Word: gossipers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first novel, is Tom Spellacy's unrepentant recollections of his life as a tarnished blue knight. He proves to be a gifted, foulmouthed raconteur who can charm the reader down to a plane where cynicism and sentimentality are indistinguishable and the difference between social history and gossip is irrelevant. His "book" on Lois Fazenda, a would-be starlet whose naked body was found neatly cut in two at the torso: "She lived in a series of boarding houses much like the one on North Cherokee. On West Adams Boulevard she thought she was pregnant. On Camino Palmero she hemorrhaged...
Singer Frank Sinatra seldom ducks a rumble with a reporter. No sooner had he dropped his $3 million lawsuit against New York Gossip Columnist Earl Wilson, who wrote an unauthorized biography of the crooner, than he filed a $2 million complaint against Los Angeles Times Columnist Jody Jacobs. In an upcoming episode of Laugh-In, Ol' Blue Eyes goes after splashier revenge-by pouring a can of green paint (actually, dyed Cream of Wheat cereal) over a Rona Barrett lookalike. The victim: Actress June Gable, who plays a gossip-caster named Ms. Groana on the show. "He dumped this...
Ferris is more interested in transforming Dylan Thomas from a literary gossip item into a case history of arrested adolescence. He has supplemented the story of the Swansea son of an overattentive mother and dissapointed schoolteacher father with some fresh evidence. A former baby sitter recalls the child Dylan as "an absolute tartar, an appalling boy." At twelve, he plagiarized a poem and had it published in the Cardiff Western Mail As a young reporter in Swansea, Thomas developed his heavy drinking habits for, Ferris suggests, "the pleasure of being rescued afterwards." He was obsessed with fears of sexual inferiority...
...through a straw"), but such lapses of taste are rare. More often, Mazo brings fragments of the life sharply into focus with his knack for daring imagery ("feet flash out and back like darting fish"), and what could have been either an uncritical catalogue or a collection of gossip succeeds instead in being both thorough and sparkling...
...conversations along the buffet table consist mostly of insurance firm gossip, lamentations about the stock market, and the latest round of fifty-year old debates on the relative merits of the Yankees and the Red Sox. But this year, more than a few alumni mentioned either excitement or concern about the possibility of Harvard launching a major capital fund drive, the first such drive here since the mid-fifties...