A COUPLE OF COMEDIANS by Don Carpenter
Simon & Schuster; 220 pages;
$9.95
In A Couple of Comedians, Narrator David Ogilviegagman of the title team makes a list, in descending order of status, of the Los Angeles hotels favored by showfolk. He does it perfectly, beginning with the Bel-Air, ending with the Montecito. This may seem a small felicity, but it is precisely the sort of thing that writers of parboiled Hollywood romans à clef usually get wrong or skip altogether in their haste to get to the casting couch and the boudoir.
Verisimilitude is...