Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Garson Kanin, playwright (Born Yesterday), novelist (The Rat Race) and Hollywood memoirist, is wooden in his overall structure but energetic in his scenes. The Fatty Arbuckle party that led to his sex scandal, trial, ruin and censorship; Greta Garbo's slow but sure rise to stardom amid the "ah-rintch" groves, and the pandemoniac search for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara. Much space is devoted to a novelization of the rise and fall of Marilyn Monroe. Farber's conclusion: Hollywood did not kill her; "it was just a case of bad luck, mismanagement...
...stunted adult was Playwright James M. Barrie; the event that maimed him, the death in a skating accident of an older brother. Jamie, who was six when the accident occurred, imitated David, and even put on his clothes. But none of it did any good: Jamie remained the runt of the family, whereas the lost David, in his mother's eyes, would always be tall, handsome, ripe with promise. "When I became a man," Barrie noted sadly, "[Da-vid] was still...
...effect, married his true love: the Davies family. Arthur Davies was a successful barrister, his wife Sylvia a woman of memorable vivacity. They had five sons, each as perfect in his way as David had been so long ago. Slowly, almost insidiously, the playwright enveloped them with his charm and money. All but one of the boys adored Barrie and his tales. He, in turn, created for them the character of Peter Pan. "I suppose," he said, "I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame...
...Birkin observes, when Barrie died in 1937 he was revered and renowned as a novelist and playwright. Yet it is doubt ful that he felt himself anything but a failure, still longing for that country of lost content, a landscape that existed only in his mother's mind when she dreamed of her dead David. What Barrie discovered in his single masterpiece is that almost everyone secretly yearns for vanished innocence. Most people put the search aside to answer the demands of here and now. Barrie's tragedy was that he was condemned to look for it every...
...wrote more than 50 books (among them God and Intelligence, Peace of Soul, Three to Get Married), and was almost as famous for person-to-person conversions as for oratory. Among his worldly converts: Louis Budenz, managing editor of the Communist Daily Worker; Columnist Heywood Broun; Playwright-Politician Clare Boothe Luce...