Word: svengalis
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...endearing things--perhaps the only endearing thing--about the scandal that ended consultant Dick Morris' career as Bill Clinton's election-year Svengali is the fact that the prostitute who allegedly rode Morris around his Jefferson Hotel suite was more of a working woman than a working girl. Now 37, Sherry Rowlands may have represented fantasy to Morris, but the more charitable sectors of the public could imagine her as just another middle-aged single gal trying to make ends meet...
...been four buddies playing guitars and drums. That all-male unit has been fundamental -- rock's version of the nuclear family. And where have women fit in? Often as the girlfriends about whom misogynistic lyrics could be written. Women have sung in girl groups (usually packaged by a male Svengali); they have served as the comely, tambourine-rapping vocalists in otherwise all-male bands; or, like Madonna, they have achieved success as sexy solo divas. But for most of rock's history, women have never been full, chord-crunching, songwriting partners with men in real rock groups. The guys form...
Washington -- It has taken hardly a month for David Gergen to become the White House Svengali: a top West Wing aide says he's now the non-Hillary person the President listens to most. It was Gergen who pushed Clinton to have dinner with Bob Dole last week, who helped dispose of the travel-office scandal and the owls-vs.-timber brouhaha. "We're taking out the trash," says a Clinton aide in the White House. "When we come back in July and go into conference on the budget, we cannot have this stuff lying around...
Paramount teamed them for six more pictures. But Von Sternberg was a Svengali who used his Trilby less as a performer than as another element in his lush decor -- and an androgynous one at that. It suited him to dress her in white tie and tails (and to have her kiss a woman before she embraced Gary Cooper in Morocco). At first Dietrich fit into Hollywood's pantheon of sexual ambiguity somewhere between Greta Garbo and Mae West. Von Sternberg did nothing to soften her exotic sexual challenge or penetrate her masklike countenance, both of which were largely his creations...
...Zanuck to Marilyn Monroe. It was on 20th Century Fox letterhead, scolding Marilyn for her "completely impractical request" to have a special dialogue director work with her on the set of Don't Bother to Knock (a movie rated "don't bother to see"). "You have built up a Svengali," the letter read in part, "and if you are going to progress with your career and become as important talent-wise as you have publicity-wise then you must destroy this Svengali before it destroys...