Word: gambler
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...David Ho doesn't look like a gambler. With his boyish face and slender build, he could more easily pass for a teenager than for a 44-year-old father of three--or, for that matter, for a world-renowned scientist. In fact, when he was an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology back in the 1970s, Ho hung around the blackjack tables in Las Vegas, tilting the odds in his favor by memorizing each card as it was played. He got so good at counting cards that he was thrown out of several casinos...
...Like a gambler unwilling to cut his losses, Time Warner CEO Gerald M. Levin keeps doubling his bet. In 1989 Levin, then vice chairman, negotiated Time Inc.'s buyout of Warner Communications, an acquisition that enriched Warner's shareholders but not Time Inc.'s. Without making much of a dent in the $11 billion debt incurred by the deal, Levin kept rolling the dice. He sold pieces of the new company into complex partnerships that raised billions but tied up Time Warner's best assets, including Warner Bros. studios and HBO. And instead of paying down the mortgage, Levin went...
...brutal supposition in popular psychology: men tend to homicide, women to suicide. In the traditional view, this is the only heroic violence suitable for a lady--to die with dignity. In the 1932 Three on a Match, society wife Ann Dvorak leaves her loving husband for a small-time gambler, neglects her child and, realizing the error of her ways, kills herself. Best friend Joan Blondell marries the husband, and Bette Davis moves in as nanny. The 1937 Stage Door has an array of dazzlers (including Hepburn and Ginger Rogers) as young actresses angling for Broadway stardom. They fight over...
...seedy Manhattan hotel lobby in 1928, Hughie is an old-fashioned tale--even the clock on the wall ticks in waltz tempo. And Erie Smith (Pacino) is an old-fashioned gambler, a loser out of Damon Runyon. For Erie, horseplaying is a sacred vocation. "I'd rather sleep in the same stall with old Man o' War," he says, "than make the whole damn Follies." Down on his luck, he has the sour, insistent patter of a guy without dolls, a sharpie gone flat. Tonight he's got nothing better to do than talk to a taciturn desk clerk...
...mutterings, or seemed to. Hughie is dead now, so Erie elegizes a man he thought brought him luck. Like most elegies, this one is about the mourner. Erie needs a new lucky charm. If he can connect with this clerk--turn their parallel monologues into a dialogue--the gambler might be a winner again...