Word: might-have-been
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...Might-Have-Been. During World War I he worked for the Allies as translator (he speaks eight languages), was so shocked by German atrocities in Belgium that he vowed never to play in Germany again, and never has. Asked what countries he had not visited in the last 40 years, he once named Tibet, because it is too high, and Germany, because it is too low. In 1938 he returned a decoration awarded him by Mussolini with a telegram signed "Artur Rubinstein, Jewish pianist...
...Omnibus kept the drama level high with the James Barrie play, Dear Brutus, especially selected by Helen Hayes to celebrate her 50 years in the theater. In the 1918 opening of the play, Actress Hayes had played Margaret, the child who "might-have-been," opposite William Gillette. On TV she was the world-sick Mrs. Dearth who gets a chance to relive her life and does even worse than before. Helen Hayes played with authority and was well-supported by Franchot Tone, Martyn Green and Lori March. But teen-ager Susan Strasberg-in Helen's old role of Margaret...
...glimpse of the might-have-been at Yalta was given by a letter to General George Marshall from Major General John R. Deane, head of the U.S. military mission to Moscow from 1943 to 1945. A month before the Yalta Conference, Secretary of War Henry Stimson forwarded the Deane letter to President Roosevelt. If, as Stimson probably hoped, Deane's conclusions had guided U.S. representatives at Yalta, the conference results might have been far different...
...Emperor's Clothes (by George Tabori) is theatrically an in-&-outer and artistically a might-have-been. Playwright Tabori (Flight Into Egypt) has yoked a fascinating idea for a play to a good deal more familiar one, and the two neither run very well in harness nor altogether keep to the road. Tabori's scene is Budapest in 1930; his atmosphere that of an incipient police state; his chief characters a small boy (Brandon de Wilde) and his father (Lee J. Cobb). The boy inhabits a mental world swarming with such heroes as Sherlock Holmes, Hoot Gibson...
Perhaps the most effective story is one that crosses satire and pitilessness in almost equal parts. In Under the Beech Tree, a mannish countrywoman who cares for nothing but the chase is suddenly confronted with the fresh carcass of a vixen. She imagines that the precious creature-the might-have-been mother of countless foxes-has been wantonly shot by her young nephew, and she collapses in a paroxysm of rage and grief...