Word: actorisms
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...Thursday night, the audience chose a celebrity victor, Magician Harry Blackstone, who beat out the bigger names like Dick Cavett, Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole and Actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. "I hate magicians," noted Sherrill Luke, a judge from Los Angeles, "but this man was very amusing." Forty-three hopefuls entered the amateur contest, fondly known as the Hal Holbrook Speaking Ladder because the actor who makes $20,000 each time he impersonates Mark Twain was discovered there. Nine contestants made it to the finals, where Edythe Bregnard, 63, the "Pixie Poet" of Sun City, Ariz., gave the winning speech...
...decades was something else offscreen. The paranoid figure saw herself as a feminine version of Gulliver. "Never relax," she warned B.D., "or the Lilliputians will climb up your legs and devour your soul." No defect goes uncharted, from the star's alcoholism to violent maledictions from her fourth husband, Actor Gary Merrill: "The only people who can be around you for long without wanting to kill you are faggots...
Tickled to Death (Scribners; 231 pages; $13.95) is a collection of short stories, only one of them featuring Author Simon Brett's delightful amateur detective, the hammy and frequently out-of-work actor Charles Paris. Brett's ten Paris novels thrive on their bitchy wit and backstage authenticity. Outside those environs his writing can become fey and whimsical. But Brett is a specialist at sketching protagonists who are at once charming and palpably rotten, so that their ultimate escape or exposure remains a matter of genuine suspense...
...novelist John le Carré says that he will never write again about George Smiley. Le Carré cannot think of Smiley anymore without seeing Alec Guinness. The actor stole the author's creation, hijacked it into flesh. One remembers that some primitive peoples feared being photographed because they thought the camera would make off with their souls. Mention George Smiley to anyone who knows Le Carré's spy novels and his memory will instantly throw onto its screen the image of Alec Guinness. Smiley will not be fat and smudgy looking, as the novelist imagined him. He will be simply, immutably...
...Cleveland Amory has reported taking his father, who knew Patton well, to see the movie. When the general's aide, Charles Codman, was introduced on the screen, Amory's father protested, "It isn't Coddie." Amory whispered that it was not meant to be Coddie, it was just an actor playing Coddie. But Amory's father insisted, "If they could get Georgie, they could certainly have got Coddie...