Word: amanda
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Comedy. Gertrude danced through the stock-market crash and the depression '30s. She played her first straight role in the Viennese comedy Candle Light, and Noel Coward wired her: "Legitimate at last, darling. Won't mother be pleased?" Coward wrote Private Lives especially for her, and as Amanda, whose heart "was jagged with sophistication," she profoundly affected a generation of theatergoing young women. In Tonight at 8:30, Susan and God, Skylark and Lady in the Dark, Gertrude made as much as $5,000 a week. All the money ran through her fingers as fast as it poured...
...room in which most of "The Glass Menagerie" takes, place, it lets the characters out and one can't feel quite as sorry for them as one did in the play. One of the most poignant episodes in the stage production, for instance, was a monologue in which Amanda Wingfield, a demolished southern belle, recalls her past. It was poignant because the belle was so far from her romantic youth. The picture, however, in order to avoid focusing on one face for several minutes, adds a flashback to the monologue; the belle's past becomes much closer and more real...
...when called upon to speak at a huge banquet in his honor at the old Waldorf-Astoria, he was terrified. He mumbled a few ungrammatical phrases and sat down. Then he went back to his hotel and wept with rage. Next day he hired one_ Madame Amanda, a Metropolitan Opera voice coach, to teach him how to talk. He got Damon Runyon to write him a speech. He memorized it, studied grammar, went on a 40-night lecture tour (at $1,000 a night) and conquered his fears...