Word: thaxter
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...live TV drama in New York, and then in the filmed anthologies in Hollywood, he often played the nice-looking young man who was either hiding something from others or deluding himself. Watch him in reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as an escaped mental patient who charms lonely Phyllis Thaxter in Fog Closing In, or the struggling writer fleecing an established one in Act of Faith. He's terrific in two episodes of The Twilight Zone: one as a fellow seeking a love elixir, the other as a man returning to his home town to find that no one remembers...
CHILDE HASSAM: AN ISLAND GARDEN REVISITED, National Museum of American Art, Washington. The islands are the Isles of Shoals, off the New Hampshire coast, and the garden was the notable cultivation of journalist-poet Celia Thaxter. Both are memorably captured here by Hassam (1859-1935), America's foremost impressionist. Through...
Twice upon a time there were terrific child actors: Margaret O'Brien in '40s movies and Billy Gray on '50s TV. O'Brien's sad-eyed face, a Keane portrait with angst, told moviegoers that even if Phyllis Thaxter were your mother or Judy Garland your big sister, childhood could be an unending melotrauma of nightmares and broken ideals. Gray was the winsome lad, then the sturdy teen-ager of Father Knows Best; he navigated adolescence like a middle-class Huck Finn. O'Brien and Gray were natural, winning, resourceful actors who took both...
...Charlie's earthly endeavors. His paddleball game is slowing down; he owes his publishers $70,000 on advances for books he has yet to write; his wife Denise is suing him for divorce and stripping him of everything but his costly cotton undershorts; his old friend Thaxter, an eccentric literary conman with expensive tastes, has squandered thousands of Citrine's dollars given to start an intellectual quarterly. In addition, Citrine's silver-gray Mercedes has been vandalized by a petty hood, a Mafia buffo character named Ronald Cantabile, to whom Citrine unwittingly gave a bad check...
...erudite sense of humor, his sharp pokes at intellectually provocative themes, and his spoofing of literary forms: the book, he says, is really "a send-up on the nouvelle roman." In that vein, he offers metaphor after metaphor based upon far-out late-show conceits ("I whispered like Phyllis Thaxter in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo"). And he makes it Myra's thesis that the flicks of 1931 to 1945, if not the high point of Western culture, were certainly the most formative influence upon anyone who came of age during that "post-Gutenberg and pre-Apocalypse...