lasting, effect makes A Couple of Comedians an unusually literate and oddly touching novel about performers going through the sound stages of life. -- Richard Schickel

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