The Last Tycoon Quotes

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.

Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.

They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.

You should have risen above it," I said smugly. "It's not a slam at you when people are rude -- it's a slam at the people they've met before.

There's no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all.

These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.

His dark eyes took me in, and I wondered what they would look like if he fell in love.

How different it all was from what you'd planned.

You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them--always thinking people are so important--especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it--on the inside.

Stahr's eyes and Kathleen's met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call.

There was a midsummer restlessness abroad—early August with imprudent loves and impulsive crimes.

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

credit is something that should be given to others. If you are in a position to give credit to yourself, then you do not need it.

No brilliant idea was ever born in a conference room,” he assured the Dane. “But a lot of silly ideas have died there,” said Stahr. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon

A NATION'S GREATNESS DEPENDS ON ITS LEADER To vastly improve your country and truly make it great again, start by choosing a better leader. Do not let the media or the establishment make you pick from the people they choose, but instead choose from those they do not pick. Pick a leader from among the people who is heart-driven, one who identifies with the common man on the street and understands what the country needs on every level. Do not pick a leader who is only money-driven and does not understand or identify with the common man, but only what corporations need on every level. Pick a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship. Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist. Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies. Most importantly, a great leader must serve the best interests of the people first, not those of multinational corporations. Human life should never be sacrificed for monetary profit. There are no exceptions. In addition, a leader should always be open to criticism, not silencing dissent. Any leader who does not tolerate criticism from the public is afraid of their dirty hands to be revealed under heavy light. And such a leader is dangerous, because they only feel secure in the darkness. Only a leader who is free from corruption welcomes scrutiny; for scrutiny allows a good leader to be an even greater leader. And lastly, pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

Bright unused beauty still plaugued her in the mirror.

People fall in and out of love all the time. I wonder how they manage it.

Such a pretty girl- to say such wise things.

It was midsummer, but fresh water from the gasping sprinklers made the lawn glitter like spring.

Fatigue was a drug as well as a poison, and Stahr apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from working lightheaded with weariness.

He was born sleepless, without a talent for rest or the desire for it.

Note also in the epilogue that I want to show that Stahr left certain harm behind him just as he left good behind him.

At both ends of life man needed nourishment: a breast - a shrine. Something to lay himself beside when no one wanted him further, and shoot a bullet into his head.

Junior writers $300; Minor poets—$500 a week; Broken novelists—$850-1000; One play dramatists—$1500; Sucks—$2000. Wits—$2500.

Téged is meglep? – Micsoda? – Hogy megint két ember vagyunk? Te nem szoktál erre gondolni? Hogy bárcsak egyek lennénk örökre, és aztán megint jön a csalódás, hogy mégiscsak kettő az ember?

He saw Kathleen sitting in the middle of a long white table alone.Immediately things changed. As he walked toward her the people shrank back against the walls till they were only murals; the white table lengthened and became an altar where the priestess sat alone. Vitality welled up in him and he could have stood a long time across the table from her, looking and smiling.

I matched my grey eyes against his brown ones for guile, my young golf-and-tennis heart-beats against his, which must be slowing a little after years of over-work. And I planned and I contrived and I plotted - any woman can tell you - but it never came to anything, as you will see. I still like to think that if he'd been a poor boy and nearer my age I could manage it, but of course the real truth was that I had nothing to offer that he didn't have.

There was a midsummer restlessness abroad--early August with imprudent loves and impulsive crimes. With little more to expect from summer, one tried anxiously to live in the present--or, if there was no present, to invent one.

I've told you many times that the first thing I decide is the kind of story I want. (...) This is not the kind of story I want. The story we bought had shine and glow - it was a happy story. This is all full of doubt and hesitation. The hero and heroine stop loving each other over trifles - then they start up again over trifles. After the first sequence you don't care if she never sees him again or he her.

Emotionally, at least, people can't live by taking in each other's washing.

When a girl tells the man she likes second best about the other one, then she's in love." --Cecelia Brady

You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It

Az ember vagy elfogadja Hollywoodot olyannak, amilyen, mint például én tettem, vagy megvetően legyint rá, ahogyan olyasmire szokás, amit nem értünk.

Az embernek táplálék kell az élet mindkét végén: előbb anyamell – aztán szentély. Ami mellé odaheveredhet, amikor már senkinek nincsen szüksége rá…

Az emberek folyton beleszeretnek egymásba, azután meg kiszeretnek egymásból.

Stahr's eyes and Kathleen's met and tangled.

I grew up thinking that writer and secretary were the same, except that a writer usually smelled of cocktails and came more often to meals.

