Elaine May adapts Elaine Dundy’s ‘The Dud Avocado’

Born in 1921, Elaine Dundy was a Manhattanite whose pithy flare inked the pages of The Observer and the New York Herald and so on. Eventually her debut novel The Dud Avocado (1958) so chagrined her husband Kenneth Tynan – prominent theatre critic and sore loser – that she had to walk him out of earshot at parties when the occasional fan wanted to pass her an admiring word or four. These days the popularity of the book comes in waves, the most recent and significant driven by its reprint by The New York Review of Books. The time for adaptation grows exceedingly ripe. Who better to take on the task than Elaine May, born a decade later, the undersung American actress and filmmaker who never rose up from the shroud of Ishtar ’s box office doom in 1987 and her ‘difficult’ reputation? (After 30 years, a new narrative feature is finally in the works.)Pete Hammond, ‘Notes on the Season’, Deadline, November 2019. Her male contemporaries would have doubtlessly skipped off with a second chance, but she never got one. May shrugged it off, content to grace us with her presence from time to time on the screen and the stage. Her abbreviated directorial career reflects upon her less as forlorn, and more as happily tossed-off. Who needs Hollywood, anyway?

If you’re willing, picture this:

A chipper gamine abroad in Paris “hellbent on living”. An all-expenses paid romp, the objective being a delicious tale to retell her money pot Uncle Roger upon her return. An impetuous klutz with a gorgeous lust for life, Sally Jay Gorce is one of Kerouac's mad ones, saddled up for adventure. While May’s films have typically skewered egotistical males – Walter Matthau’s lucre-obsessed Epicurean in A New Leaf (1971); Charles Grodin’s fickle heart in The Heartbreak Kid (1972) – they could well do the same for Sally, a young woman and aspiring actress not without her own set of irksome quirks, among them a murderous urge to experience anything and everything.

A chintzy evening gown, all atwirl. The camera zooms out to reveal its inhabitant: Sally Jay and her new ‘do’, freshly stained rose-pink. Somewhere between another milky Pernod on Paris’s busiest street, she shoos away her married lover, with great madness of her hands, all the while reconnecting with an old crush – a thoroughbred American boy Larry.

If a flower blooms and then explodes silently on a thronging Parisian boulevard and nobody knows about it, does it make a sound?

A rundown of Sally’s (self-professed) default modes of wardrobe:

Tyrolean Peasant: a fashionable hour, at The Ritz. Patrons of the lobby bar pop champagne and wipe their hands on the skirt of Sally’s dirndl, mistaking it for a linen napkin.

Bar Girl: café, at dusk. A midnight snack of hot chocolate and croque monsieur is interrupted by a pair of grubby hands thrusting cigarettes in Sally’s face, now alight with alarm. On a second glance around the room her eyes widen; her nosh café is the preferred haunt of ladies of the night. Gasping, she reflexively snaps hand to breast, but this protective shielding of décolletage busts open her coat – underneath which she’s not sporting any real clothes. Mon dieu.

Dreaded Librarian: the taxidermy section of the library, midday. “Wherever can I find the latest on prosody and phonology?” But before a word can depart Sally’s lips, library patrons populate in fury, surrounding her like sardines. They are an incensed swarm; Dewey Decimal who? Apoplexy in the book stacks.

With a knack for metropolitan palaver, Elaine May would condense the bulk of Sally’s hilariously astute narrations and monologues, amplifying a readymade screwball situation into an excessive, impossible on-screen diversion. She is a master of the black comedy, and uses it to conjure a real sense of feeling, be it warmth or devastation, something which makes her work more caustic and subversive than most films of this style. See for instance how Matthau’s gold digging farce in A New Leaf ripples into veritable affection or how the final reckoning of Charles Grodin in The Heartbreak Kid gives you unexpected chills. In The Dud Avocado, Sally learns to be independent – not everyone’s to be trusted and people are not what they seem. Chockfull of carousing and skedaddling, it’s a puffy sleeve of a book – elegantly humorous, not to be taken too seriously. But, as with May’s films, therein lies its power.