Word: hester
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tropic outposts, small combat units, African safaris. It remained for Novelist John (A Bell for Adano, The Wall) Hersey to put his characters to the test in a modern-day woodchuck roundup. None of the people in The Marmot Drive like each other very much to begin with. When Hester comes up from New York for a weekend at the out-of-the-way small town of Tunxis, Conn., it is to meet the family of Eben, a moody young fellow she has taken up with in the big city. What Hester and Eben have not been told is that...
...Hester is afraid of woodchucks, but the drive is hardly under way when she lets a third party kiss the blackberry stain off her lips and finds she likes it. But it is when Hester goes into an abandoned church with Matthew Avered and tries to seduce him that the real trouble starts...
Matthew ignores her advances, but in their absence the marmot drive has begun to go badly. At roundup's end, only 37 animals have been corralled instead of the hundreds the selectman promised. Besides, someone has spied him and Hester together, and he is accused of attempted rape...
Margaret Sullavan, though uneven, brings far more integrity to the playing of Hester Collyer than Rattigan does to the part. The expert Alan Webb is floored as the husband; as the playboy, James Hanley comes off much better in the play's best role. As somebody who would love and cherish Hester if he could, he perhaps reflects something in Rattigan himself. Rattigan seems not so much unwilling to do right by his material as incapable...
Last week, with the golden days gone, 65-year-old Muriel Draper died in New York's University Hospital, after nearly two weeks of suffering under an oxygen tent. With her was her dancer son, Paul Jr. Two years before, during his unsuccessful libel suit against Greenwich housewife Hester McCullough, who had labeled him pro-Communist (TIME, June 5, 1950), Paul had attempted to explain his mother -and in so doing had characterized quite a lot of U.S. intellectuals and their hangers-on. Said he: "She has made statements that are not so. They are not lies . . . They...