Word: tynan
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NONFICTION: Charmed Lives, Michael Korda ∙Show People, Kenneth Tynan ∙ The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff ∙The Falcon and the Snowman, Robert Lindsey ∙The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe ∙The Russian Empire, Chloe Obolensky White House Years, Henry Kissinger
...Tynan is best when he unreservedly gives his heart away, and Louise Brooks is his ideal recipient. He visits the actress, now seventyish and living in a small Rochester apartment; he finds her arthritic and surrounded by volumes of literary classics. "Most beautiful-but-dumb girls think they are smart, and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter," she tells him. Smitten with images of Louise's dark, gamy sexuality in such films as Pandora's Box and Prix de Beaute, Tynan is now thoroughly captivated by the frail star...
Running into Johnny Carson can be trouble too, especially if one is an anxious guest on his Tonight show. Tynan has been there on what he calls "two vertiginous occasions." His impression: "The other talk shows in which I have taken part were all saunas by comparison with Carson's. Merv Griffin is the most disarming of ego strokers; Mike Douglas runs him a close second in the ingratiation stakes; and Dick Cavett creates the illusion that he is your guest, enjoying a slightly subversive private chat. Carson, on the other hand, operates on a level of high, freewheeling...
...Tynan smartly cracks the code of Carson's durable popularity. What you see is what you get: a complete professional, as fast on the draw as any who share his spotlight; a neatly dressed Midwesterner whose underlying rectitude is beamed to millions of weary nine-to-fivers as a conspiratorial wink indicating that show people may be glamorous, but they are not to be taken seriously Tynan, the great appreciator of rare abilities, can explain the aggressive surrealism of Mel Brooks' ethnic humor, but it does not quite appear to be the Briton...
...creator of the 2,000-Year-Old Man, but it is undermined by the portentous remark that "by playing a character who was immortal, Brooks may have staked his principal claim to immortality as a comedian." And why, after recalling the freebooting hilarity of Young Frankenstein, does Tynan resonate like a Viennese psychiatrist? "We have seen that Brooks is driven by a fear, amounting to hatred, of mortality; and what is Young Frankenstein but the story of a man who succeeds in defeating death...