Word: lael
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...AFTERNOON WOMEN by Lael Tucker Wertenbaker, 312 pages, Little, Brown...
...Lael Tucker Wertenbaker is the widow of Journalist Charles Wertenbaker, whose illness from terminal cancer and ultimate suicide she chronicled with cloying intimacy in Death of a Man (TIME, April 1, 1957). In this novel about a kindly abortionist and his heterogeneous clientele, she argues that a woman should never have to bear a baby that she doesn't want. There may well be sound arguments in support of this proposition, but they get lost in the wash of a tendentious soap opera...
...Time (by Garson Kanin) is the sad, clinically harrowing story of a man who is dying of cancer of the lower bowel, and how he faces it during the last three months of his life in Southern France. The Broadway play is based on Death of a Man, Lael Tucker Wertenbaker's account of her husband's suicide. Charles Christian Wertenbaker was an able journalist (for FORTUNE, LIFE, and TIME from 1931 to 1948) turned novelist. Gift is strangely unmoving and dramatically slack, partly because the audience knows in advance that the hero will die, partly because...
...life that it rather self-consciously preaches ("use all five senses every day"). To treat life as a branch of esthetics is to observe one's responses to it, rather than engage spontaneously in it, to play-act rather than act, or play. When Wertenbaker and his wife Lael (Olivia de Havilland) make love, he asks for a morning-after review. "Miraculous, as always," she replies, making two people who believe...