Word: clef
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Most of her material apparently comes from her own experience, since she claims to have "a total recall of [my] teenage years." She describes many of these books as "romans a clef," where many of the characters and places represent similar elements from her real life...
This oddly lifeless gossip novel by Michael Korda, a publishing exec whose works include the yuppie missals Success! and Power!, is the sort called a roman a clef by the French and "serving up something for the shopgirls" by the English. There is a patronizing quality to the central notion, which is that the reader is a lowbrow who will have naughty fun -- "coo, oi didn't know that about 'er" -- guessing which real-life celebrities are behaving scandalously behind aliases and sketchy disguises...
...drama of a big story, the intrigue of an unfolding scandal or the power and glamour and sheer money associated with being a big-league anchor, interviewer or producer. In fiction and reality, TV executives often characterize themselves the way characters do in Jon Katz's roman a clef: as ranking among "the 25,000 most successful people in the world," right up there with generals, Senators, tycoons and Third World dictators. But here the big story and intrigue are inside TV itself -- the takeover of a network very much like CBS, where Katz was executive producer of the Morning...
They should look closely at the film before they leap to conclusions. White Hunter, Black Heart is based on co-screenwriter Peter Viertel's roman a clef, published some four decades ago, about his experiences in Africa when he was engaged by Huston to polish James Agee's script for The African Queen. Eastwood has dared to attempt a faithful impression of the director, his growling drawl, his loose-limbed stride, the arrogant tilt of his head. The result is a stretch for him as an actor, and fun for the audience...
...Think of Clifton Webb at age 40," says Dominick Dunne, speaking of a gentleman bitch in his latest roman a clef, An Inconvenient Woman (Crown; 458 pages; $19.95). And why not? Everyone else in the novel seems to have stepped directly from a '40s feature: plutocrat Jules Mendelson; his socialite wife Pauline; his long-suffering mistress Flo March; and a sexually ambiguous friend, the late Hector Paradiso. Hector's violent death was marked as suicide, but Mendelson knows who shot him and why. The cover-up is reminiscent of an actual Los Angeles scandal; the malicious dialogue and the insider...