Word: fraud
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Despite the title, playwright Ronald Alexander has male the albatross, Nat Bentley, a talentless television writer-producer played by Robert Preston, the only lovable aspect of his play. Bentley is the same sort of appealing, good-natured fraud that Preston played in The Music Man. He cons other people into doing his thinking and writing for him, but he has no self-delusions...
Preston finally rejects all the proposed scripts, and his studio in effect tells him to write it himself or drop dead. When at the outset of Act III, he does produce a good script, he basks in a few short moments of glory until his fraud is discovered: he stole the story from a Shirley Temple movie on the Late Show. At precisely this point the humor drains out of Nobody Loves an Albatross, for the audience begins to realize just how pathetic Preston is. His friends all deliver homilies to the effect that honesty is the best policy...
...Missing Ballots. In 1941 Congressman Johnson ran for the Senate in a special election, came in second out of 29 candidates. In 1948 he tried again -and beat former Governor Coke Stevenson in a runoff primary by precisely 87 votes out of 988,295 cast. Stevenson of course charged fraud, but couldn't prove it-the suspect ballots had mysteriously disappeared...
...Greece has prospered, Papandreou replied: "Numbers prosper, the people suffer." Farmers, who had benefited least from the boom because of low prices for their goods, got Papandreou's easy promise that he would forgive their debts. Above all, Campaigner Papandreou concentrated on the old 1961 charges of election fraud, cried that he was determined to save the nation from the "fascist and terrorist" policies of Karamanlis...
...Fraud, even if proved, "would be totally irrelevant to the real issues," Sutherland contended. He pointed to the decision in Bolling v. Sharpe, announced the same day as Brown v. Board of Education. In this case, the Court held that "segregation in public education is not reasonably related to any proper governmental objective...