Mash goes to San Francisco

 

SOME PRETTY STRANGE PEOPLE ARE DESCENDING ON SAN FRANCISCO

 

BARBARA ANN MILLER Alias Betsy Boobs - a curvaceous student nurse and honours graduate of Sadie Shapiro's Strip Joint. The operating theatre has never been the same since she arrived!

PANCHO HERMANEZ A gifted Balalaika player living in Paris, he had spent his boyhood - would you believe ? -in a Russian Orthodox monastery!

FRANCIS BURNS, M.D. One-time Major in the Medical Corps in Korea, he was now a prosperous practitioner in the field of vasectomology, and was besotted with the Reverend Mother Emeritus Hot Lips.

COLONEL C. EDWARD WHILEY Pillar of San Francisco society, henpecked by his veritable horror of a wife, he was destined to become the first man to pilot a plane under the Golden Gate Bridge.

 

Other riotous M*A*S*H titles in Sphere Books:

 

 

M*A*S*H

Goes To San Francisco

 

 

 

RICHARD HOOKER and

WILLIAM E. BUTTERWORTH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SPHERE BOOKS LIMITED

 

30/32 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1X 8JL

 

First published in Great Britain by Sphere Books Ltd, 1977 Copyright © Richard Hornberger and William E. Butterworth 1976 Published by arrangement with the authors' agents

In fond memory of Malcolm Reiss, gentleman literary agent June 3, 1905 - December 17,1975

 

- Richard Hooker and W. E. Butterworth

 

 

 

 

 

 

TRADE MARK

 

 

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Set in Monotype Times

Printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd Aylesbury, Bucks

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

When Mrs C. Edward Sattyn-Whiley, a rather formidable lady of generous proportions, rolled up to the main entrance of the San Francisco Opera House in her white Rolls-Royce, she was the cynosure of all eyes, which was, frankly, the way she both planned and wanted it.

 

Mrs. Sattyn-Whiley was the undisputed grande dame of San Francisco society, and she had dressed the part tonight. Her blue hair was topped with a diamond tiara, and she was actually wearing a stomacher, which is a piece of jewelry that hangs about the neck and terminates in a large jewel in the vicinity of the bellybutton.

She descended from the white Rolls-Royce, a 1935 model, the 'Silver Ghost,'* rather regally on the arm of her husband of some thirty years, Colonel C. Edward Whiley, and was followed a moment later by her son, Cornelius E. Sattyn-Whiley, M.D.

Neither Colonel Whiley, a pale-faced chap who would have registered about 125 pounds on the scales if he and his top hat and tails were all soaking wet, nor his son, who took after his mother's side of the family and would have registered about 230 pounds on the scales, bone-dry, looked positively overjoyed at the prospect of an evening at the opera.

Dr. Cornelius E. Sattyn-Whiley had just returned to San Francisco after an extended absence, and tonight was, in a manner of speaking, his reintroduction to society. Cornelius Dear, as his mother called him, had, in fact, just returned from the jungles of the Northeast, where he had been educated,

 

* One of the reasons Mrs. Sattyn-Whiley was the grande dame of San Francisco society was her wealth. And one of the reasons she was wealthy was that she had four cents out of every nickel she had ever made and/or inherited. She had inherited the 1935 Rolls-Royce from her Uncle Max, and was not, as she told one Rolls-Royce salesman after another, going to buy a newer model so long as this one could be coaxed into life.

 

had graduated as a doctor of medicine, and had spent a year as an intern and then three years as a surgical resident - all at a large medical establishment that shall herein be unnamed, but which is located on the banks of the Charles River in a large city in Massachusetts.

 

Cornelius Dear was an only child, which had prompted his godfather, Dr. Aloysius J. Grogarty, to suggest that marital relations were something else that Mrs. C. Edward Sattyn-Whiley had tried once, found undignified, and never tried again.*

With her son and husband at her side, Mrs. Sattyn-Whiley marched into the grand foyer, acknowledged with a barely perceptible nod of her blue-haired head those few people whom she felt worthy of that honor, and then proceeded backstage. She felt that her position was such that it behooved her to visit the performers before a performance, to let them know, so to speak, that even if she was in the audience, they should not be nervous.

Most of the time, she was a bit uncomfortable with the singers, because the vast majority of them were not of her social class. Tonight, however, that wasn't the case. Tonight she would visit Madame Kristina Korsky-Rimsakov, who was singing the lead role in Giacomo Puccini's Madame Butterfly.

When Madame Korsky-Rimsakov had been first proposed, some six years before, as the prima donna of the San Francisco Opera - on the board of directors of which Colonel C. Edward Whiley sat - Mrs. Sattyn-Whiley** had been aghast

 

* Dr. Grogarty had made this comment at Cornelius Dear's second birthday party.