Word: showmanly
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DIED. Roy Mark Hofheinz, 70, rambunctious, larger-than-life Texas entrepreneur and showman whose Houston Astrodome was the world's first indoor stadium; of a heart attack; in Houston. After passing the bar exam at 19, becoming the nation's youngest elected county judge, and serving as manager of Lyndon Johnson's unsuccessful 1941 Senate campaign, Hofheinz vowed to make a million dollars in less than a decade, which he did. Elected mayor of Houston at 40, he survived impeachment and eventually promoted the Astrodome, lavishly appointing the stadium with such splashy innovations as an electronic scoreboard...
...live here in the '20s," says Douglas Meltzer, 59, a former aircraft worker and a long time Hollywood resident who is out for a morning stroll. Meltzer's father came to Los Angeles to play violin in the orchestra of the Million Dollar Theater, another of Showman Sid Grauman's grandiose palaces. Meltzer, an earnest man with bushy eyebrows, wispy white hair and a chuckle for punctuation, remembers the Hollywood he knew then...
...personification of evil, Mussolini has won his own immortality as the archetypal thug. But the founder of Fascism was a complex thug who could never make up his mind whether he wanted to be a fearsome breaker of the peace, like his neighbor to the north, or a geopolitical showman, the P.T. Barnum of international politics. Judging from Denis Mack Smith's study, by far the more solid and persuasive of these two new biographies, the Duce (chief) was a bit of both...
...President's 41-minute televised performance, in which he outlined the idea of a New Federalism, was vintage Reagan, as flawlessly paced and as forcefully persuasive as any of his campaign speeches-which is what the address basically was. With a showman's instinct, he evoked the heroic spirit of Leonard Skutnik, who dived into the Potomac last month to rescue a drowning plane crash victim (see box), and stirring speeches to Congress by Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Only when he touched on foreign policy did he shift about nervously, as if on unsure terrain...
...Coppola's audacity- as brilliant film maker and profligate showman-that raises both hopes and hackles in the industry. Last week Paramount executives were grunting "No comments" through clenched teeth-perhaps because, as Zoetrope President Robert Spiotta suggests, "they're more disturbed by not being told than by Francis' marketing strategy." One Paramount insider did allow that "we might well have backed the idea-if Francis had come to us with it." But surprise is all in a flanking maneuver. Besides, as one screen writer friend of Coppola's says: "Francis is a genius at manipulating...