Word: townes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...known as "prime minister of the U.S. underworld." The obvious way for upstart mobsters to hasten the crumbling of Kingpin Costello's dark empire of crime and rackets would begin with the elimination of the Big Boss himself. Costello taxied last week from a quiet on-the-town evening to his apartment house on Manhattan's Central Park West. In the building's vestibule an ill-wisher met Costello, plunked one .38 slug into his head at ten-foot range, departed in a black Cadillac. The bullet, a hatband-guided missile, burrowed like a chigger...
...ideas. Jack Benny has seven sets. TV exerts such a spell on movie stars-especially when it happens to be showing their old films-that it has rendered the movie colony housebound. Says Columnist Sidney Skolsky: "The nightclub business is dead, and there is just no place left in town, day or night, where you can count on finding a gathering of well-known movie people." As for fur-bearing TV sets, Teitlebaum has since filled orders to cover them in mink ("Of course, I left the screen showing...
...Guard. The rise of the TV era in Hollywood has placed the movie people, themselves long cast as parvenus, in the odd role of the social old guard. Social Arbiter Mike Romanoff, the town's leading restaurateur, sniffs at the "dirty shirt" school that he finds prevalent among TV performers as well as newcomers to films. Says he: "The TV actors can afford to eat here, but they haven't progressed beyond the drugstore counter. They think differently, behave differently, live differently. The dirty shirt is a form of snobbery, you know. We're snobs...
...Moon for the Misbegotten was Eugene O'Neill's last play. Finished in 1943, it had a turbulent pre-Broadway road tour in 1947 and closed out of town. Whatever production difficulties it encountered, A Moon has internal troubles that go much deeper. In the current production, three accomplished actors cannot save, or even for long sustain, the play. Nor is the general effect one of crude mass: it is much more one of sheer dead weight. O'Neill's greatest fault-using too many and too flaccid words-flattens out a story that...
...14th century merchant dressed in flowing robes and holding a sheaf of bills of exchange. The merchant's name is Francesco di Marco Datini, and he is still Prato's favorite son. When he died, Datini left his whole fortune of 70,000 gold florins to the town's poor, along with his spacious house and all his papers. The interest on his capital is still shared out annually (about $1,100) among poor Pratese, but to those who write and love social history it is Datini's papers that constitute the real treasure-trove...