Word: shaw
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...film studio near London, 526 years after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, realism-bound Producer Otto (The Moon Is Blue) Preminger sought to restage the event, almost succeeded. Shooting the burning scene for his movie version of Shaw's Saint Joan, Preminger watched happily as his fledgling star, young (18) Iowa-born Jean Seberg, mounted a pile of faggots and was duly chained to the stake. Soldiers lighted the faggots and Jean's eyes rose with the flames. Suddenly, before a dummy could replace the lady not for burning, a gas pocket, fed by hidden...
...years. George Bernard Shaw took up every sort of cause from Fabianism to vegetarianism to antivivisection. But he had one obsession that puzzled even his closest friends. "They think it a huge joke," he once complained. "It's the most serious proposal of my life." His will proved that he meant what he said: aside from some personal bequests, the bulk of his estate was to go into a charitable trust to finance the design of a new phonetic alphabet for the English-speaking people. But just in case the courts might throw out such a trust, Shaw named...
...spite of the eccentricity of Shaw's will, no one at first bothered to contest it. Shaw had not left too much cash, and the huge (70%) death duties had yet to be paid. Then along came the Broadway hit My Fair Lady, which has brought in $2,000 a week in royalties, has paid the death duty, upped the estate's value to $2,000,000. By last month so much money was involved that Britain's Public Trustee Office decided to test the will in court. Was the rewriting of the alphabet really a legitimate...
...arguing the case, the attorney general did his best for Shaw's frustrated crusade. To G.B.S. "Dr. Johnson's Alphabet" of 26 letters was as obsolete as Roman numerals. What was needed, he insisted, was an alphabet large enough to cover all the language's 40-odd basic sounds. Such absurdities as having f, ff, gh and ph represent one single sound would be eliminated. Phone could be spelt with three letters, Shaw with only two. "The saving," said Shaw, "would pay for half a dozen wars, if we could find nothing better to spend...
...High Court Judge Sir Charles Harman finally agreed. "It seems to me," said he, "that the objects of these alphabet trusts are analogous to trusts for political purposes. They would involve a change in the law of the land. Such objects have never been considered charitable." The defeat of Shaw's crusade, added Sir Charles, "is not the fault of the law but of the testator, who failed almost for the first time in his life either to grasp the legal problem or to make up his mind what he wanted...