Word: westports
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...Bette's idea of a bed companion is a good book." So complained Bandleader Harmon Nelson Jr., first husband of Unabashable Actress Bette Davis. Last week, three husbands later, Davis, 65, gave away much of her bedtime reading to Boston University's Mugar Library. Changing homes in Westport, Conn., she donated more than 4,000 books covering four decades of theater and the arts. True to style, she overwhelmed the competition. Even though Movie Queens Myrna Loy and Joan Fontaine have given their personal papers to the same library, Special Collections Curator Howard Gotlieb will house the Davis...
...place to another inspecting nearly every home that is for sale. The most annoying part of selling a house is showing it to a steady stream of lookers, many of whom conclude at the first glance that they have no interest. Now Victor Klein, a real estate broker in Westport, Conn., has an idea that could eliminate most of the bother. Using an inexpensive Sony TV camera and playback unit that is simple to operate, he puts on video tape the interior and outdoor views of the houses that clients want to sell and shows the tapes to prospective buyers...
Such sympathy is in constant jeopardy here because of the characters' grisly speech habits. The book is full of basically decent men who seem obliged to come across as loudmouthed smart alecks. "Jim, old buddy, how's your sex life?" is a Westport way of saying hello. "What are you running here, a desert?" is a necessary preamble to ordering drinks. Even the boozehound on doubles has a wretched little snapper handy: "Two Scotch on the rocks, put them in the same glass, will you?" The irony is that Dillon is painting a verbal desert inhabited by people...
Maloney, a light novelist with a heavy hand (Daily Bread, The 24-Hour Drink Book), can write dialogue that gets off the train at Westport. He can compose scenes that seem to come from a camera rather than a type writer. He makes superb use of his country club to write a short history of the decline and fall of the snob in America. But he shows no faith in his material. Just when he should be putting it all together, he takes it all apart, hurrying on to play a stand-up comedian in print - he becomes an anything...
Died. John Chapman, 71, drama critic of the New York Daily News since 1943; of cancer; in Westport, Conn. The son of Poet Arthur Chapman (Out Where the West Begins), John was a photographer in Paris, a newsroom editor and a Hollywood columnist before he started reviewing Broadway productions for the News. Unabashedly proud of his nickname-"Old Frostface"-Chapman once claimed that despite the News's huge daily circulation (now more than 2,000,000), he wrote for a tiny audience: "A tough...