Word: myron
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...moment arrives one night when Myron is televiewing Siren of Babylon, a 1948 costume turkey starring Bruce Cabot and Maria Montez. As Myron ad justs his set, the imprisoned Myra shoves him through the screen, and he finds himself back in 1948 on the MGM set where the movie is being shot...
Drag Queen. It was a good year for Hollywood, and one of the best that a powerful, confident America has ever known. But Myron soon learns that his "new" world of padded shoulders and Hudson Hornets is divided into the locals - those who are actually living and working on the film in 1948 - and the visitors - those like himself who were mysteriously dumped there. There are scores of visitors, including a Philadel phia cook named Whittaker Kaiser, who is a merciless lampoon of Norman Mailer at his most masculine pugnacious. Richard Nixon even puts in a brief appearance, wanting...
Under such conditions, Myra is periodically able to take full command of Myron's body. This gives the narrative a Jekyll and Hyde format, with Myra eventually upstaging Myron, who every one thinks is a drag queen. Still unsatisfied by her escapades in Book I, Myra resumes her humiliation of men, inflict ing yet another hilarious outrage upon a strapping, redheaded youth out of the Van Johnson mold. She also undertakes to save Hollywood, armed with the fore-knowlege of its decline and Vidal's grasp of the industry's "future" profit-and-loss sheets. She even...
Myra's own fate is to wind up in the body of Maria Montez - unable to understand Spanish. With Myra foiled, a puzzled Myron returns to the rightful side of the TV screen. It must be seen as a victory of banality over evil - at least temporarily...
Last year's bestselling Burr is an excel lent example of the author's skill at packaging a bit of class in a good deal of excelsior. For Myron, he tricks out his peeves and hostilities with the malicious energy that has made him the best-if not the most original-of our hard-core satirists. Myra/Myron is the perfect mate for Vidal's cold-blooded gifts. If the caricatures, derision and raillery sometimes outpace the action-or the point -it is because even Vidal is not immune to the satirist's most common affliction...