In 1937 Marlon Rambler, 67, an alcoholic movie photographer for 20th Century Fox News, loses a kneecap on the Yang-tze while aboard the U.S. Gunboat Panay when Japanese planes attack the ship. Back home in Greenwich Village, crippled and awaiting a gold kneecap, Marlon is led by his dear friend playwright Eugene O'Neill, himself a recovered alcoholic, into the care of Dr. Marie-Louise van der Streep, a white-headed Dutch virgin about to turn eighty, whose office lies across from Marlon's dusty basement digs on 10th street in Greenwich Village. When Marie-Louise slips in the rain and cripples both wrists, she accepts Marlon's offer to handle her bevy of famous writers, radio and movie folk for her birthday party--Orson Welles, Greta Garbo, Thomas Wolfe, Aline Bernstein, Claude Rains and Fritz Kreisler, among others--after which romance blooms. Meanwhile Marlon handles the weekly arrival of the German dirigible Hindenberg for Fox News--which blooms into sheer horror overhead and leaves him as whiteheaded as Marie-Louise .. . .