Word: raconteur
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DIED. Marc Connelly, 90, playwright, bon vivant and raconteur whose 1930 play The Green Pastures, depicting Old Testament stories as they might have been enacted by Southern plantation blacks, is one of the enduring triumphs of the American theater; in New York City. An early collaborator of George S. Kaufman and one of the circle of wits at the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s, he later turned to directing, writing and traveling...
...suburban Los Angeles. Like an anchorite, Lee spends time communing with the desert, but he certainly knows his way around town when it comes to filching TV sets for ready cash As he puts it, he and his brother are both "city coyotes." Lee is also enough of a raconteur and Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc., golfer to con Austin's movie producer, Saul Kimmer (Louis Zorich), into buying his unwritten cornpone saga of the "true West." Saul is one of those monstrous Hollywood moths who skirt the flames of venality, yet never get torched. All three...
...accepting and ably defending spending programs much higher than he would have liked. He is remembered in Washington as a modest and unassuming man with a wide range of interests (he has been both a newspaper columnist and TV talk-show host in California) and something of an irreverent raconteur. He and his wife of 38 years, Jane, enjoy theater, opera and ballet; they have a son and a daughter. After leaving the Administration in 1975, Weinberger became a vice president and director of the Bechtel Group, an international construction and engineering firm based in San Francisco...
...when he was sober. He wrote his diary at night when he was drunk." On the evidence of the 840 letters collected here, Waugh sometimes tippled while he corresponded, but the contrast between this book and his Diaries (published in 1977) is as vivid as that between a buoyant raconteur and a mean lush. Here is Waugh effusively thanking Harold Acton for sending his latest book: "A work of that kind, so rich and learned, .must be studied with proper reverence." He told his diary something different: Acton's book was "unreadable...
DIED. Harold Edgar Clurman, 78, ebullient, versatile catalyst of the American theater, who attained eminence as a director (Member of the Wedding, The Waltz of the Toreadors), producer, author, teacher and raconteur; of cancer; in New York City. After starting out as an actor, he founded the Group Theater in 1931 to serve as an alternative to Broadway's commercial offerings; for ten years it provided a forum for playwrights like Clifford Odets and William Saroyan, introduced to the American stage the Stanislavsky Method of acting, and nourished such actors as Lee Strasberg, John Garfield, Cheryl Crawford...