Auntie Mame Rides Again

GUESTWARD HO! (270 pp.)--Barbara Hooton, as indiscreetly confided to Patrick Dennis--Vanguard ($3.50).

"Once upon a time I was young, frivolous, carefree, and relatively slim. That was way back in 1953 A.D. I had the longest reddest nails of anyone who worked at Bergdorf Goodman and I used to stand elegantly in Bergdorf's marble rotunda . . . looking just as soignee as all get out . . . Every Friday they paid me fifty lovely dollars, less withholding, less social security, less retirement benefits, less hospitalization, and I could do just about anything I liked with the change. My husband, Bill . . . worked a little farther down Fifth [and] except for an occasional ink stain, his hands never got dirty . . .

"Then it happened.

"We got a ranch."

Far from Paradise Isle. The refreshing switch in this latest packet of nonfiction escape literature is that Barbara Hooton thought of Manhattan as paradise and regarded the wide-open spaces as a disease which Hubby Bill had somehow caught. Her account of the running of a New Mexico dude ranch, as breezily set down by her collaborator and longtime friend, Patrick (Auntie Mame) Dennis, might be subtitled "Auntie Mame Rides Again" or "The Comic Labors of Hercules."

Rancho del Monte ("sounded unpleasantly like a fruit cannery to me") was a 15-room house surrounded by 2,400 acres, and supporting two guest cottages, a bunkhouse, a swimming pool, a tennis court and "a couple of smallish private mountains." At $10 a day per paying guest, it was so far from supporting the Hootons that after four days they were $160 in debt. To begin with, the help was a hindrance. For a wrangler, a dude ranch's jack-of-all-trades, they had Curly, "as stunning as a window dummy and every bit as bright." Curly managed to ride his horse into the reservoir, the draining of which cut off the water supply for hours. Barbara, who "didn't know a tsp. from a Tbsp.," was far from home on the kitchen range. The cook she hired was touted as "marvelous with chicken," which was the whole truth--that's all she could cook.

Gin & Cacti. As for the paying guests, most were game, and a few were gamesome. There was the wealthy lush who catapulted his Jaguar into the swimming pool ("Every time I go swimming, I keep tasting gin and ethyl"). There was the child-hating old woman who, for the Easter egg hunt, hid the eggs deep in the local cacti. There was the would-be siren on a man spree whom Barbara dubbed "Miss Ladydog." And there were a few prize phonies whom Barbara learned to shun by the chromium on their cars and the fact that their "checks were least likely to succeed."

At year's end Barbara was stunned to learn that Rancho del Monte had turned a profit of $4.98. "Do we take that four ninety-eight profit and plow it into a fund for our old age?" she asked. "We do not," Bill said stanchly. "We put every penny of it back into the ranch." After a hectic visit to New York which showed her just what she was not missing. Barbara agreed.

Since Rancho del Monte is still very much open for business, Guestward Ho! will probably net double royalties: 1) at the bookstalls, as a highly readable romp with two innocents in pueblo-land; 2) at Rancho del Monte and vicinity, where soon a big traffic jam may set in.

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