BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: PEOPLE etc.

BOB MUNDEN

"Bob Munden was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records 
as “The Fastest Man with a Gun Who Ever Lived”. One 
journalist reckoned that if Munden had been at the OK
 Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, on October 26, 1881, 
the gunfight would have been over in 5 to 10 seconds."

iMBd
**
JASPER MASKELYN
" Every magician, at their core, is a master of deception. 
But when Jasper Maskelyne moved his act from the stage to 
the theater of war, his deception skills were used to save lives. During World War II, Maskelyne joined the British military and used his knowledge as an illusionist to trick 
the Nazis. His team took camouflage to a new level,creating deceptive decoys to trick enemy fighter pilots: fake harbors filled with phony boats and dazzling light-displays that, from above, looked like cities. The illusions reportedly caused the enemy to waste tons of ammunition."


INTERESTING FACTS.   June14, 2023
nterestingfacts.com/influential-magicians/Yp6adVuKogAHE3uP?liu=bc6ace8ab3f84bb0bb64e2ba0affc64f&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1819019860

**
HEMINGWAY MEETS ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

"Mrs. Roosevelt is enormously tall, very charming, and almost stone deaf. She hears practically nothing that is said to her but is so charming that most people do not notice it.."

ERNEST HEMINGWAY in a letter to Mrs. Paul Pfeiffer. 
2 August 1957. Ernest Hemingway's Selected Leters, 
1917-1961, edited by Carlos Baker.

**
         
GAIL GREENE
I have dedicated myself to the wanton indulgences of my senses. And I shall consider it fitting and divine if on my deathbed my last words echo those of Pierette, the sister  of Brillat-Savarin, who died at table shortly before her one-hundredth birthday “Bring on the dessert. I think I’m about to die.”

Gael Greene, quoted in her New York Times obituary
(November 2, 2022)

**

ON THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR OF BREAKFAST
AT TIFFANYS

Capote
Kaput.

LJP

**



HENRY JAMES’S FOREHEAD

“…his forehead was more like a dome, it was a whole street.”
**
Max Beerbohm
David Cecil. Max (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company., 1964)

**

ARCHIBALD LEACH & CARY GRANT

It is well-known by most film fans that the birthname of
Cary Grant was Archibald Leach. Archibald Leach was
A name mentioned by Grant in a few of his movies.
Less known is the remarkable coincidence that occurred
When Grant married the heiress Barbara Hutton. The story was recounted by Jeffrey Lyons in his book Stories My Father Told Me Me (New York: Abbeville Press, 2011):
CARY GRANT & HIS MARRIAGE TO BARBARA HUTTON

Grant was asked why his marriage to Barbara Hutton, the richest woman in the world, didn’t last. ‘Tell you why,’ Grant
explained. I was making $14,000 a week and still felt like a kept man.’ Another reason might have been the fact that Hutton had a long time chauffeur whose name was Archie Leach !”

**
DOROTHY PARKER IN THE HOSPITAL

"There was something about hospitals that struck her 
as being lugubrious. She was always funny about hospitals.
She called this one Bedpan Alley. When Alexander
Woollcott came to call, she immediately rang for the 
nurse -- in order, she told Mr. Woollcott, to assure
them forty-five minutes of absolutely privacy.But
the funniest thing of all was that she did not have
enough money to pay her bill..."

John Keats. The Life and Times of Dorothy
Parker You Might As Well Live (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1970)

**
LORD BYRON & LADY CAROLINE LAMB

Lady Caroline Lamb  is “said to have surprised 
her lover Lord Byron by having herself
served naked in a large soup tureen during
her husband’s birthday dinner.”

Adrian Tinniswood. The Rise and Fall of the
English Country House After World War II
(New York: Basic Books, 2021)
**
LORD BYRON

George Gordon Byron, Lord
Frequently was bored
In lands sunny & shady
Except when he was seducing a married lady.
**

On Ramsey MacDonald

  “ (AT BARNUM’S CIRCUS) the exhibit on
the programme I most desired to see was 
the one described as the Boneless Wonder.
My parents judged that the spectacle would
be too revolting and demoralizing for my
youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years 
to see the boneless wonder sitting on the
Treasury bench.”

   Winston Churchill

**
JOHNNY INKSLINGER HOPS ON A TRAIN
TO AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS, IN ORDER
TO GO ON A BLIND DATE WITH MS. EMILY
DICKINSON

There is a certain slant of rime that oppresses,
But yrs afterwards I still sing her praises.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Whatja two do?
Still carrying the torch?
Skinny dip together thru deep pools of grief?
No. Not quite.
Merely sat on her front porch,
Undressed with our eyes Nature.
Reminisced a bit about Ben Newton
Or Charles Wadsworth,
Who moved to California.
How empty the whole house of poesy seemed,
An entire upstairs collapsed with ghosts, couch
& armchairs covered with white sheets,
Poems stitched together,
Hidden away in drawers.

From room to room we went,
Leaning toward eternity, silently,
Not speaking a single word.'
We live our lives with others, then they die,
Or disappear completely.
We call out to the disappeared
But NO ONE ANSWERS,
Until the opening of single door becomes
Too painful to contemplate.

Shall we sleep together?
We paused in the garden of earthly delights,
Eavesdropping to half an ounce of blackpoll warbler,
She turned to me and said:
"First chill, then stupor, then the letting go."
I understood what she meant,
But too late. Far too late for me, for her, for all of us.

Louis Phillips

from AMERICAN ELEGIES (World Audience Books, 2009)