Word: bit-part
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Unlike most members of the class of '43, Nancy Davis did not plunge from college straight into marriage. Indeed, she was out in the world from 1943 to 1952, first as a Marshall Field's shopgirl in Chicago, then as a bit-part Broadway actress, then as a successful Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player. Still, even as she pursued a Hollywood career, she wanted everyone to understand that her hopes and dreams were safely conventional. Her "childhood ambition," she wrote on her MGM biographical questionnaire at 27, was "to be an actress." But her "greatest ambition" was "to have...
That little monster appears to have grown into Trevor's newest menace, Francis Tyte, 33, a bit-part actor, pathological dissembler, bigamist and homosexual prostitute. Tyte's face, lean and handsome in the Leslie Howard mold, is known to millions of British telly viewers. He is the fellow in the tobacco ad who nonchalantly puffs a pipe while military officers strut by, sniffing...
...movie was released last month, Actress Mary Tyler Moore, 42, acknowledged that she prepared for the part by drawing on her experiences in raising her own son from her first marriage, Richard Carlton Meeker Jr., 24. Said she: "I was kind of a perfectionist mother, and I demanded a lot of him. I think I was responsible for a lot of alienation. I brought some of that to the part." Indeed, only in the last few years did Meeker, who worked as a bit-part actor and mail-room clerk at CBS television studios, become close to his mother. Said...
That big one with the moustache is Ben Davidson, former defensive end with the Oakland Raiders and bit-part actor (clothed, in the porn classic Behind the Green Door). The little one he's holding is Jim Bouton, the ex-New York Yankee pitcher who threw curves at the baseball establishment with Ball Four, his 1970 book about drinking, dallying and other big-league peccadilloes. The two are preparing a fall TV series (titled Ball Four) in which Bouton portrays a so-so relief pitcher and Davidson plays a catcher named Rhino...
There are many asides, bit-part players, odd corners of narrative, even a haunting interior monologue by Clumly's blind wife. Gardner explores everything with love and forbearance, like an old-fashioned novelist who has forgotten he must compete with television, sex books and the Good Life for the raddled reader's attention. No matter. Raddled or not, readers should ignore the flaws. Swallow the magic apples. Brush up on terza rima (to identify those snippets of The Inferno that Gardner can't keep from including). Borrow a French dictionary (to translate Gardner's morsels...