Word: yarn
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...true calling. Through a correspondence course offered by the University of Minnesota, Elli discovered that he had a greater talent for writing. The resulting novel, a tense, minute-by-minute account of a prison riot, shows that he has a born storyteller's way with a yarn...
...probably is not. In any case, Phillips is still living as good a yarn as he tells. He has just sold, for about $1,000,000, a cattle ranch in Nevada and published a new book, Unknown Oman. Last week, after a brief cruise in the Greek Isles, he flew to New York on the spur of the moment, went to Texas to dine with Oilman John Mecom, continued on to San Francisco and Honolulu. Next, he contemplates going to Viet Nam, where he is an accredited war correspondent for Scripps-Howard...
Most of his material comes from his own backwoods boyhood spent on a 2,500-acre cotton plantation in the Arkansas Delta country. There, as a youth, he listened in on back-porch yarn spinning, submitted to hell-fire-and-damnation sermons, saw ghosts at the foot of his four-poster and, like many another adolescent, doubted his own provenance ("Was I adopted? Had I been stolen from the gypsies?"). Unlike most children, though, he drew constantly. "At first it was only cowboys, then it was baseball and football players. Finally," he recalls, "I drew a cowgirl." Not long after...
...fact, time proved them right, but Director Andrew McLaglen (son of Victor) uses the bare bones of history mostly to flavor his yarn. Even human mating instincts operate almost exclusively in relation to the bull. One eager beefer corners Maureen behind a candlelit table for two, panting, "Run out on me now, and your bull will wind up on that table tomorrow night...
...anything, unshakable performances keep The Group going strong. As the bride Kay, who ultimately pays with her life for choosing the wrong husband, Broadway's Joanna Pettet etches a jittery, wounding image of pride slowly strangled. As Libby, the frigid literary snob, Jessica Walter unreels bits of the yarn through hearsay, as only a cat can. As Dottie, a staid Bostonian who decides to let a casual acquaintance seduce her, Joan Hackett intuitively lights up every scene she is in. And Shirley Knight, as Polly, reads gentle truth into every word and gesture. Leading the second rank, Candice Bergen...