Word: ballyhooer
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...help ballyhoo a $50-a-plate benefit for Manhattan's nonprofit Actors' Studio. Cinemactor Marlon Brando, a Studio alumnus, and Hollywood Expatriate Marilyn Monroe, presently a Studio "observer," got together to make an unlikely combination that could be a hilarious bonanza at the box office. Features of next month's Studio soiree: legerdemain by Actor Orson Welles, risque-poetry reading by Playwright Tennessee Williams, "after-midnight" songs by Italy's Cinemactress Anna Magnani...
...truth is that now the British crowd is more easily enticed and dominated by mass communications, showmanship, ballyhoo, than the American crowd is. The Americans have had a great deal more of it, and for years were far more responsive to it, but while there is in them still a strain of the gullible and hysterical, there is also the work of a powerful antibody, a strain of the skeptical, the cynical . . . But the newly arrived British bring with them into this world of mass communications, shows and ballyhoo, a certain innocence, belonging to an earlier age . . . Their minds...
Einstein disliked the ballyhoo, but over the years he learned to make use of it. From his pedestal he occasionally poked a finger into worldly affairs. In the '30s he asked the Polish government to pardon draft dodgers. In the '50s he urged "the little minority of intellectuals" to refuse to testify before congressional committees, on the grounds that "it is shameful for a blameless citizen to submit to such an inquisition...
Frau Lucie Maria Rommel, whose late swashbuckling husband, Germany's Field Marshal Erwin ("Desert Fox") Rommel, tried mightily to invade Egypt in 1942, invaded Egypt without firing a shot. In Cairo to help ballyhoo the world premiere of a new German movie That Was Our Rommel, Frau Lucie sat beside Egypt's President Mohammed Naguib at the showing, was also greeted cordially by Premier Gamal Nasser. Later she placed wreaths on war memorials to both Allied and Axis soldiers at El Alamein, where Rommel lost the crucial battle of the North African campaign...
...present has its pressagents as the past had its poets (Was Achilles really that good, or did Homer just make him seem so?), and the ballyhoo is plastered no more thickly around movie folk and politicians than around the men and animals who compete with the elements, with the clock, with weight or age or strength or with each other, in the name of sport. But a true champion's feats endure because of what the champion himself adds: an undying spirit of competition, an ability to inspire awe, a willingness to gamble on losing, the guts to lose...