Wylie: "If you don't like advice, why do you pay me?" Stahr: "That's a question of merchandise. I'm a merchant. I want to buy what's in your mind.

I found her as lovable as a cheap old toy. She

De tudod, az a helyzet, hogy a tudás olyan végtelen… és minél többet tud az ember, annál több tudnivalóról szerez tudomást, ami már éppen csak hogy karnyújtásnyira van és ez így megy folyvást.

But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up to two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.

You could say that this was where an accidental wind blew him but I don't think so. I would rather think that in a "long shot" he saw a new way of measuring our jerky hopes and graceful rogueries and awkward sorrows, and that he came here from choice to be with us to the end. Like the plane coming down into the Glendale airport into the warm darkness.

I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.

Valami nyugtalanság járta át a nyarat – augusztus eleje volt, bolond szerelmek és szenvedélyes bűnök ideje. Ilyenkor mindenki tudja már, hogy immár nem sokat tartogat számára a nyár, ezért megpróbálja mohón belevetni magát a jelenbe – vagy ha nincsen jelene, megpróbál teremteni magának valamit helyette.

I'm sorry I was short with him--but I don't like a man to approach me telling me it for my sake. "Maybe it was," said Wylie "It's poor technique." "I'd all for it," said Wylie. "I'm vain as a woman. If anybody pretends to be interested in me, I'll ask for more. I like advice." Stahr shook his head distastefully. Wylie kept on ribbing him--he was one of those to whom this privilege was permitted. "You fall for some kinds of flattery," he said. "this 'little Napoleon stuff.'" "It makes me sick," said Stahr, "but it's not as bad as some man trying to help you." "If you don't like advice, why do you pay me?" "That's a question of merchandise," said Stahr. "I'm a merchant. I want to buy what's in your mind." "You're no merchant," said Wylie. "I knew a lot of them when I was a publicity man, and I agree with Charles Francis Adams." "What did he say?" "He knew them all--Gould, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Astor--and he said there wasn't one he'd care to meet again in the hereafter. Well--they haven't improved since then, and that's why I say you're no merchant." "Adams was probably a sourbelly," said Stahr. "He wanted to be head man himself, but he didn't have the judgement or else the character." "He had brains," said Wylie rather tartly. "It takes more than brains. You writers and artists poop out and get all mixed up, and somebody has to come in and straighten you out." He shrugged his shoulders. "You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them--always thinking people are so important-especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it--on the inside.

Old Marcus still managed to function with disquieting resilience. Some never-atrophying instinct warned hi of danger, of gangings up against him--he was never so dangerous himself as when others considered him surrounded. His grey face had attained such immobility that even those who were accustomed to watch the reflex of the inner corner of his eye could no longer see it. Nature had grown a little white whisker there to conceal it; his armor was complete.

His apprehension of splendor was fading so that presently the luxury of eternal mourning would depart.

Jacques La Borwitz had his points, no doubt, but so have the sub-microscopic protozoa, so has a dog prowling for a bitch and a bone." -Cecelia Brady

You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.

He was born sleepless without a talent for rest or the desire for it." --Cecelia Brady about Stahr

¿No te pasa que siempre piensas o esperas que seamos una sola persona, y luego te encuentras con que seguimos siendo dos?

És bár én kedvelem az írókat – mert ha az ember megkérdez valamit egy írótól, rendszerint választ is szokott kapni a kérdésére –, ettől mégis kisebb lett a szememben. Mert az írók valahogy nem egészen emberek. Ha viszont jók a mesterségükben, akkor meg tulajdonképpen egy egész csomó ember lakozik bennük, miközben mindent elkövetnek, hogy mégiscsak egy személy legyenek.

One of the pilots asked Mr. Smith if he liked his business, and Mr. Smith said, "Sure. Sure I like it. It's nice being the only sound nut in a hatful of cracked ones." ---Stewardess to Cecelia Brady

In the past, when Michel had been asked about how the firm would manage without the prolific Felix, he would quote Georges Clemenceau, the French World War I leader: “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.

For a full minute, our bowels were one with the bowels of the earth--like some nightmare attempt to attach our naval cords again and jerk us back to the womb of creation." -Cecelia Brady describing the earthquake

Under the moon, the backlot was 30 acres of fairyland—not because the locations really looked like African jungles and French châteaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway by night, but because they looked like the torn picture books of childhood, like fragments of stories dancing in an open fire. I never lived in a house with an attic, but a backlot must be something like that, and at night of course in an enchanted distorted way, it all comes true. —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Love of the Last Tycoon

She had loved him always and just before she died, all unwilling and surprised, his tenderness had burst and surged forward and he had been in love with her. In love with Minna and death together--with the world in which she looked so alone that he wanted to go with her there.

