Word: rat
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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...
...Crawdaddy. He tells us how Marianne Faithfull, actress, singer, and onetime "good friend" of Mick Jagger, originally wouldn't sleep with either Jagger or Richards because of their zits: "She didn't think she could ever bring herself to kiss a man with zits." Sanchez reveals how the "water rats" line in "Live With Me" stems from an actual rat-shoot out at Keith's estate, and how the previously indecipherable "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out" is actually a homophone for a recurrent voodoo phrase. On the subject of black magic, there's a great quote from Richards gleaned...
...using laconic, coarse, gritty, abandoned things to suggest a tragic sense of history. A case in point is his dreadful reliquary of Auschwitz, from the Stroher collection in Darmstadt: its few objects in a glass case-blocks of fat on a battered electric hot plate, moldering sausages, a mummified rat on a straw bed, a diagram of the camp, a drawing of a child-are perhaps the most poignant, and certainly the least exploitative, image in modern art of that catastrophe...
...confused about how to interpret the play. Kirsten Giroux's Goneril is a shallow, cold bitch-queen; Janet Rodger's Regan a bit more of a bitchy housewife. Henry Woronicz's Edmund swaggers like a comic hero, an illegitimate Petruchio. Harold Levine's Cornwall is a snivelling rat of a villain, more disgusting than threatening...
Life in the Cambridge rat race, as one might assume, doesn't bolster many people's self-confidence. Harvard is a place populated by very ambitious people," says Walters. 'You have to be ambitious to get here and to stay here--and keep your self-respect." It's not that Harvard induces depression, but rather that depression is a reaction to disappointments and college students have an inordinate amount of opportunities to be disappointed. "It's not a simple reaction to an 'F' in a course," Walters insists. "When students come to us, they're concerned not only about their...