Word: ventriloquistic
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Anyone who has watched him manipulate the wisecracking dummy he calls Jerry Mahoney knows that Paul Winchell, 50, is a talented ventriloquist. But few realize that he may be even more gifted off-camera than on. A gadgeteer with a flair for mechanical problem solving, Winchell has contributed to his own profession by developing new techniques for making dummies move and for animating films. Even more remarkable, he has also contributed to medical science. He has designed and patented a mechanical heart and is now participating in the artificial-heart research program at the University of Utah's medical...
Died. Valentine Charles Parnell, 78, "Britain's No. 1 Showman" and longtime impresario of the London Palladium; in London. The son of a vaudeville ventriloquist, Parnell rose from office boy in a theatrical booking agency to become director of 400 theaters and music halls. To the Palladium he brought modern microphones and high-priced U.S. stars, both new to music-hall audiences, and soon turned the old moviehouse into one of the world's eminent stages...
...until the last moment, the White House thought they had it in the bag. Where in Justice, Richard Harris's book on the Justice Department, Nixon and his ventriloquist Mitchell come off as Machiavellian, in the Carswell case harebrained better describes their style. John Mitchell reportedly thought Carswell "too good to be true"; Nixon studied the Constitution diligently and concluded, quite literally, that "it is the duty of the President to appoint and of the Senate to advise and consent." And Senator Hruska, a special friend of the White House, sat like Christopher Robin clutching his Pooh bear...
...postgraduate fascination with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the ultimate Princetonian, fresh from Metro drinking himself to death just one year after Alice MacGraw was born. Fitzgerald wrote: "People in the East pretend to be interested in how pictures are made, but if you tell them anything, they never see the ventriloquist for the doll. Even the intellectuals, who ought to know better, like to hear about the pretensions, extravagances, and vulgarities?tell them pictures have a private grammar and watch the blank look come into their faces...
...whole problem of Tom Wolfe's voice has always been a particularly tricky one. Even within the realms of a single essay, he comes off the indefatigable ventriloquist, first projecting his voice through one character and then rushing off to speak through another. Where Mailer chooses to raise himself as the touchstone against which the rest of his work can be measured, Wolfe dissolves into an invisible man. Occasionally he allows us glimpses of himself, white-suited and bemused, but always he remains elusive...