Think of it as if you were standing on one of those globes with a map on it — I always wanted one when I was a boy.” “I understand,” she said after a minute. “When you do that, you can feel the earth turn, can’t you?” He nodded. “Yes. Otherwise it’s all just mañana — waiting for the morning or the moon.

Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?" The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence. "I read your letter," said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal, but with a faint two-edged deference. "I can't get what I write on paper," broke out Boxley. "You've all been very decent, but it's a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you've teamed me with listen to what I say, but they spoil it--they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words." "Why don't you write it yourself?" asked Stahr. "I have. I sent you some." "But it was just talk, back and forth," said Stahr mildly. "Interesting talk but nothing more." Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but non to amusement, and said: "I don't think you people read things. The men are duelling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket." He barked again and subsided. Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?" "What? Naturally not." "You'd consider it too cheap." "Movie standards are different," said Boxley, hedging. "Do you ever go to them?" "No--almost never." "Isn't it because people are always duelling and falling down wells?" Yes--and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue." "Skip the dialogue for a minute," said Stahr. "Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write--that's why we brought you out here. But let's imagine something that isn't either bad dialogue or jumping down a well.

In that moment, something else occurred to me: The “leader of the free world,” the self-described great business tycoon, didn’t understand leadership. Ethical leaders never ask for loyalty. Those leading through fear – like a Cosa Nostra boss- require personal loyalty. Ethical leaders care deeply about those they lead, and offer them honesty and decency, commitment and their own sacrifice. They have a confidence that breeds humility. Ethical leaders know their own talent but fear their own limitations-to understand and reason, to see the world as it is and not as they wish it to be. They speak the truth and know that making wise decisions requires people to tell them the truth. And to get that truth, they create an environment of high standards and deep consideration – “love” is not too strong a word – that builds lasting bonds and makes extraordinary achievement possible. It would never occur to an ethical leader to ask for loyalty.

If you were in a drug store," said Stahr "-having a prescription filled-" "You mean a chemist?" Boxley asked. "If you were in a chemist's," conceded Stahr, "and you were getting a prescription for some member of your family who was very sick-" "-Very ill?" queried Boxley. "Very ill. Then whatever caught your attention through the window, whatever distracted you and held you would probably be material for pictures." "A murder outside the window, you mean." "There you go," said Stahr smiling. "It might be a spider working on the pane." "Of course-I see." "I'm afraid you don't, Mr. Boxley. You see it for your medium but not for ours. You keep the spiders for yourself and you try to pin the murders on us.

When Camilla and her husband joined Prince Charles on a holiday in Turkey shortly before his polo accident, she didn’t complain just as she bore, through gritted teeth, Camilla’s regular invitations to Balmoral and Sandringham. When Charles flew to Italy last year on a sketching holiday, Diana’s friends noted that Camilla was staying at another villa a short drive away. On her return Mrs Parker-Bowles made it quite clear that any suggestion of impropriety was absurd. Her protestations of innocence brought a tight smile from the Princess. That changed to scarcely controlled anger during their summer holiday on board a Greek tycoon’s yacht. She quietly simmered as she heard her husband holding forth to dinner-party guests about the virtues of mistresses. Her mood was scarcely helped when, later that evening, she heard him chatting on the telephone to Camilla. They meet socially on occasion but, there is no love lost between these two women locked into an eternal triangle of rivalry. Diana calls her rival “the rotweiller” while Camilla refers to the Princess as that “ridiculous creature”. At social engagements they are at pains to avoid each other. Diana has developed a technique in public of locating Camilla as quickly as possible and then, depending on her mood, she watches Charles when he looks in her direction or simply evades her gaze. “It is a morbid game,” says a friend. Days before the Salisbury Cathedral spire appeal concert Diana knew that Camilla was going. She vented her frustration in conversations with friends so that on the day of the event the Princess was able to watch the eye contact between her husband and Camilla with quiet amusement. Last December all those years of pent-up emotion came flooding out at a memorial service for Leonora Knatchbull, the six-year-old daughter of Lord and Lady Romsey, who tragically died of cancer. As Diana left the service, held at St James’s Palace, she was photographed in tears. She was weeping in sorrow but also in anger. Diana was upset that Camilla Parker Bowles who had only known the Romseys for a short time was also present at such an intimate family service. It was a point she made vigorously to her husband as they travelled back to Kensington Palace in their chauffeur-driven limousine. When they arrived at Kensington Palace the Princess felt so distressed that she ignored the staff Christmas party, which was then in full swing, and went to her sitting-room to recover her composure. Diplomatically, Peter Westmacott, the Wales’s deputy private secretary, sent her avuncular detective Ken Wharfe to help calm her.

