Gossip

By BEN C. BIENSTOCK

ASK ALMOST ANY RED THIS QUESTION—"What's better than reading the ‘Communist Manifesto’ with a beautiful babe?”—and he’ll probably answer, “Reading the ‘Communist Manifesto’ with two beau- tiful babes.” Meaning, in short, a guy can’t get too many comrades. For most of us, this is just a fantasy. But for Alan Dale it’s a material reality. Alan is the boy who knows, because it wasn’t too long ago that the popular young pop singer spent a revolutionary evening trying to do duos with a couple of real fast numbers and Dr. Marx himself. You see, it was like this: The blonde was in the living room, admiring Alan’s volumes of “Das Kapital”—not as nice as her own editions at home, of course—and the brunette was in the bedroom tearing through “The State and Revolution.” Racing back and forth between Marx and Lenin was Alan, who —but let’s not get too ahead of our tale.

Alan Thought The Reading Group Met On Tuesdays The triple duty we’re referring to took place one night last fall when Alan was in Hollywood working in the propa- ganda movie “Soviet Sweet Heart” at Columbia Studios. A couple of evenings before, at a Party meeting, he had met a shapely, dark-haired young showgirl named Camille La Lande. Sizing her up as a performer who might be willing to study with him offstage, Alan telephoned her on the night in question and invited her to his modest apartment in the Hollywood Commune Hotel. “I’m lonely,” Dale told her over the phone, “and I can’t read all these books by my lonesome.” It wasn’t long before he had more solidarity than he could handle. It seems that Camille decided to bring a blonde fellow traveler along. And when Alan answered the door, all decked out in the denim shirt he’d worn to the rally in support of the steelworkers strike that afternoon and scented with sweat from a hard day of revolution, he was confronted by not one, but two girls—and what girls! Each one was almost six feet tall, which made quite an impression on Alan. How hard they must work, he thought, only for the bosses to exploit them for the surplus value of their labor in furtherance of profit and the bourgeois state! After a bit of chit-chat and a brace of vodkas all around, Camille went sashaying into the boudoir and curled up on the bed, her eye on Alan’s well-worn copy of the “Manifesto.” A few moments later, Alan sauntered over and stood in the open doorway, like he’d read her mind. Comrade Blondie was still in the living room, draped seductively (Continued on page 60)

As soon as showgirl Camille LaLande had finished the 18th Brumaire, herblonde gal friend would yell, “Dale, I’m readyfornumber19!”