Word: personal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Costanza once called her job "a responsibility, not a title," and declared: "I'm not afraid to lose it. But when I leave I want to be the same person who walked in. I'm not gonna change." That obstinate trait was both a virtue and the reason for her downfall...
...coming," concedes Richard Ferris, president of United, the largest airline in the non-Communist world. "If anyone had told me last year that we would be up 21% in traffic so far this year, we would have straitjacketed him and locked him away." Now such a prescient person would probably be promoted to Senior Vice President for planning...
Davis gives the role everything he has, which is both too much and not enough. Like Liza Minnelli, who was in rapt attendance on opening night, Davis is a claque person: his fans bestow upon him an adoring worship that outstrips the sum of his actual gifts. He is a passable dancer (though he does not dance in this show), his voice is only as strong as the mic it is hooked to, and an orphan out of Annie could match his acting. Like Minnelli, Davis projects the image of an overage child parched for affection, aggressively demanding approval...
Celebrityhood is full of lobotomy cases, skilled at not topping Johnny's lines and at flogging their book or plugging their Vegas engagement. "What a trial to be Norman Mailer, Billy Carter, Farrah Fawcett-Majors," John Leonard has written, "to have to grow a personality along the lines of one you invented, the one that sold; to have to compete with other fabricated personalities, inflations of cunning, blimps of ego." Celebrities also must cope with skeptical magazine profilers bent on finding the "real" person underneath...
NONFICTION: A Place for Noah, Josh Greenfeld ∙ Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces, Joseph Conrad ∙ Evita: First Lady, John Barnes ∙ First Person Rural, Noel Perrin ∙ Inventing America, Garry Wills ∙ The Gulag Archipelago III, Alexander Solzhenitsyn