Shortly thereafter, luck—both bad and good—took a hand in his career. There was a crackdown on burlesque across the country and it became harder and harder for him to get bookings. But TV was just burgeoning, and some Mad Ave genius got the idea of utilizing Happy’s talents on the idiot box. His humor had always been visual, TV was still young enough so that the viewers went for slapstick, and pretty soon Happy’s Hooper was ace-high.
It stayed that way for quite a few years. Then Hollywood took notice of him. Contracts were waved under his nose. Offers of movie money poured over him like syrup over a pancake. Happy latched onto a three-picture contract for more money than he’d ever dreamed of before. He kissed off his video career and double-timed west.
It turned out to have been a mistake. His first picture was a flop. His second flick ditto. He never made a third one. The studio came up with a loophole in the contract and kissed off Happy.
He tried to go back to TV, but it had passed him by. Everything was situation comedy by then. Nobody wanted slapstick. They forget fast in the entertainment business, and as far as TV was concerned, Happy Daze couldn’t have been more forgotten if he was a Charlie Chan rerun.
There was nothing else for him to do but try to pick up bookings on the night club circuit. One of these took him to a second-rate club in L. A. where the farmers seemed to really dig his brand of slapstick; It was here that I'd first met him on my last visit to Hollywood. And I gathered now that he was still playing at the same club — not exactly knocking ’em dead, but pulling in enough tourists who remembered his name to justify a permanent niche on the bill.
The thing I’d learned about Happy, the thing that was still true, was that he was a standup comic to the core. He was always on. He was frequently funnier off-stage than behind the footlights. And being a friend of his meant that you had to vacillate between two roles: straight man and appreciative audience. Such were the conditions of friendship.
So I laughed dutifully when I found myself standing there and foolishly holding the detached phony hand. I laughed when Happy mugged a cross-eyed imitation of the surprised look on my face. I laughed when he slapped me on the back and dropped an ice-cube down my pajama shirt. And I laughed when he went off into a “Diz-muzz-be-der-blace" routine which ended with him chasing Misty around my room a la Harpo Marx.
Misty finally escaped him and slipped into my bathrobe by way of cooling him down. With the scenery thus covered, it occurred to me to ask them how they’d happen to learn of my arrival so quickly. In the back of my mind was the nagging suspicion that either one of them might be Ex-Lax—or, for that matter, Castor Oil.
“We were sitting in the cocktail lounge having a drink with Winthrop Van Ardsdale when you checked in,” Misty explained. “We saw you passing the entrance with the bellhop. Then we just checked with the room clerk. You can imagine how thrilled I was to learn that you have the room next to mine,” she added in the throaty, come-hither tone of voice that made her fans believe that maybe, just maybe, given the opportunity, she might succumb to each of them.
“Winthrop too,” I noted. “Where is he? I haven't seen him in a dog’s age.”
“He left us to pull the gag while he went ahead to arrange the party.”
“Party? What party?”
“The welcoming party for you.”
“Oh? Gee, that’s damn nice of Winthrop. When is the party?”
Happy glanced at his watch. “In about fifteen minutes,” he told me. “You’d better throw some clothes on.”
“Better still, come as you are,” Misty cooed.
“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” I had some catching up to do. “You mean the party is tonight? How can it be? It’s almost one o'clock already.”
“Shank of the evening.” Happy swept aside my doubts. “This is Hollywood. Remember? Parties always start late out here.”
“But do you think Winthrop will be able to get anybody to come so late?”
“Sure he will,” Misty assured me. “When he tells them you’re in town and the booze and vittles are free, all your old friends will come.
“It’s nice to be loved for myself,” I observed dryly. “Still,” I added less cynically, “it is damn nice of Winthrop to go to so much trouble and expense.”
“Expense? Peter!” Happy hooted. “Don’t be ridic!’
“But if he's throwing a party for me—”
“He’s not throwing it. He’s arranging it. How could Winthrop throw a party?” Misty asked logically. “He doesn’t have a nickel.”
“Nothing changes,” I sighed. It was true. Winthrop hadn't had at nickel when I’d known him four years earlier either. What he had had—and still did have—was a name and reputation.
He’d been born with the name: Van Ardsdale. It bespoke a paternal line of American aristocrat ancestors going back to the first Dutch settlers. Tracing the ling forward, one must gloss over the fact that their rather dubious contribution to the American Revolution lay in the staunchness of their Tory opposition. In any case, perhaps the Van Ardsdales might be forgiven in light of their subsequent contribution to the development of the country. Early movement westward was certainly encouraged by the family forge, which manufactured the chassis for covered wagons. And it has never been proven that the number of wagons which broke down en route was the result of skimping on materials, or shoddy workmanship. Also, their role in the expansion of the country, such as the way they campaigned for the Mexican War in which, unfortunately, the guns manufactured by the Van Ardsdales displayed and undesirable tendency to backfire and blow the heads off the soldiers firing them was notable. And, as subsequent investigation proved, the guns they supplied the Mexicans were certainly every bit as inferior. Following the Civil War, scions of the clan, carpetbags in hand, helped to reconstruct the South - and were rewarded by the British for their successful efforts in keeping the price of Dixie cotton down. By the turn of the century, the Van Ardsdales could point with pride to the railroad tracks stretching across the country which had been manufactured in their steel mills. These tracks also represented a debt owed them by free enterprise, since by keeping the price of the rails way up, the Van Ardsdales had insured that the railroad builders themselves would have to keep wages to their laborers way down, thus stopping the labor movement from developing too quickly. A side effect was the importation of Chinese labor which was forced to work under the most stringent conditions. So stringent, indeed, that more Chinese perished building American railroads than were killed in the Korean War. But then that was a fact only indirectly related to the Van Ardsdale industrial empire, and one, in any case, which would really not be appreciated until modern times when the intrinsically evil nature of Asiatics would be pointed out by latter-day Minutemen and such. In the interim, the Van Ardsdales maintained a strict neutrality during the early days of both World Wars, selling armaments impartially to both sides. In the 1920s, a Van Ardsdale tracked a little oil across the family name by dipping into Teapot Dome, but another cousin wiped the smirch clean a short time later by philanthropically devoting his skills to government service. He was a voluntary economic advisor to the Hoover Administration. There are some who opine that it was due to his acumen that the Van Ardsdales emerged virtually unscathed from the Depression. By the time of the Eisenhower years, there were some twenty multi-millionaire branches of the Van Ardsdales around. One of the most notable of them was represented by Alistair Van Ardsdale, Winthrop’s father. It was he who decided that the time had come to stop amassing fortunes and start spending money. He was a yachtsman, a huntsman, and a horseman. His racing stables were well-known at tracks throughout the country. A classic golf tourney was named after him. Yet it should be noted that he was a sportsman rather than a playboy—which was the appellation his son Winthrop justly earned quite early in his life.