Word: backed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...began his pitch: "This, folks, is Jody, who taught those Frenchmen in Paris something about the great American art of the striptease." The crowd rolled in at six bits a head. "Shake it, gal!" they yelled, happily ignorant that Dancer Anita Lopez was a bewigged male. On down the back end (the sideshows) of the carny, they plunked their dimes down for Jennie Thurman, "The Girl in the Iron Lung." (Healthy Jennie, 17, "did have a touch of polio" once when she was a little girl, insists her father, foreman at the Ferris wheel...
...mallet and sent a weight soaring up a wire to clang a gong. He strutted off like a dragon slayer. "The guy can rig that bell any way he wants to," said an operator. "He twists a knob, and you'll never hit the bell; he twists it back, and you'll hit it every time." Over where the flatties (dishonest concessionaires) worked the barrel ball game, the toss of a ball into a barrel won a prize. But someone stood by to slip a bouncy false bottom into the barrel when the marks began...
...another, good business or bad, the real carnies always stick with their show. There is nowhere else to go. When a man's show folds, he will be back next season, owner of one ride, maybe, or a hanky-pank, but working for a stake that will let him open his own again. And each year it is getting harder...
...Sunday school, Gene Skerbeck has the last word: "It used to be that you could take a show into the back country and those people had never seen anything like it. But they've all seen it on TV now. The rubes and the suckers are playing golf now. Oh, I don't say there aren't some rubes left, but where they are I don't know. Sometimes I think the only real suckers left are in the business...
Daily the newly formed cast trooped into a screening room in Hollywood's Television City, watched thousands of feet of newsreels. Douglas took notes when he noticed Stalin slipping a hand into his tunic or holding it behind his back; Gomez grinned and grunted along with Malenkov as he raised a glass at a Kremlin party. Gradually, as rehearsals wore on, the story took shape: the fierce old Georgian, breaking up his Politburo in an effort to divide and maintain control; the purge of Jewish doctors on a trumped-up charge of poisoning the General Staff; Stalin...