Word: xanadu
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...novel's unwritten law is that time eventually earns a dispensation for past sins. Tough old pros like Alfred Gronevelt, official owner of the Clericuzio-controlled Xanadu Hotel in Las Vegas, and ruthless Eli Marrion, geriatric head of LoddStone Studios, are, like the Don, the novel's honored guests. Puzo's younger heroes are fewer but conspicuous: the Don's Adonis-like grandnephew Croccifixio ("Cross") De Lena and his film-goddess girlfriend, Athena Aquitane. The book's fools and villains are ruled by passions, impulses and grotesque egos. A degenerate gambler and loudmouthed deadbeat lurches obnoxiously toward his inevitable fate...
...Kane before its release in 1941, and so overwhelming its pressure on Welles' reputation, that it can be seen as the apex of his career, perhaps of Hollywood's Golden Age. It surely makes the man worth one more biography, Simon Callow's Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Viking; $29.95), and the film worth a long documentary look, The Battle over Citizen Kane by Thomas Lennon and Michael Epstein, on PBS's The American Experience next Monday. These solidly researched works revive a thrilling era in American theater and film--a five-year span dominated by the Boy Wonder...
...there were the famous liaisons with actresses: Welles wed three, Hearst one. For decades, while his papers denounced Hollywood morals, the old man lived openly with Davies, a comedian he foolishly tried to remake as Garbo. She stayed with him, good times and bad, in San Simeon (the "Xanadu" of Kane), his Spanish-Moorish-Italian "ranch" crammed with four millenniums' worth of trophies. It was your crazy uncle's attic, half the size of Rhode Island...
...fall of a national celebrity whose initial passion for championing the "working man" is replaced by an obsession with embodying his own myth. Welles, who co-wrote, directed and produced the film, plays the cynical multimillionaire from his idealistic college days through his demise, old and forgotten in the "Xanadu" he has built to himself...
...updated introduction to the 1994 edition, Grinspoon makes it clear that his intent is neither to encourage nor to stigmatize those who partake of the demon flower. This is just the facts, ma'am, a fogie's guide to Xanadu. Grinspoon has collected and synthesized a great deal of information, and he gives ample to time to the anti-weed agenda. The author quotes a few scary tidbits from the FBI: "He [the user] becomes a fiend with savage or 'cave man' tendencies. His sex desires are aroused and some of the most horrible crimes result..." Horrible crimes...