Word: merricks
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...million by Sherry Nelson, his estranged wife. She is arguing that she is entitled to half of his earnings, including those in the four years they lived together before they were married. Even more bewildering is the suit, now being considered in New York State, brought by Etan Merrick against Producer David Merrick. They were married in 1969 and secretly divorced a month later, but then lived together until 1976. A New York court once denied her alimony for the years following her divorce, but her lawyer thinks that the precedent of the Marvin case may help her cause...
...John Merrick (1863-90) was so monstrously deformed that beside him Caliban might seem shapely. His head had the circumference of a normal man's waist, and the bone structure occluded one eye and twisted his mouth into a slobbering aperture. A spongy cauliflower-shaped mass on the back of his head and other body growths gave off an odious suppuration. His hip was deformed, and he could scarcely walk. Only his left arm and his genitals were unmarred. So grotesque was Merrick's body, in fact, that he was banned from appearing in sideshows, for a time...
Quite by happenstance, Merrick then came to the benign attention of Dr. Frederick Treves, a gifted anatomist at London Hospital who eventually became personal surgeon to Queen Victoria. Private quarters were set aside for Merrick at the hospital, and with infinite patience but genteel reserve, Treves embarked on a process of Victorian social engineering. In a sense it is the education of a noble savage, but here an ironic ambiguity begins to bite into the play. For who, precisely, is noble and who is savage? At one point, when two hospital orderlies are sacked for gaping at Merrick, he asks...
...last years Merrick became the mini-pet of the haut monde. The Princess of Wales visited him, the Prince of Wales sent him venison, and an actress, Mrs. Kendal, was solicitously tender. At the point in the play where she reaches out to take Merrick's hideously gnarled right hand in hers, the emotionally charged impact equals the scene in The Miracle Worker where Helen Keller first comprehends the sign for water. Longing to sleep "like other people," Merrick, who could only achieve rest by lowering his huge head on his knees, lay down one night in 1890, broke...
...Broadway Theater of St. Peter's Church (in Manhattan's Citicorp Building), is done with impeccable taste and graced with skilled key performances that equal or surpass anything to be seen at present in the New York theater. Displaying no cosmetically applied malignancies, Philip Anglim 's Merrick is like some sort of simple, twisted saint...