Word: albatross
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Despite the title, playwright Ronald Alexander has male the albatross, Nat Bentley, a talentless television writer-producer played by Robert Preston, the only lovable aspect of his play. Bentley is the same sort of appealing, good-natured fraud that Preston played in The Music Man. He cons other people into doing his thinking and writing for him, but he has no self-delusions...
...only thing impressive about Nobody Loves an Albatross is Preston's acting. The audience knows he's unscrupulous, but loves him anyway. Surrounded by stock characters--a saucy maid, a smart little daughter, a nervous young writer, and a stacked secretary--he keeps Act I from collapsing altogether by the sheer force of his personality. The act is little more than a prolonged series of semi-funny jokes; for example: "Go play with your dolls like I told you--sticking the long pins into Mr. Whitman." Multiply this by 500 and you get an idea of what Preston salvaged...
...breed of albatross, common to the central Pacific, the gooney bird goes through a stately dance during courtship rites, punctuating his performance with mournful groans and metallic clackings of his beak...
...John Kennedy sleep in Theodore Bilbo's old fourposter in the mansion back in 1957. Worse than that, he had gone on statewide TV in the fall of 1960 to support Kennedy for President. Said Johnson from every stump: "Coleman can't get the Kennedy albatross from around his neck.' Johnson insisted with pride and fervor that he had "stood up for Mississippi" at Ole Miss, so wasn't it about time Mississippi stood up for him? For comic relief, he threw in a surefire laugh-getter: "You know what the N.A.A.C.P. stands for: Niggers, alligators...
Hero of Goldwyn's sea saga was Albatross Owner Ira E. Dowd, president of American Hydrofoil Lines. During a subsequent stop in the East River, flagged down by a Coast Guard patrol boat, Dowd clambered topside to report details of the rescue, lost his footing and slipped overboard. It was 9:55 a.m. when the Albatross spewed her tardy commuters into Wall Street, 45 minutes late. All declared themselves staunchly in favor of hydrofoil commuting, though it takes nearly as long and costs approximately three times more ($100 a month) than commuting from Port Washington via the overland route...