'Wonderland' is the American theatre world. Cyril ('Barmy') Fotheringay (pronounced Fungy) Phipps, Eton, Oxford and Drones Club, is attracted by Dinty Moore, secretary of a Broadway producer, Joe Lehman. Film-star, buzzer and boozer Mervyn Potter, due to appear in a Broadway play, burns his cottage down and is rescued by Barmy. He persuades Barmy to put his little all, $22,000, to buy twenty-five per cent of his play, 'Sacrifice', producer Joe Lehman. Potter is engaged to Hermione Brimble, daughter of a tycoon. She swears him off drink and puts a detective on to report if he drinks. Potter owns a Tanganyika lion-dog, Tulip, dangerous when Potter is drunk and argumentative.

Potter will not marry Miss Brimble. Barmy Phipps will marry Dinty. The play is 'fixed' to be a success. Lehmac Productions buy Barmy out for $100,000.

It's a return to the backstage world of A Damsel in Distress, Jill the Reckless, and The Adventures of Sally. It is loosely adapted from George Kaufman's play, 'The Butter-and-Egg Man'. Some critics said Wodehouse's American dialogue, especially the slang, was all wrong, but he said that he took it verbatim from the Kaufman script. So there!

Fanny, wife of Joe Lehman of Lehmac Productions, 'a man of the great indoors', had been a great juggler. She is a very good wisecracker.

Peggy Marlowe, show girl, is based, surely, on Marion Davies, mistress of William Randolph Hearst, American newspaper tycoon, owner of, and host at, San Simeon.

Source: Richard Usborne. Plum Sauce. A P G Wodehouse Companion.