Word: much
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...target. Taylor's voice is deep and apparently inexhaustible. Working variations on a biblical theme ("Create in me a clean heart, O God"), he artfully circles around his subject, now lulling the listeners into serenity, now rising to majestic sincerity in stately cadences that overwhelm as much with their sound as with their meaning. Taylor says that for him a sermon is a journey. "I like to start with a cool introduction to suggest what I'm going to say, without giving away the secret." But when the secret is out and the climax is reached...
...stardom. She announces that she is "a screen star, in the tradition of Shirley Temple, Liv Ullmann and Miss Piggy." When the audience good-naturedly boos one of her jokes, she exclaims: "The crowd turns on the diva. [Pause] But the diva doesn't care!" Her singing, much of it done with three saucy young women called the Harlettes, is no threat to Streisand, or even Minnelli. But it bursts with feeling-almost too much for mere lyrics to express...
...pair's fights became almost epic in scope. "I liked a good fight like he did," Midler recalls. "But I didn't like any one to fight back, and he fought much harder than I did." She left him and fled to Paris for three months in 1974, only to return for several more rounds. The knockout came last February, and Bette dropped Russo as her manager...
...overall structure but energetic in his scenes. The Fatty Arbuckle party that led to his sex scandal, trial, ruin and censorship; Greta Garbo's slow but sure rise to stardom amid the "ah-rintch" groves, and the pandemoniac search for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara. Much space is devoted to a novelization of the rise and fall of Marilyn Monroe. Farber's conclusion: Hollywood did not kill her; "it was just a case of bad luck, mismanagement. She met the wrong people, she got bad advice...
Such mid-life crises threaten to become as much a cliché in literature as they are in life. Yet Piers Paul Read, 38, puts a lot of his native English on this familiar pitch. He knows, as most chroniclers of Me Decade shenanigans do not, that private acts have public consequences; in the great tradition of British novelists, he draws society as a delicate, vast spider web, tuned to vibrate at the lightest footfall or breath of scandal. In addition, Read is a self-described "serious Catholic" and scales this novel to dimensions familiar to readers of Graham Greene...