I stared through the front door at Barrons Books and Baubles, uncertain what surprised me more: that the front seating cozy was intact or that Barrons was sitting there, boots propped on a table, surrounded by piles of books, hand-drawn maps tacked to the walls. I couldn’t count how many nights I’d sat in exactly the same place and position, digging through books for answers, occasionally staring out the windows at the Dublin night, and waiting for him to appear. I liked to think he was waiting for me to show. I leaned closer, staring in through the glass. He’d refurnished the bookstore. How long had I been gone? There was my magazine rack, my cashier’s counter, a new old-fashioned cash register, a small flat-screen TV/DVD player that was actually from this decade, and a sound dock for my iPod. There was a new sleek black iPod Nano in the dock. He’d done more than refurnish the place. He might as well have put a mat out that said WELCOME HOME, MAC. A bell tinkled as I stepped inside. His head whipped around and he half-stood, books sliding to the floor. The last time I’d seen him, he was dead. I stood in the doorway, forgetting to breathe, watching him unfold from the couch in a ripple of animal grace. He crammed the four-story room full, dwarfed it with his presence. For a moment neither of us spoke. Leave it to Barrons—the world melts down and he’s still dressed like a wealthy business tycoon. His suit was exquisite, his shirt crisp, tie intricately patterned and tastefully muted. Silver glinted at his wrist, that familiar wide cuff decorated with ancient Celtic designs he and Ryodan both wore. Even with all my problems, my knees still went weak. I was suddenly back in that basement. My hands were tied to the bed. He was between my legs but wouldn’t give me what I wanted. He used his mouth, then rubbed himself against my clitoris and barely pushed inside me before pulling out, then his mouth, then him, over and over, watching my eyes the whole time, staring down at me. What am I, Mac? he’d say. My world, I’d purr, and mean it. And I was afraid that, even now that I wasn’t Pri-ya, I’d be just as out of control in bed with him as I was then. I’d melt, I’d purr, I’d hand him my heart. And I would have no excuse, nothing to blame it on. And if he got up and walked away from me and never came back to my bed, I would never recover. I’d keeping waiting for a man like him, and there were no other men like him. I’d have to die old and alone, with the greatest sex of my life a painful memory. So, you’re alive, his dark eyes said. Pisses me off, the wondering. Do something about that. Like what? Can’t all be like you, Barrons. His eyes suddenly rushed with shadows and I couldn’t make out a single word. Impatience, anger, something ancient and ruthless. Cold eyes regarded me with calculation, as if weighing things against each other, meditating—a word Daddy used to point out was the larger part of premeditation. He’d say, Baby, once you start thinking about it, you’re working your way toward it. Was there something Barrons was working his way toward doing? I shivered.

services as a tree trimmer.92 In the fall of 1975, while still promoting Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicholson played a very small part in his pal Sam Spiegel’s production of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, based on the life of MGM wonder boy Irving Thalberg, who made Metro the dominant

was glad that there was beauty in the world that would not be weighed in the scales of the casting department.

By the summer of 1988, Bill Gates was the leading representative of a new breed of tycoon: the software superrich. Just as oil created a kind of royalty in the last century, “wildcat” programmers had emerged among the wealthiest self-made men in America. Paul Allen, who had left Microsoft because of illness, was worth megamillions. So were the founders of other leading software companies. At the age of thirty-three, Gates was the youngest billionaire in the United States.

He adored his girls, but he’s French, so he’s, you know, women are there to be dressed and fed and fucked.

déjà vu all over again.

the famous remark of Hegel that ‘the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk’”—Hegel’s view that wisdom comes only in hindsight.

You know that I am a great believer that the faults of people are very often more determining than their qualities.

One spring evening in 1896, a prominent Pennsylvanian named Hamilton Disston blew his brains out in a bathtub. He had become gravely depressed after depleting his inheritance on a grandiose campaign to drain 4 million acres of Florida swamp known as the Everglades. Although Disston died believing himself a failure, he was later proven a pioneer and an inspiration. In the years that followed, one version or another of his rapacious fantasy was pursued by legions of avaricious speculators—land developers, bankers, railroad barons, real-estate promoters, citrus growers, cattle ranchers, sugar tycoons and, last but not least, the politicians they owned.

