Word: fixer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...unusually effective in getting things done. Born into a well-to-do Paris family, Chirac began his rise to power in 1962, when at the age of 30 he landed a job on the staff of Pompidou, then De Gaulle's Premier. Chirac's talents as a fixer and arranger made him indispensable to Pompidou, who fondly called him "my bulldozer." He included him in the small circle of staffers with whom he would share a cocktail...
...prepare mentally for troubleshooting an engine. Briefly, motor maintenance requires a good deal of quiet concentration so that the underlying principles of the engine are allowed to fill the gap between the object (engine) and the subject (mechanic). A Zen monk would say that under such conditions, the fixer and the fixed are no longer opposing objects but one reality. The author is more practical. Among other things, he suggests that if you cannot fix the bike yourself, at least avoid garages where the mechanics play the radio...
Faulty interpretations can create much disappointment, as in the movie version of his novel The Fixer, "Horrible. That thing went to five different writers. Edward Albee was one of them but he would only do it if he had full say over it. Dalton Trumbo finally wrote the screen play and he's a hack. The film should have been done as a sort of fable, in black and white. Instead, it was all galloping Cossacks and dancing girls: an overdone fake. And that sickens a writer--to see his book faked...
...some $34,000 in royalties on his writing (The Cross and the Arrow), and should pay it all to Solzhenitsyn, "an incredible human being, one of the moral giants." Then came two Pulitzer-prizewinning novelists, Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men) and Bernard Maiamud (The Fixer), who also announced that they wanted their Russian royalties paid to Solzhenitsyn. But the Soviets do not have any copyright treaties with the West, and they deny any obligation to pay royalties to Americans. Besides, said one top official, Solzhenitsyn doesn't need any help because he is "well...
Alan Bates (The Fixer, Women in Love) is an actor of supreme craftsmanship, but here he is strangely irresolute. The part calls for him to perform a couple of vaudeville turns, imitating the Mitteleuropäischer doctor who first diagnosed the child's brain damage and a batty vicar who tries to help. Bates pushes for the comedy as he does for almost every other emotion, and the strain shows. Miss Suzman, who last appeared as Alexandra in Nicholas and Alexandra, is good when Sheila is tough and tart but bad when she is tender. When she recalls finding...