Word: mistressing
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...gifts from the Central African Republic's butcherous Emperor Bokassa, Giscard's reaction was roughly, "So what?" Of course, the French have a tradition of Non, je ne regrette rien. Across the channel, the Duke of Wellington once displayed something of that spirit when an old mistress (a Frenchwoman) threatened to publish all kinds of lurid details about his grace. "Publish and be damned!" the Iron Duke responded, or words to that effect. Grover Cleveland ("Ma, Ma, where's my pa?/ Gone to the White House-ha ha ha!") also managed a show of imperturbability about...
...well-known actors, Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson, pose deeper problems, and offer more radical solutions. Of Morgana, mistress of mandrake and sulfur, Mirren makes an armored, camp enchantress. Swathed in purple veils and seaweed capes, intoning Merlin's dread spells as if they contained the dirtiest and most sacred words in any world, incarcerating the wizard in a cocoon of cotton candy as she proclaims victory over her mentor, Mirren convinces that she could charm a kingdom-or a film- with her perfidy...
...them. Their venal mother has farmed them out as domestic servants. In one revealing scene, an early employer flicks through a pile of dinner napkins that Léa has ironed and airily tosses half of them on the floor as insufficiently impeccable. The eventual demise of their present mistress, Mme. Danzard (Anne Pitoniak), is built on such moments, and the murder is a strange admixture of revolt and matricide. Throughout, the play is charged with the alternating currents of cozy domesticity and a sense of how the French Revolution began...
...Walter kept us moving, often for no good reason. We spent hours in department stores shopping for the just-right pillow he could sit on during broadcasts. Crewmen were driven to the racetrack and to liquor stores, and once I even had to collect a bigwig's poodle clutching mistress from the airport...
...balance sheet of a personal hell. His lawyer anti-hero Bill Maitland (Nicol Williamson) is "irredeemably mediocre," and incorrigibly self-destructive. He indulges in lacerating sado-masochistic diatribes, pops pills and suffers interminable hang overs. His joyless office liaisons sate only his lust, and he leaves his wife, mistress and daughter parched for love. In short, he is a mess, but he is the kind of mesmerizing mess that more men see in the shaving mirror in 1981 than did in 1965 when the play opened in New York. Now as then, Williamson is incandescent. He intuits every mock-marked...