Word: spotlight
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Ralph Bellamy, star of Broadway's State of the Union, also had a sunshine-&-shadows week. Hot Organist wife Ethel Smith had sued him for separation, charged that when she played the organ for guests he flew into a rage because she stole the spotlight. Bellamy's own complaint, in answer: though he was busy onstage nights till 11:20, she only gave him till 11:45 to get home, and if he missed the deadline she locked him out. Anyway, Actor Bellamy & highball crashed the Men of Distinction gallery...
...team of inside dopesters had been notoriously cold toward each other. When Allen came home in 1945, he was in no hurry to get back to the old stand. For more than six months, he and Pearson did not even meet or speak, though Allen longed to share the spotlight and the audience (20 million a day) of the carrousel...
Just one painting held the crowd momentarily. Ivan Le Lorraine Albright's pustulant portrait of Dorian Gray, painted for MGM's movie of Oscar Wilde's novel, stared arrestingly from under a strong spotlight. To keep calloused fingers off moldering Dorian, he was surrounded by a low grey fence. Blurted one housewife, after minutes of careful study: "Anyway, you can tell he's English." The man who painted the sorry sight had also contributed a lithographic Self Portrait (which won $50). It was better-dressed but no better-fleshed than Dorian. "That fellow," confided one bemused...
...neon signs more than warranted Oakley's remark. In the yellow-floored, blue-walled shop were 20 barber chairs upholstered in pastel-blue leather. Behind them stretched long strips of mirror topped by germ-killing lamps. Above each chair, from the sound-proofed ceiling, shone a spotlight. On the small pink-&-blue mezzanine in the rear there were two more chairs for children, surrounded by giraffe-shaped palm pots...
Each character takes the spotlight in turn, bares his or her inner torments in stream-of-consciousness. Virginia Woolf carried off the trick; Toynbee doesn't. Through the dense matting of symbolism (even the choice of tea cakes, the dropping of a cup, becomes symbolic), readers may extract many meanings or none. Guesses British Critic Cyril Connolly, editor of highbrow Horizon: "And what are these figures, but expressions of a deeper truth, of cycles of spring and winter, youth and age, death and rebirth, of the Mother who must become our enemy if we are to grow...