Word: perham
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Drawing on extensive interviews with Coe's companion, Virginia Perham, Olsen details the rage behind the go-getter smile. The vaunted independence was in fact financed by parental handouts. Often impotent, Coe bragged of his sexual prow ess to Perham as if she had not witnessed his failures. He alternately fasted and gorged on junk food, used the name Kevin with girlfriends and clients and spoke in a variety of voice inflections. "Knowing Fred Coe," said a schoolmate, "was like having a platoon of friends...
...hesitated in the middle of a sentence," recalled the receptionist, "Mrs. Coe would fill in the word. They're that close!" Then, one evening, after a quarrel about his lack of accomplishment, Ruth vandalized Coe's car. "Don't let Son upset you," she once told Perham. "He's not worth it." Perham, a horrified witness to their scenes, came to see Ruth as Coe's "judge, jury and executioner, Gordon as futile peacemaker and a child called Son in the middle...