Hollywood: Your Place or Mine?

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The annual dinner of the Writers' Guild of America is one of those har-de-har-har festivals like Washington's Gridiron Club and Manhattan's Circus Saints & Sinners meetings. This year the tone was set early when John Huston arose to accept an award for advancing "the literature of the motion picture through the years." He waved a bottle of champagne at the cheering masses, declaring that he was drinking to them all "from an overflowing cup, with an overflowing heart." Champagne foamed out of his glass and down over his dinner jacket like a cataract of Fab.

The scripted skits began with Hoke Singer Allan Sherman's parody of the recent doings at Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to the tune of The Streets of Laredo.

They were down there to film The Night of the Iguana

With a star-studded cast and a technical crew.

They did things at night midst the flora and fauna

That no self-respecting iguana would do.

In one blackout, a representative of the "Council of Protestant Churches" named Otto (The Cardinal) Preminger man of the year—"in gratitude and deep appreciation for his not having made a picture about us."

Topping the evening was a takeoff on Tom Jones, with Jack Lemmon approximately re-creating the scene in which Tom eats dinner at an inn with a bright-eyed woman of palpable lust, staring into her eyes as both munch, chew and savor hunks of meat and chicken, licking their fingers and biting sensuously into ripe fruit until they cannot stand it any more and run upstairs for dessert. In Hollywood last week, it was Jack Lemmon, writer at Universal Pictures, and his secretary, played by his handsome wife, Felicia Farr. Entering his office in a very low-cut dress, she picked up an envelope and licked it, then licked a stamp. Then she ate a pencil, slowly. Lemmon ate a pencil. Then they both started eating erasers, blotters, letter openers, a telephone, never taking their eyes off one another. "Let's go to lunch," he panted.

She: "Your place or mine?"