Word: kleptomaniac
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Psychiatrists think that kleptomania-compulsive theft for neurotic rather than economic motives-is a symptom of many different kinds of emotional stress, so they have no standard profile of the kleptomaniac. Many say the disorder is associated with depression and a sense of entitlement; the shoplifter is in effect saying, "I have been treated so harshly that I deserve the things I take." Says New York City Psychologist Donald Kaplan: "It is a kind of unconscious moral reasoning, demanding restitution." Adds Vanderbilt University Psychiatrist Pietro Castelnuovo-Tedesco, "They feel they have been victims of theft in the past, and they...
...they're caught in camp in Norfolk without a war, awaiting their "orders." First there's the kid--the big, gawky out-of-it one from high school who joined the Navy to find his manhood but only found "men" who made more fun of him. He is a kleptomaniac, and before the action begins he tries to lift $40 from the polio contribution box at camp. Polio is the commander's wife's favorite charity. The kid is court-martialed, dishonorably discharged and sentenced to eight years in military prison...
...criminal (Randy Quaid) is as petty as his crime, a puffy adolescent kleptomaniac who needs to be fetched up, not sent up, as his two reluctant guards (Jack Nicholson and Otis Young) soon realize. Feeling too sorry for him to maintain strict discipline for five days, they start loosening him up with a monumental beer bust in Washington. Next they get him into a nice, maturing brawl with some Marines in a men's room at Penn Station, and finally buy him his sexual initiation in a Boston brothel. By the time they deliver him to the brig...
...together on the beach. They meet again in New York, where he shows up by chance one night to take her 17-year-old daughter on a date. There is great fluttering and consternation that result in several dubious subplots involving a good-natured ex-husband (Gene Kelly), a kleptomaniac mother (Binnie Barnes) and a suitor from out West (Billy Green Bush), who is given to such admiring exclamations as "Wahoo! When you get yourself together you really get everything in the right place...
...Once the basic research had been done, Irving and Suskind simply sat down at a tape recorder, interviewed each other, and began spinning tales. They invented scandalous stories of how Hughes seduced his father's mistress while his father was watching, how Hughes once rescued a kleptomaniac aircraft executive from imprisonment for a theft of Oreo cookies, and how Hughes reluctantly went swimming in the nude with-of course-Ernest Hemingway. The imaginary Hughes had originally barged in on Hemingway in Sun Valley, introduced himself as a bush pilot and taken the novelist "for a spin...