Word: sob
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...FITNESS AS TO CRAFT, HEALTH AND LIFE. Breath control is essential. I tried to persuade old Charles Laughton of that when he told me he was going to do Lear. He asked if I could give him any advice. I said, "Yes, I can, you fat, old s.o.b. [pronounced sob]. You have a large estate in Norfolk. I've seen it, not that you ever invited me to it, dear boy. I was catty. You have a large estate with an extensive hillside. Every morning I want you to climb that hillside, and shout out the lines." Well...
...York. He was also trying, with the groovy relevance of a mid-60's liberal, to make a trendy statement about bad cops, good robbers, Watergate and Vietnam. But he couldn't control his techniques. He cut so flippantly from one to the other--a laugh here, a sob there--that he destroyed the thoughtful consistency that would have elicited emotional response. Dog Day Afternoon ends up being as realistic and immediate as Dragnet, and no more nor less contemporary than the Nehru jacket...
Switched-on Bach, the burbling and tootling re-creations of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and other works on the Moog synthesizer, has become the best-selling "classical" record of all time (3 million copies sold worldwide to date). None of the subsequent sons of SOB (The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, Moog Strikes Back) has ever managed to overtake the original, but the newest and most interesting challenger is Tokyo's Isao Tomita, 43. After a slow start last year, his RCA album Snowflakes are Dancing (electronic versions of Debussy piano pieces) has passed the 200,000 mark. Three months...
...more professional-and garish-is Gerold Frank's oversized Judy (Harper & Row; $12.50). Ex-Ghostwriter Frank is a sob brother with impeccable credentials (I'll Cry Tomorrow; Beloved Infidel). He merchandises anecdotes with the craft of an attorney summing up for the jury. But does the author stand for defense or prosecution? Frank's descriptions of Garland on Garland are acute and empathetic: "She saw herself so impersonally she could say of her photograph, 'I don't like her hair that way,' or of herself on the screen, 'She could have done that...
...THEN there is George. George is the one character Beatty tries to make believable. When Jill, irate at his sexual habits, calls him a good-for-nothing, George sits down and begins to sob in despairing agreement. When Lenny blows up at him for moving in on Jackie, George tries to calm the executive with the sincere assurance that Jackie truly loves him. But such scenes are unconvincing, for George's overall personality has been made abundantly clear: he is nothing but a dumb stud, whose only responsibility is to make sure he wipes his groin clean before going from...