Word: cipherer
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...Hollywood attic, two losers have been moldering for over a year, waiting for a miracle that would render them profitable. The leftovers are Fearless Frank and Madigan's Millions, and the miracle is Midnight Cowboy, which reinforced the reputation of Dustin Hoffman and elevated Jon Voight from a cipher into a star with a six-figure salary. This month American International Pictures, with the calculation of a jeweler digging out his stock of Mickey Mouse watches, is distributing a double bill that brings the boys together again for the first time...
Such a character could easily have emerged as a mere cipher-caricature in a satiric, ham-handed social catalogue of the times. Not in this appealing first novel. Author Wolff, Newsweek's book editor, invokes Freeman and his long-suffering family with subtlety. Their relations with one another, it turns out, are also bad debts. His wife Ann, sexually and emotionally little more than an object of Freeman's consumption, has left him. His son Caxton, a conniving p.r. flack for a top political candidate, helps support his father-primarily because of the embarrassment the old man could...
Thus, from an inconsequential human cipher, Stephens leaped to importance as a central witness in one of the century's most shocking assassinations. He was so important that the state sought to do everything-even keep him a prisoner-to protect him against harm from possible accomplices in the killing. At first, Stephens willingly moved into Shelby County jail, where he was free to come and go but was accompanied by a bodyguard. He was away too often to suit police. Claiming that his activities outside the jail jeopardized his own safety, the state invoked a Tennessee law that...
...tried to determine if the faces on the cover were the key to a cipher, but were unable to break the code. Any attmpt to do this requires a key to the faces. "Sixteen" magazine published one last summer sometime. The gravest fault in the "Sixteen" key was that instead of admitting their ignorance when they couldn't identify a face, they called them all "Indian Gurus." There is an almost infinite number of ways a cipher could be built into the crowd of faces. It is a very frustrating way to spend a weekend...
...auntie to many orphaned spirits. Christopher Isherwood, the Beatles, Mia Sinatra: the list lengthens every year. The latest addition is Paul Fraser, the tall, blue-eyed New Yorker who is the troubled protagonist of this novel. At 46, Paul is a successful playwright and lover but, alas, a spiritual cipher. And after botching a suicide attempt, he drifts off to India-where Author Brown feels thoroughly at home...