Los escritores son como niños: ni siquiera en circunstancias normales son capaces de concentrarse en su trabajo.

The Ukrainian people would soon find out how ironclad these assurances were. The corrupt Viktor Yanukovych had returned to power in the last election, thanks to the efforts of the equally crooked political consultant Paul Manafort, whose office manager in Kyiv, Konstantin Kilimnik, had deep ties to Russian intelligence. Their paymasters included tycoons enmeshed with both organized crime and the Kremlin. Manafort collected many millions in fees from Yanukovych, laundering them in offshore accounts, and attracting the attention of the FBI, which began wiretapping him in a foreign intelligence investigation. Manafort also cut business deals with the country’s richest and most odious oligarchs, including Dmytro Firtash, a Putin crony and a prominent associate of Russian organized crime indicted on federal corruption charges in Chicago in October 2013.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” Emerson

Part of the deal between Fox and New Regency was the establishment of a new TV division. Milchan brought in a good friend, ambitious Israeli TV personality Yair Lapid, to head up the new department. The first project to emerge was Malcolm in the Middle, a wildly successful children’s comedy series. One of the last and

I had learned over the course of the last year that female models in the catalog business are all competitors, all the time.

Lincoln ( he prefers to go by just his last name. No one calls him “Abe“, which he loathes. Few call him “Mr. President“. His wife actually calls him “Mr. Lincoln“, and his two personal secretaries playfully refer to him as “the Tycoon“) paces the upper deck of the steamboat River Queen, his face lit now and again by distant artillery.

Secrecy, however, came at a cost. Every Democratic senator greeted the announcement with euphoria, except for one. Kyrsten Sinema learned about the agreement on the floor of the Senate, when Republican senator John Thune mentioned it to her. And she instantly unleashed her fury on Schumer. In fairness, Joe Manchin knew that the legislation would needle her. Over the past year, the pair struggled to suppress their rivalry. They both enjoyed being the fiftieth senator, the vote on which their party’s agenda depended. It was the point of maximum leverage—and it came with the plaudits of tycoons, who cheered them for spoiling the Democratic agenda. Despite

What were they thinking now, the champions of need and the lechers of pity?—she wondered. What were they counting on? Those who had once simpered: “I don’t want to destroy the rich, I only want to seize a little of their surplus to help the poor, just a little, they’ll never miss it!”—then, later, had snapped: “The tycoons can stand being squeezed; they’ve amassed enough to last them for three generations”—then, later, had yelled: “Why should the people suffer while businessmen have reserves to last a year?”—now were screaming: “Why should we starve while some people have reserves to last a week?” What were they counting on?—she wondered.

Old money and new. Families with far-reaching Dutch heritages, New York City financiers and real estate tycoons, renowned artists, Hollywood actors—all of them had homes here, lives here. Often second lives, hidden chapters that could unfold in the dark, in a place fewer people were watching.

Before Charles had a chance to hang up, Mason said quickly, “One last piece of advice? Work on your delivery. I hear everyone down there has a shotgun. I’d miss you.

Second, he is credited with almost single-handedly devising the financial rescue package that saved New York City from bankruptcy in 1975, standing tall against President Gerald Ford and his incendiary refusal to help.

Such a pretty girl- to say such wise things.

What were they counting on? Those who had once simpered: “I don’t want to destroy the rich, I only want to seize a little of their surplus to help the poor, just a little, they’ll never miss it!”—then, later, had snapped: “The tycoons can stand being squeezed; they’ve amassed enough to last them for three generations”—then, later, had yelled: “Why should the people suffer while businessmen have reserves to last a year?”—now were screaming: “Why should we starve while some people have reserves to last a week?” What were they counting on?—she wondered.

The Jes Grew crisis was becoming acute. Compounding it, Black Yellow and Red Mu'tafikah were looting the museums shipping the plunder back to where it came from. America, Europe's last hope, the protector of the archives of "mankind's" achievements had come down with a bad case of Jes Grew and Mu'tafikah too. Europe can no longer guard the "fetishes" of civilizations which were placed in the various Centers of Art Detention, located in New York City. Bootlegging Houses financed by Robber Barons, Copper Kings, Oil Magnets, Tycoons and Gentlemen Planters. Dungeons for the treasures from Africa, South America and Asia. The army devoted to guarding this booty is larger than those of most countries. Justifiably so, because if these treasures got into the "wrong hands" (the countries from which they were stolen) there would be renewed enthusiasms for the Ikons of the aesthetically victimized civilizations.