Word: runyon
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...Damon Runyon died of cancer in 1946, after having contributed some 90 million words to the newspaper record of his time. Much of this prodigious output appeared in Hearst's old New York American, where Runyon in scribed such transitory events as prize fights, ball games, murder trials and wars. He may well have been the most-read U.S. journalist of his day, says Biographer Edwin P. Hoyt in A Gentle man of Broadway (Little, Brown & Co.; $6.95); but Hoyt argues convincingly that Reporter Runyon was also the most misread...
Broadway was Runyon's country. In his other career as a short-story writer, he peopled the Great White Way with a tender host of Guys and Dolls -Harry the Horse, Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Mad ame LaGimp, a long parade of gold-hearted touts, pimps and whores...
Thanks to the characters he created, Runyon is best remembered as the sen timental troubadour of that most cynical of all streets. The truth is, though, that Runyon was all cynic himself. By romanticizing Broadway, he was thumbing his nose at the world of respectability that he mistrusted and despised Cold Blue Eyes. "When a prominent citizen gets jammed up with the rules," he once wrote, "there are always a lot of folks ready to turn on the brine for him. But when some bezark that no one ever heard of gets found out, they rush...
They ought to put a 20-lb. weight on him, handicap him like a race horse, to give the rest of us a chance." At 32, Palmer is a hero out of Runyon -a passionate gambler, an electric showman. His desire to win is so strong that finishing second-even though it makes him rich-is only a little less distasteful than finishing last. "The desire is the thing," he says. "You have to keep yourself under control, to believe in yourself...
...reglaze of a soggy old (1933) candied apple called Lady for a Day, Bette Davis, 53, finds heavier slogging on the comeback trail. She is cast as Apple Annie, one of those studiously shabby, relentlessly endearing sentimendicants who are patrolling the stretch of Broadway that is running through Damon Runyon's brain...