Killer Diller

Onstage comes something that, by its own description, looks like a sackful of doorknobs. With hair dyed by Alcoa, pipe-cleaner limbs, and knees just missing one another when the feet are wide apart, this is not Princess Volupi e. It is Phyllis Diller, the poor man's Auntie Mame, only successful female among the New Wave comedians and one of the few women funny and tough enough to belt out a "standup" act of one-line gags.

A 43-year-old mother of five who started out as a comedienne only six years ago, she now makes $4,000 a week haunting the U.S. nightclub circuit. She plays Texas Guinan in Elia Kazan's movie Splendor in the Grass, and has been nationalized by Jack Paar (28 appearances). Despite the cash struggle going on between Paar and Ed Sullivan, she performed last week on the Paar show, even though she is scheduled to tape a Sullivan show this week. Currently she is at Greenwich Village's Bon Soir, an underground cigarette oven so sophisticated, she claims, that "a nine-year-old boy came in here the other night, and when left he was 38."

Wintery Hyperbole. Waving an unlit blue cigarette in a holder, she pops her eyes, works her mouth into exotic shapes from figure eights to dodecahedrons, now and then poking forth a grooved tongue until she seems to be a rain-spouting functional gargoyle held up by a wildly flying buttress. All of this, including her guffaws between jokes, is merely punctuation. Phyllis Diller is not just a buffooning grotesque. Her form of comedy is even older than she is. and it runs counter to the trend of modern, storyline comedians, but her hard, calculatedly frenzied style goes over brilliantly in a nightclub atmosphere.

She can be cattier than a back fence. Not even exotic maharanis are safe from Killer Diller, who tells people not to be fooled by the big single jewel on thai lovely Punjabi forehead. "I mean, it's got to be covering something," says Phyllis "Like, a tunnel." Much of her self-written act centers in the everyday household which she usually populates with schizos now and then tossing in a normal person like the mother who said, "Eat, Chester Have you any idea how many poor people in China would want that oatmeal?" Say Chester: "Name two."

Giving helpful hints to slatternl housewives about how to arouse sympa thy in a husband, she tells them to stay in bed until 4:30 p.m., then "put furniture polish behind your ears. It makes you smell tired when your husband comes home." W7hen her imagination flies, it sometimes lands in hyperbole that makes even Jonathan Winters seem summery by comparison. She sketches one woman who wears bronzed baby shoes for earrings.

The kid is still in them, and he has hiccups.

Compulsive Talker. Comedienne Diller nearly always mentions her own brood of children: "They're for sale, and those who aren't working are marked down." The oldest is a 20-year-old college stu dent, and all five live with an aunt and a grandmother. Their father, Sherwood Diller, travels the circuit with Phyllis as husband-manager (by train, since she is fond of dresses, uses 22 suitcases).

Born in Lima, Ohio, raised on am bitions to sing or teach, Phyllis met Sher wood in 1938 at northwestern Ohio's Bluff ton College, and for 16 years the Dillers drifted from occupation to occupation, mainly in California. He worked for everyone from the U.S. Navy to Sears. Roebuck, while she wrote news paper society columns, did merchandising work in radio. On the side, she ran the children's choir at the Alameda Presbyterian Church (she had the kids sing through Campbell soup cans, amplifying their voices considerably).

It was Sherwood who suggested in 1955 that his compulsively talking, ever-quipping wife try for an audition as a comedienne at San Francisco's Purple On ion. She ran 89 weeks. Warm, friendly and modest about everything but her jokes, Mrs. Diller is one successful per former who finds it easy to believe what is happening to her. "The older I get, the funnier I get," she says. "Think what I'll save in not having my face lifted."

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