Word: bummed
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...happily terse where there no longer can be much tension, yielding forgotten details into the bargain. Crippen, perhaps England's best-known wife murderer, was born in Michigan; Captain Kidd, most famous of pirates, probably was not a pirate at all but a legitimate privateer who got a bum rap from a British court. While the never-caught Jack the Ripper was terrifying London, Queen Victoria sent the Home Secretary directions as to how to catch him. Ruth Snyder, during her trial, received 164 proposals of marriage; Fatty Arbuckle weighed 16½ Ibs. at birth...
Bernard Shor is a beefy saloonkeeper who looks like an elderly, slightly worn cherub. He insults his best friends ("Ya crumb-bum!") and coldly rejects sycophants ("How should I remember ya when I only seen ya oncet?"). Everybody calls him Toots, a name that has stuck since childhood when he was-incredible as it may seem-a pretty boy. His pals are sportsmen, athletes, politicians, showfolk, journalists and has-beens; in short, Toots Shor is a Runyonesque character too true to be fictional...
...counted themselves lucky if they were awarded with "palship," Toots's ultimate accolade. He was favored by politicos; Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had him to the White House, and Jack Kennedy invited him to his inauguration. Every ballplayer worth his mitt got the de luxe, or crumb-bum treatment, and even Bernard Baruch, elder statesman of the stock market ticker, benched down at Shor's now and then. But Toots made no attempt to attract the glossier types of café society. "Who needs ya?" he bellowed cheerily...
With the show-biz-sporting crowd that collects there. Gleason stands around at the bar, communicating in the limited vocabulary of the milieu: "Pal," "Bum," "Tomato." and "Har-de-har-har." Jackie compares Shor's to "the corner candy store when you were a kid, except instead of Jujubes you've got the booze." The famous story is true that Gleason and the 240-lb. Shor once raced each other around the block, running in opposite directions. Gleason was standing coolly at the bar when Shor puffed in. Gleason had used a cab. but Shor, whose giant brain...
...Marvelous & Grimy. As the verminous tramp in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker (TIME, Oct. 13), Donald Pleasence, 41, succeeds in creating probably the grubbiest creature who has ever been seen on Broadway, beside whom the average Bowery bum would seem like the twin of Mr. Clean. For all the brilliance of the playwright, The Caretaker would collapse onstage without an actor who could make the old man both repulsive and sympathetic. Like Scofield, Pleasence got his early experience in Birmingham. Enormously popular on British television, he has wide and proven capabilities as a character actor and in leading roles...