Word: trait
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...celebrity. In his artistry, he owned the natural jazzman's gift of blending with rather than blaring against an ensemble of fellow performers-a knack never used better than in the scatty and mellow duets (Gone Fishin', for one) that he recorded with Armstrong. A similar trait made his private life seem actually private in contrast to the typical Hollywood star's. He had his troubles, heartbreak at times in his marriage to hard-drinking Dixie Lee, who died of cancer in 1952, and again in dealing with four sons with a penchant for mischief...
...also did not ennoble William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter turned columnist who seeks to establish-with the repetitious use of labels like Lancegate -that all politicians are as shabby as Nixon. Cheap-shot comparisons are an old and dubious journalistic device: as if two people who share one trait can be said to share them all. New York magazine got in a worse cheap shot by egregiously referring to Lance as Carter's Bebe Rebozo...
...TAKES REAL CHUTZPAH to write an autobiography, a trait the Redhead (as Auerbach is affectionately known) obviously does not lack. The book details his entire life, from his youth in Brooklyn to his current duties with the Celtics. Nothin in between is left out. Nothing. Red rises from college hoop star to gym teacher to coach, bouncing from team to team in the early years of the NBA until he lands in Boston. He has had a very nice life, but it is impossible to read this book without thinking how irrelevant a life, too. What has this man done...
...power wielded by Hollywood's biggest moguls over scripts and salaries, always standing by an almost quixotic sense of honor in an epoch sorely lacking men of principle. Although his career suffered accordingly, the legend that lingers only profits from this irrepressible streak. But in the film this trait is largely neglected until the concluding portion, when Russell decides to end the film with a famous boxing exhibition between a tubercular Valentino and a reporter from a New York paper that had published a scathing criticism of the film idol. To wind up the movie with this inherently ludicrous vignette...
...dominant personality trait is the willingness to gamble. Ballerina Assoluta Natalia Makarova, who now makes about $300,000 a year from her dancing, took a great risk in defecting from the Kirov Ballet to perform in the alien world of Western ballet. But then Natasha, 36, has always been supremely confident of her talent. Recalling an old Russian proverb, she observes: "It is bad soldier who does not expect to be general...