James Earl Jones At Bat

By Helen Dudar The New York Times March 22, 1987 Just before the opening night curtain rises on Fences on Thursday, a voice in the corridor will call “five minutes,” and James Earl Jones will make his way to the darkest corner of the stage. There, he will stand, rapt,...

Where Have You Gone, Mickey Mantle?

By Bruce Buschel Atlantic City Magazine April, 1984 You smell hot dogs and beer. You feel the anticipation. Men sport bright caps with fancy insignias. Women wear shiny team jackets two sizes too large. Kids struggle with long leather mitts. They hand over their...

The Girls on the Bus

By Mary Bruno New York Woman October 1988 Alessandra Stanley is slumped on a couch in the lobby of the Merrimack Hilton. Amidst the frenzy all around her, she looks like an oasis of repose. But her blue eyes are aggressively alert. They slip and dart like a cat’s,...

Will the Next Lenny Bruce Please Speak Up?

By Robert Ward GQ August, 1984 I remember everything about the first time I heard Lenny Bruce. I was filing records in the Modern Music House in Baltimore, Maryland. They were Miles Davis records, and I was putting yet another copy of his masterpiece, Kind of Blue, in...

Hot Chicago

By Bill Zehme Vanity Fair November 1984 This year Chicago delivered to Broadway the two most important new American plays of the season, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and David Rabe’s star-studded Hurlyburly. Both plays originated in...

Angry Young Man with a Horn

By Bruce Buschel GQ February 1987 Wynton Marsalis leans forward, peers through his glasses and says with his usual fervor, “People actually want to discuss music with me. Me! Their knowledge of music is so limited that I don’t understand how they even think they can...

Kiss ’n’ Kill

By Judith Rossner The Movies November 1983 Pornography, erotica, fantasies of beautiful women are probably as old as excess energy and leisure time. It was Hugh Hefner’s inspiration to bring them, on a large scale and slickly packaged, into the middle-class living...

Shooting To Win

By Gloria Emerson The Movies November 1983 I did not suspect until recently that a large number of journalists rapidly converging on the capital of a small, poor country in great trouble might be a chilling sight. For nearly a decade I had often been part of such a...

Shelley Winters: “Wait A Minute—Where Am I?”

By Helen Dudar Writers Bloc June 1980 Shelley Winters has written the story of her life. Anyone who has followed her flourishing career on the talk show circuit will be pardoned for asking what she possibly has left to tell. The TV addict who really keeps track of...

Ivan Passer: Making It Cutter’s Way

By Fred Schruers The Washington Post December 13, 1981 Ivan Passer’s film Cutter’s Way, now at the Key Theater, is one of those rare movies that has led a heroic life of its own. Like a boxer in some Hollywood ring drama, beset by skeptics and loan sharks and battered...

Scorsese’s Strange Realm 

By Fred Schruers The Washington Post May 8, 1983   Last night at the Cannes Film Festival, Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy played to a glittering crowd at the new Palais des Festivals, appearing as the prestigious opening-night entry in the competition. Back...

Brooke Shields Walks on Glass

By O’Connell Driscoll Playboy December 1985 “You’re here,” Eddy Jo said. “Just barely,” Teri Shields said. She made a motion as if to sneeze, then caught herself. “I was wondering,” Eddy Jo said. She carried three spiral notebooks, cradled in her arms like a fat baby....