Word: clef
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...other hand, ex-Actor Tryon is canny enough to know that it is a crock of gold. He has not, after all, chosen to unmask malaise on the assembly line or among welfare mothers. Crowned Heads is crammed with enough props to put MGM back in production. No clef is needed for this roman. Real stars parade by in abundance. Tryon also provides long lists of plausible but fictive movies and imaginary songs that set America humming (Ditto, Really Truly True). Even the four principal characters are amalgams of known personalities. Fedora owes something to Garbo, Dietrich and Gloria Swanson...
...official sheet, dated May 22,1971, are recorded two games of ticktacktoe between Ehrlichman and the Secretary of State. One game is a draw. The other game shows Ehrlichman a winner. In the shade of this trophy−this fun-and-games scalp−Ehrlichman wrote his roman à clef, The Company, in which Kissinger, under the thinnest of disguises, has taken a second clobbering that the old ticktacktoe loser could hardly have dreamed of five years...
...that account prospective buyers of The Company should beware. A Washington roman à clef it is; a full-scale Watergate book it is not. Ehrlichman is clearly using fiction as an extension of politics by other means; but his novel ends with word that a member of the White House staff has just been caught breaking into the headquarters of a Democratic candidate. The Company, in fact, bears the same relation to the final drama of Watergate that successive Shakespearean history plays bear to one another. There is some overlap. Dark deeds and blood feuds of the past rise...
...roman à clef was once a cosy affair. But one touch of TV makes the whole world kin. Readers will have no difficulty in making out the shaggy outlines of Presidents J.F.K., L.B.J., R.M.N., not to mention Henry Kissinger (Carl Tessler in the book), J. Edgar Hoover (Elmer Morse) and others, including, eventually, E. Howard Hunt (Lars Haglund), who (yes, indeed) is planted on President Monckton...
...energy than the rancorous opinions that stream from the mouths of the characters. Many of these views are clearly Agnew's own, and a disproportionate number demonstrate that the former Vice President bears a chronic grudge against the press. Although The Canfield Decision is not a roman à clef, a nosy columnist named "Andy Jackerson" gets a going over. A Russian, for example, sees America in decline because "the country is under attack by professional critics with an unlimited supply of ink and microphones." Such a thing could not happen in the Soviet Union. If the author...