Word: idolator
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...anyone can mollify hard-line conservatives, it should be their idol, Ronald Reagan. That is what Chief of Staff Howard Baker thought when a handful of right-wingers who had been invited to the White House began leveling accusations that the Administration was selling out the contras in Nicaragua. Baker had arranged for the President to drop by and explain in person that his tentative backing for a Central American peace plan implied no lessening of U.S. support for the Nicaraguan rebels. But this time his remarks were greeted only with cold silence; visibly irritated, Reagan shrugged and walked away...
...time the evening had ended, though, many were left wondering whether the production was anti-Nazi or anti-Semitic. Schoenberg's libretto makes an explicit extended centerpiece out of the episode of the Golden Calf: gold is collected and formed into an idol; a ritual slaughter of animals is followed by a sacrifice of Four Naked Virgins; there is an orgy of drunkenness, sexual license and suicide. By forsaking emotionally neutral biblical robes for specific ghetto mufti (only Moses, portrayed by Bass-Baritone Theo Adam, is outfitted in Old Testament garb), Ponnelle risked having the quarrelsome Jews appear like characters...
...over his silver hair, his B-movie-star face, his phosphorescent white suit -- the whole look so neat, so sensible, so . . . Phil Donahue -- and the sublimely silly uses to which he put them. Phrases like "Well, excuuuuuse me!" and "Naaaah!" became schoolyard mantras, and his concerts were eliciting rock-idol squeals. "He was performing to audiences of up to 20,000," recalls David Letterman, the late-night commissar of '80s comedy. "I think that's a record for a stand-up comedian in peacetime." In 1978 Martin recorded a gag disco tune called King Tut; it sold more than...
Chronicling the life of 1950s teen-idol Ritchie Valens (Lou Diamond Phillips), La Bamba is an ode to the American middle-class dream. The film opens with the Valenzuela family, a group of Mexican immigrants, working as California migrant workers...
...these are signals sent out by Steve Martin, who is too smart and funny to be fit for a movie idol's straitjacket. He began, in the early 1970s, as a stand-up comic with an unusual persona: a guy determined against all odds -- lack of charm or talent, for example -- to be the life of the party. In his first movies too he made mock of his Waspy features by playing dimwits and cuckolds. Would he restrict himself to updating Jerry Lewis when he could be Cary Grant? Not at all. For with Pennies from Heaven Martin essayed nostalgic...