Word: tosspot
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Died. Brendan Francis Behan, 41, professional Irish tosspot and boyo terrible, semiprofessional writer of wit and distinction, a pudgy, rumpled, onetime juvenile terrorist for the I.R.A. who staggered into the limelight in 1958 with his scabrous reform-school memoir, Borstal Boy, two brilliantly nihilistic plays of Dublin low jinks, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, but despite faint, repeated vows to stay "off the gargle" subsequently squandered his fireworks in binges from Los Angeles to London; of diabetes, jaundice and acute alcoholism; in Dublin...
...Bing Crosby, 58, mending in Santa Monica after an operation for kidney stones: Brendan Behan, 37, diabetic but enthusiastically tosspot Irish playwright; into a Dublin hospital for the fourth time in 18 months. Moaned Wife Beatrice: "It's the usual trouble-too much gargle...
...marriage to the late Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas was a never-ending hurricane of flying crockery, and in Leftover Life to Kill, her chronicle of that 17-year clash of egos, Caitlin Thomas, 47, sometimes wondered how she and the tosspot genius avoided killing each other. Now, in a "Not Quite Posthumous Letter to My Daughter" in Harper's, irascible, Celtic-tongued Caitlin has some heartfelt advice for her 18-year-old: "Stick, my child, for goodness' sake, to creating babies, washing nappies, and crooning lullabies. A woman's place, as Dylan never ceased to tell...
Married. Marine Corps Reserve Colonel Gregory ("Pappy") Boyington, 46, World War II ace (28 Japanese planes), reformed tosspot and bestselling autobiographer (Baa Baa Black Sheep); and TV Actress Dolores ("Dee") Tatum, 33; he for the third time ("first time I've been married sober"), she for the second; in Denver...
...minute factual detail, Ellmann fashions a Ulyssean portrait that has the lived-with, lived-through intensity of a major novel. Never before have people so painfully close to Joyce stepped so personably out of the shadow of his reputation. There is his father John, a barroom wit and tosspot, would-be singer and doctor, who sired ten children and saddled his brood with eleven mortgages. There is Joyce's wife Nora, a Galway girl with a tart tongue and no head for "that chop suey he's writing," as she once said of Finnegans Wake. There is Brother...