Word: biz
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...dancer's line, a comedian's schtick, a singer's coloratura vanished as soon as the performer walked into the wings, and could only be remembered, described, perhaps glimpsed in a third- or fourth-hand imitation. Now recordings, film and videotape form a permanent database of old-time show biz. A young actor can summon up Marlon Brando's performance in A Streetcar Named Desire instead of having to read about it as a part of the irretrievable past, remote as David Garrick's 18th century Hamlet...
Then magic struck. Guided by Ball's comic brilliance, the show developed the shape and depth of great comedy. Lucy's quirks and foibles--her craving to be in show biz, her crazy schemes that always backfired, the constant fights with the Mertzes--became as particularized and familiar as the face across the dinner table. For four out of its six seasons (only six!), I Love Lucy was the No. 1-rated show on television; at its peak, in 1952-53, it averaged an incredible 67.3 rating, meaning that on a typical Monday night, more than two-thirds...
...best, of course, if you were a player, a singer, a fellow musician. But with luck and fine timing, you could also be a casual guest, a dinner companion, a colleague's spouse--even, if the furies were snoozing, a journalist. In 1988 Sinatra, the paragon of show-biz sangfroid, told Larry King, "I swear on my mother's soul, the first four or five seconds, I tremble every time I take the step and I walk out of the wing onto the stage, because I wonder if it will be there when I go for the first sounds...From...
There was a time when banks liked to present themselves as staid old conservative places. Not anymore. First, Citibank sponsored an Elton John tour. (So it's not the Foo Fighters--it's a start.) Now three show-biz types have bought a bank. MAGIC JOHNSON, JANET JACKSON and former head of Motown Records Jheryl Busby have spent about $3 million on a controlling share in the California-based Founders National Bank. They hope to use their contacts and drawing power to get the African-American elite to plunk their savings there. They also hope to be able to attract...
...springing in air, curving back on itself, joining with others in a frazzle of twists, hanging from a string and responsive to the lightest touch of a finger or breath of air. Most of them were portraits--some of fellow artists (Miro, the composer Edgard Varese), others of show-biz celebrities like Josephine Baker or the great honky-tonk comedian Jimmy Durante, whose famed nose, translated into wire profile, becomes a fearsome proboscis. They were witty, vital (the faint quivering of the wire from room vibration gave them an odd subliminal life) and completely without pretension. They were also, clearly...