Honest, Abe: Is There Really No Business Like Show Business?

Abe Burrows must have fallen out of fashion nowadays, though as long as people still enjoy GUYS AND DOLLS they will be enjoying his wit. I say this because I seem to be the first reviewer for HONEST, ABE, his memoirs published in 1980. For the miost part, the book is a straightforward and often amusing account of his work for the stage. He started out as--well, it's a little murky but he became famous on radio writing for DUFFY'S TAVERN and other radio programs, then moved onto TV where he appeared on a show with Broadway legend George S. Kaufman, who had written dozens of Broadway hits and who treated Abe as sort of a prize prodigy of a pupil. Abe had a sideline of entertaining people at nightclubs with an original line of patter songs he'd composed himself, satirizing current trends in music, he was the Weird Al Yankovic of his day. He was asked to rewrite the "book" for GUYS AND DOLLS by a pair of enterprising producers, Feuer and Martin, who had signed up Kaufman to direct the Frank Loesser musical. The rest is history, but not so great history I expect. Abe went to work with the aging, acidic Cole Porter on the latter's final Broadway shows, CAN-CAN and SILK STOCKINGS, and in this book he seems to believe that they are great masterpieces, or maybe that's just his gallant tribute to Porter, about whom he tells many funny stories. So the material about Kaufman and Porter is reason enough to get this book. Abe became known as the "Doctor Fix It" show doctor who'd be called it to help re-think a dying show. Thus he became resented by the people he would replace or advise. He wrote a number of "straight plays" too, including FORTY CARATS and CACTUS FLOWER--well, he adapted them from French originals. Along the way he worked with many of the legends of show business: of Bert Lahr and Ethel Merman he inks neat pen portraits. It's an amusing book but one that has a hole in the center. He keeps absolutely mum about his associations with American communists, and about the HUAC hearings that led to the blacklist. Politics isn't his strong suit in this account of his life, but why call your book "Honest, Abe" if you aren't prepared to explain that you named names and ratted on your friends, in order to keep your own job. You get a little hint of this when he alludes to the end of his first marriage. Did she, like his old friends, leave him in disgust? It's hard to get a read on this matter, well, obviously he wants to pretend that it didn't happen.