Word: patricia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Died. Patricia Stevens Muntz, 45, owner of Patricia Stevens, Inc., largest combination modeling-agency-charm school in the U.S.; of heart failure (she left two farewell notes and an empty bottle of barbiturates under her deathbed); in Chicago. A onetime Powers model, Pat opened a small agency of her own in Chicago in 1942, over the years added ingenious beauty lures for plain girls, upped enrollment to 2,000, grossed over $1,000,000 a year, had 41 agencies in other cities. In her last days she quarreled bitterly over control of her business with second husband Earl ("Madman") Muntz...
Which to Shoot? What is her uncanny power? It seems that the lion was found by the warden as a cub, and Patricia named him King and reared him, feeding him from a bottle and sleeping with him in her crib. When he finally became too big, he was banished to the wilds. But King still plays dead on Patricia's command. He loves the warden, too, and will wrestle with him on invitation...
Trouble comes when a young Masai warrior takes a fancy to Patricia. This nymphet of the Carnivora is delighted. As she well knows, a tradition of the Masai once held that a tribesman could not take a wife until he killed a lion, and Patricia eggs him on to fight King for her. The lion duly eviscerates the tribesman, but just as he is about to dispatch him, up runs the warden. Which to shoot? He hesitates for several paragraphs between his pledge to protect all animals and "an instinctive feeling of solidarity with [the man] rooted in the first...
...Patricia is stunned that death has resulted from her innocent game. Disillusioned, she goes off to school, presumably to lose forever in civilization her unique communion with simple beasts...
...with red clay) to the construction of a native hut (from cow dung). But apparently he was trying to crossbreed Lolita with Rima, the bird-girl, and to enhance the result with the mystical animal overtones of Romain Gary's The Roots of Heaven. He professes to see Patricia as a study in "the passage from innocence to non-innocence." But the reader who, like the monkey, pulls at Kessel's eyelids is apt to find they conceal nothing except what meets...