Word: mistressing
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Hopkin's Huml is not a man of great introspection. As Dr. Balcar (Lyra O. Barrera) says of Pazook, "He doesn't know what's going on inside him." He is most chipper when he abuses his wife, Vlasta (Forbes), his mistress, Renata (Bina Martin), or his secretary, Blanka (Magda Hernandez). Witness the scene when, without a flinch or trace of anger, he asks Vlasta, "Will you stop speaking for all womankind and see about starting dinner...
What is truly frightening is that Havel intends Vlasta to speak for all of womankind, and for all of womankind to speak for Vlasta. Much of the humor of the work lies in Havel's recycling women's dialogue. The playwright has Huml's wife and mistress share catty, stereotypical lines. Forbes is a little flat as Vlasta, but Martin displays some nice comic timing as Renata...
...reason to think the real Edward J. Watson was much more than a serial killer with trading smarts that were offset by lethal outbursts of meanness. But the reader doesn't see much of that side. Oh, Watson beats his son every Sunday and throws a half-caste mistress off his land when she becomes inconvenient. But the narrative, which is told in 36 short chapters by ten locals, mostly mixes awe and dread, along with a certain aw-shucks accommodation. Outsize characters, Watson's workmen and neighbors seem to think, have their little crotchets...
...says Dominick Dunne, speaking of a gentleman bitch in his latest roman a clef, An Inconvenient Woman (Crown; 458 pages; $19.95). And why not? Everyone else in the novel seems to have stepped directly from a '40s feature: plutocrat Jules Mendelson; his socialite wife Pauline; his long-suffering mistress Flo March; and a sexually ambiguous friend, the late Hector Paradiso. Hector's violent death was marked as suicide, but Mendelson knows who shot him and why. The cover-up is reminiscent of an actual Los Angeles scandal; the malicious dialogue and the insider's knowledge of West Coast society...
From then on, and despite headline-grabbing flirtations with John Gilbert and Leopold Stokowski, Garbo became in effect the indentured mistress of her movie studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This most galvanizing of actresses was the most passive of stars. At MGM's urging, the young Garbo slimmed down, had her teeth capped, adjusted her hairline. Her most enduring studio ally was her doting cinematographer, William Daniels. Garbo must have felt comfortable, surrounded by MGM's middlebrow high gloss. She may not have cared that its gentility suffocated her films, so long as she could breathe her artistry into them...