Word: famous
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...instruments by ear, but he did not get serious about the piano until one of his teachers told him he would never be anything but a music teacher. "That's when I started practicing eight, ten hours a day," he says. "I had a tremendous desire to be famous." He needed it. At Iowa's Drake University, where he got a master's degree in music, professors patronized him because he eked out his income playing in nightclubs. In the Navy he almost lost his right index finger when a gun breech slammed shut...
...operas. From the age of twelve, Ludwig was enthralled by the work of the composer, whose fascination with medieval legend he shared. Upon his accession to the throne, he summoned Wagner from Stuttgart, installed him in a Munich suburban house, bankrolled the first productions of his most famous operas. Atop the Munich Residence he built a huge greenhouse with a lily pond. Floating in a barge clad as Lohengrin, he watched slides of the Venusberg cast on the walls by a projector, while a hidden orchestra played Tannhäuser. Though World War II bombs shattered the greenhouse...
Every Eye. Ludwig's most famous effort was Neuschwanstein, whose Romanesque-Moorish turrets bedeck Bavarian travel posters. The carvings and furnishings from its marble and mosaic chapel, study and bedroom display a gaunt tension that clearly foreshadows the Jugendstil 30 years before its prime. Sketches for carved colonnades incorporate fantastic root-and-branch configurations that would have delighted Spain's art nouveau master, Antoni Gaudí. Ludwig's two other palaces both evoke the rococo splendors of Louis XIV of France. From Linderhof come tutti-frutti-colored, specially commissioned Sèvres porcelain, embroidered screens inspired...
...could hold his own intellectually in company with those lights of Renaissance humanism, Erasmus and Thomas More. Yet he grew into a gross, willful creature not so far removed from the modern layman's view of him, which seems to be based mainly on Charles Laughton's famous roaring, slobbering portrayal in the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII. He gorged himself at seven-hour banquets, eventually became so fat that he had to be moved up and down stairs by machinery. He toyed with court intrigues, then grimly ended them with executions; he was crude...
...close friends and hardly ever appearing on the telly or the front pages. Now Wilson has suddenly re-emerged with force. First, he dealt decisively with his disintegrating Cabinet, warning right-wing dissidents two weeks ago to shape up by quoting Harry Truman's famous dictum, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." Then he announced at a party rally that Britain, which has been having more than its share of economic difficulties, was now "on the way to an economic miracle." Many friends and foes alike thought that the statement...