Word: cowardly
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...volumes of Beaton's diaries preceded this abridged collection, but in this case less truly is more. The dull passages have been excised, and only the best remain, glittering stories about glittering people. Cocteau and Colette, Coward and Capote, Garbo and De Gaulle. Advising the young Beaton about clothes, Noel Coward, for instance, sounds like one of his own characters. "One would like to indulge one's own taste," he says. "[But] I take ruthless stock of myself in the mirror before going out. A polo jumper or unfortunate tie exposes one to danger...
...people are not emotionally engaging. And such pin-flares of love as do appear seem to have been struck from a wet match. Obsessed as Pinter is by rooms, the drawing room seems to make him a trifle uneasy. Betrayal is a kind of bittersweet Noël Coward comedy in which the people are brittle, and more laconic than witty...
...magnet of the evening is Maggie Smith as Carson's wife Ruth. She seems to have slithered out of a Noel Coward comedy. Sophisticated, weary of it all, and restless, Ruth is given to brisk interior monologues, like "Help!" or "Watch it Tallulah!" Stoppard has given her a tasty collation of epigrams, and her delivery is succulent. Of her one-night London stand with Wagner, she notes that "hotel rooms constitute a separate moral universe." She develops a sensual fantasy crush on Milne and is heart-wrenchingly crushed when he is killed. Seductively comic, and amusingly seductive, Smith must...
...line on the Stones: they are not nice people. His Jagger is a megalomaniac trampling over his friends, even members of the band, to achieve millionaire respectability, a pseudo-hipster who never outgrew his banal suburban upbringings and mother-love. His Keith Richards is a vicious junkie, a coward, a racist, a cruel manipulator. Richards exploits Sanchez throughout, to smuggle drugs or take the rap for auto accidents or whatever. Since he was paying Sanchez a grand a month to do almost nothing, it doesn't seem all that reprehensible...
DIED. Jed Harris, 79, irascible, flamboyant theatrical producer and director, whom Noel Coward dubbed "destiny's tot" when, at the age of 28, Harris had had four hits on Broadway (Coquette, The Royal Family, The Front Page, Broadway); in New York City. Born Jacob Horowitz in Vienna, Harris dropped out of Yale and toiled briefly as a press agent for the Shubert brothers before emerging as a theatrical Wunderkind by producing Broadway. Though financially crippled by the stock market crash in 1929, he produced or directed some of the more notable Broadway efforts of the 1930s, including Thornton Wilder...