Word: ventriloquist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...postgraduate fascination with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the ultimate Princetonian, fresh from Metro drinking himself to death just one year after Alice MacGraw was born. Fitzgerald wrote: "People in the East pretend to be interested in how pictures are made, but if you tell them anything, they never see the ventriloquist for the doll. Even the intellectuals, who ought to know better, like to hear about the pretensions, extravagances, and vulgarities?tell them pictures have a private grammar and watch the blank look come into their faces...
...whole problem of Tom Wolfe's voice has always been a particularly tricky one. Even within the realms of a single essay, he comes off the indefatigable ventriloquist, first projecting his voice through one character and then rushing off to speak through another. Where Mailer chooses to raise himself as the touchstone against which the rest of his work can be measured, Wolfe dissolves into an invisible man. Occasionally he allows us glimpses of himself, white-suited and bemused, but always he remains elusive...
Candice Bergen is not the daughter of a king, but a ventriloquist. Otherwise she conveys all the insouciance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's fabled Daisy Buchanan. Beautiful, rich, intelligent and flippant, Candice can well afford drawing-room sallies and wry self-deprecation. Recalling growing up as Edgar Bergen's daughter, she says: "One may not turn out exactly normal when you have two wooden dummies for brothers, each with his own room." Or her days with the jet set: "That was a valuable exposure to the ultimate in boredom." Or her screen performances: "I'm great...