Word: birde
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...shirt's breast pocket-tells it all. Russell Birdwell, Hollywood's busiest huckster, is on the job. After a brief dry spell trying to direct pictures (The Girl in the Kremlin, Flying Devils), and a few months of promoting such inanimate products as automatic laundries, "the Bird" is back at his appointed task: fabricating movie myths and getting their names into print...
...Brando? Meanwhile, the Bird is busy with his other charges. Hollywood recognized his belligerent direction behind Director Rouben Mamoulian's recent spat with Sam Goldwyn. (Even Mamoulian does not seem to mind that the publicity-reaping battle cost him the job of directing Porgy and Bess.) And not long ago, Birdwell sold gullible movie columnists the phony yarn that Greta Garbo had expressed an interest in the movie version of Lolita. Director Stanley Kubrick, who is Birdwell's client, is supposed to have ruled Garbo out of Lolita but offered her the part of Marlon Brando...
Russell Juarez Birdwell, a slimmed-down, mustachioed version of the late Bob Benchley, has a secretary in constant attendance to record his every word, suggests that his glibness is an inheritance from his father, a Texas revivalist preacher. From his mother, says the Bird, he got an appetite for cash. "She always insisted that we work and save. When I was small, I made money by trapping and skinning skunks.'' Young Birdwell soon learned that there are as many ways to make pocket money as there are to skin polecats. In high school and the University of Texas...
...Number? His methods proved to be simple, disarmingly unsophisticated-a kind of fraudulent folk poetry. For Selznick he once flew "the entire town" of Zenda. Ont. (pop. 12) to Manhattan to attend the premiere of The Prisoner of Zenda. After the Bird set up his own office, he encouraged indignant cries of fraud by claiming that he had insured a client (Southern Starlet Margaret Tallichet) for $1,000,000 against the loss of her drawl. Smugly he was able to exhibit the policy; he had indeed insured Margaret-for one day, at the cost...
While he devises unending eccentricities for his clients, the Bird indulges in few of his own. In his small, two-room office, the Bird allows himself but one flamboyance: two telephones-one green, one red. In accord with Hollywood tradition, the red phone has an unlisted number. On the rare occasions when it rings, the Bird stares at it in sullen suspicion. Has the town finally got his number? Then he relaxes. "No one knows that phone. Must be a wrong number," he says, and refuses to answer...