Fred's Book Club: The Family Kerr.

Wednesday is Hump Day, and it's time for the Humpback Writers, our book feature that generally has writers that do not have humped backs, but maybe some do. I don't like to ask. However, I am certain that today's writer did not, because she was portrayed by both the lovely Doris Day and the lovely Pat Crowley, and never by Charles Laughton.  

"We are very careful with our children," Jean Kerr writes in the opening essay of the book Please Don't Eat the Daisies. "They'll never have to pay a psychiatrist twenty-five dollars an hour to find out why we rejected them. We'll tell them why we rejected them. Because they're impossible, that's why."

Thus begins the titular piece in this famous collection of suburban humor. Jean Kerr and her husband, the Pulitzer-winning drama critic Walter Kerr, raised six children, so as you might imagine she had a lot of material. Some of her pieces in the book ran in magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. The collection was first published in 1957. My beat-up paperback was a 1959 edition acquired cheap from a used-book store many years after that.   

Walter was a playwright in his own right, but is best remembered as a sharp critic of the theater, and the only critic I know of who has a theatre named for him. Like his wife, he had a terrific sense of humor; his review of I Am a Camera in 1951 concluded "Me no Leica." Jean too would write plays; she wrote the Tony-award winning King of Hearts and the long-running Mary, Mary. If that were not enough, she wrote three more collections following Daisies (two of which I have -- somewhere). 

And no wonder -- she has a wonderful touch. On shopping for a home, she introduces "Kerr's law, which states in essence: all the houses you can afford to buy are depressing. For months and months we followed happy, burbling real estate agents through a succession of ruins which, as the agents modestly concluded, 'needed a little paint and paper to make them happy.' These houses invariably had two small dark living rooms and one large turn-of-the-century kitchen -- and I don't mean the nineteenth century."

Of course, many of the jokes are dated; there are any number of references to slogans of the day, and Davy Crockett and Jackie Gleason don't conjure now the way they did in the fifties. 

But take this from a story on dogs, as fine an example of visual comedy as one can expect in a book: 

It's not just our own dogs that bother me. The dogs I meet at parties are even worse. I don't know what I've got that attracts them; it just doesn't bear thought. My husband swears I rub chopped meat on my ankles. But at every party it's the same thing. I am sitting in happy conviviality with a group in front of the fire when all of a sudden the large mutt of mine host appears in the archway. Then, without a single bark of warning, he hurls himself upon me. It always makes me think of that line from A Streetcar Named Desire -- "Baby, we've had this date right from the beginning." My martini flies into space and my stockings are torn before he finally settles down peacefully in the lap of my new black faille. I blow out such quantities of hair as I haven't swallowed and glance at my host, expecting to be rescued. He murmurs, "Isn't that wonderful? You know, Brucie is usually so distant with strangers."

As the wife of a major theater critic, though, she has some pieces specific to her lifestyle, such as:

In my short and merry life in the theatre, I have discovered that there are two sharply contrasting opinions about the place of the drama critic. While in some quarters it is felt that the critic is just a necessary evil, most serious-minded, decent, talented theatre people agree that the critic is an unnecessary evil. However, if there is some room for argument about the value of the critic, there is none whatever about the value of the critic's wife. To the producer, in particular, it is painful enough that the reviewer must bring his own glum presence to the theatre, but the thought that he must bring his wife and that she, too, will occupy a free seat is enough to cool the cockles of his heart and send him back on a soft diet.

Jean Kerr is still funny, and I am certain that the success of her writing opened doors for many other women to write humor, such as Erma Bombeck. And, as I said at the beginning, this book was adapted into a film starring Doris Day as Jean Kerr (under the nom de filme of "Kate Mackay") and a TV show with Pat Crowley (as "Joan Nash"). Though Jean Kerr died in 2003, the family continues on. 

And if you're wondering where Jean got the terrific title for the essay (and thus the book, the film, and the TV series), it all comes from this: 

My real problem with children is that I haven't any imagination. I'm always warning them against the commonplace defections while they are planning the bizarre and unusual. Christopher gets up ahead of the rest of us on Sunday mornings and he has long since been given a list of clear directives: "Don't wake the baby," "Don't go outside in your pajamas," "Don't eat cookies before breakfast." But I never told him, "Don't make flour paste and glue together all the pages of the magazine section of the Sunday Times." Now I tell him, of course.

     And then last week I had a dinner party and told the twins and Christopher not to go in the living room, not to use the guest towels in the bathroom, and not to leave the bicycles on the front steps. However, I neglected to tell them not to eat the daisies on the dining room table. This was a serious omission, as I discovered when I came upon my centerpiece -- a charming three-point arrangement of green stems. 

Rest in peace, Jean Kerr.