Word: palming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sheer vastness and excess, Bob Hope's three-year-old, 25,000-sq.-ft. home in Palm Springs, Calif., is not the gesture of an old man content to dwell quietly among yesterday's memories. Climbing the cascade of black marble stairs under the house's wide-vaulting arch, a visitor might be on some gigantic Academy Awards set, a gleaming desert mirage. Actually, the place is a kind of hotel. Even when the owner is on the road, friends check in for a few days. On this afternoon, however, the sound of Crosby-esque bubabooing from...
...attention span of an eight-year-old. Fifteen minutes of work on his material and he's getting antsy. The Palm Springs spread is, like Disneyland, made to be toured, and Hope is soon whisking the visitor over his domain, stopping one minute to show off a photo of George Patton urinating into the Rhine, and in the next parading the wonders of his clothes closet, a room about the size of a C.E.O.'s office. There are a wall of shoes and long racks of blazers, slacks and other 19th-hole formal wear. "I wear them...
...constant in Hope's day is his nightly walk. He heads for Palm Springs' main drag, which is teeming with teen-agers at 1 in the morning. It is the vaudevillian's instinct that the moment you are off the stage the audience begins to forget you, and so Hope works even here; he window-shops and scratches autographs on cocktail napkins, all without breaking his stride. Hope confesses that he's "slowing down a bit. I still need the laughs and the adulation, but I guess I can get those from my specials...
Noteworthy Typewriter Stunts and Tricks. In the late 1920s, the Royal Typewriter Co. dropped 11,000 parachuted typewriters out of a plane over Hartford, Conn. This was intended to increase sales. Tricks with typewriters were also popular in the early days, such as making palm trees out of capital I's and asterisks. Placing such things in a composition must have offered problems, but they are said to have given much...
...whim (some $9,000 a day, or more than $1,100 an hour, for instance, just for the services of Star Model Isabella Rossellini), and arguing costs about $50 a word. So Nick LaMicela, the project's art director, has selected a quiet country road, with no palm trees to spoil the illusion of France. Somebody has found a French cowherd. Actually he is a Puerto Rican waiter, but in beret, smock and scarf, and with rouge on his round cheeks to suggest a history of drinking wine for breakfast, he looks as French as Pierre...