Word: walk-on
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...every author knows, people are reading lighter these days. A chapter can't be too short; a character can't be too thin or too rich. It doesn't hurt to have walk-on parts for real celebrities. Erich Segal is an able practitioner of glitz lit. As a classics scholar (he has taught at Harvard, Yale and Princeton), he understands that readers never tire of seeing the proud and the privileged lowered by fate. Love Story, his bittersweet ode to the Ivy League, established him as the preppies' Pindar. The Class is his bid to be their Homer...
Wouk knows all the storytelling tricks and uses them freely. His minichapters seem calculated for attention spans shrunk by 40 years of television; he has increased his quotient of scatological humor; he injects sermonettes on foreign policy and domestic relations; and he provides walk-on parts for celebrities. Should there be any confusion, Marlene Dietrich is the "woman with beautiful crossed legs," and Ernest Hemingway is the burly guy with the mustache who says, "Hammering out a style takes work." He might have added that if you hammer too long, you get pulp...
Stuck with a bearded enigma at the center of his tale, Vidal packs the edges with peripheral figures. Nearly everyone who was anyone during the 1860s, from Henry Adams to Walt Whitman, is given a walk-on role. This process extends to some 19th century notables already deceased. Vidal manages to insert the information that Francis Blair, an aged visitor to the Lincoln White House, knew Andrew Jackson...
...weeks in the musical Nine. Of all the recent replacements, however, the most interesting may be Morgan Fairchild, 32, who last week joined the cast of the off-Broadway comedy Geniuses. Morgan steps into the role of a leggy, not-so-dumb blond up for a nude walk-on in a grossly expensive epic war film. Fairchild is working for scale ($195.80 a week) to break out of the blitz of vixen parts that Hollywood has offered since her bitchy role on television's Flamingo Road. "All they want you to do is run around in pants...
First-year walk-on Mark Chang made up for his luck of height with tremendous quickness to help anchor the blocking corps and compensate for the loss of the injured Jon Tanaka...