The Wicket Men Of Hollywood

"I quit polo because they made me—the insurance and those things," corrected Zanuck. "I rode No. 1."

And the No. 1 puffed moodily on his cigar for a moment.

"Croquet can be fun, too," he continued after a long silence. "It's not always absolutely serious. When we get someone new down at my place in Palm Springs, we always give him 'the ball.' This is a ball which looks just like every other ball except you can't hit the damn thing straight. You absolutely cannot hit it straight. We gave Romanoff one once that was painted just like a grapefruit. Then he hit it under a tree with a lot of real grapefruit lying around. He went around there for 20 minutes whacking the hell out of ripe grapefruit. He was absolutely drenched in grapefruit juice.

"Then there's 'the mallet.' It's my personal mallet, I tell Romanoff, and I want him to have it because it's so delicately balanced it will make a crack player out of him—finest wood from the Himalayas and absolutely without price. Only for Godsakes, under no circumstances is he to throw it or lay it down hard or do anything like that. It's perfectly balanced, you understand.

"Well, of course, it's a breakaway mallet and along about the third swing, the thing falls into splints. Of course the boob is white-faced and I'm having a stroke. I fall to the ground and wail, 'Oh, my God, it's irreplaceable. The mallet's irreplaceable.' "

And with that—unsmiling, cigar clenched between his teeth—the old No. 1 rose abruptly, snatched his sawed-off polo mallet off the coat tree and strode out the door to face the more pressing problems of Sheree North's cleavage in The Lieutenant Wore Skirts and the grosses on The View from Pompey's Head, each of which, in its own way, is as complicated as croquet.