This “People Are Talking About” excerpt was originally published in the November 1964 issue of Vogue.
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People are talking about…The betting odds on the election with the insiders quoting the morning line from the gamblers at Vegas and from the great betting house. Ladbroke’s, in London…The Committee, a smart little group who do a revue of often funny, frozen improvisations, smashing head-on into politics…The wily, eighteenth-century satirist. Jonathan Swift, whose old book, Directions to Servants, just republished, contains among other advices this: “Never come till you have been called three or four times: for none but dogs will come at first whistle.”…The Entertainers, a new CBS-TV program starring nine commercials and twelve products, occasionally interrupted by Art Buchwald, Carol Burnett, and, among others, Tessie O’Shea.
People are talking about…The amazingly gay, horrifying, and extraordinary “exhibition of monsters, evil or endearing,” some of them old as Egyptian ones, some as contemporary as Ernst, Matta, and Picasso, but all at the University of St. Thomas Art Gallery in Houston, Texas…The craze of Italian women for cleaning their skins with watermelons…The Pilgrims, a new threesome group of folk singers (on Columbia Records) with an especially good tenor, Bob Guillaume, who flies off in the song. “Three Little Worms.”…Goldfinger, so far the best James Bond movie, the action marvellously implausible…Peyton Place, a sad, popular, unpleasant night serial that goes so slowly that it seems to be fainting away.
People are talking about… In London, John Osborne’s new play, Inadmissable Evidence, in which he makes a bloodcurdling, sad, envious attack on the young that he used to speak for, the young now forty who find life slipping away, with the major role that of a solicitor, played by Nicol Williamson, who grimaces, twitches, and leches with stupendous authenticity…The increased success of the Ad Lib Club where everyone who is switched on goes almost nightly, its lovers including Catherine Deneuve, making the new movie, Repulsion…Lady Longford’s huge study of Queen Victoria, Victoria, R.I., a book like formalized chatter, drawn from Windsor Castle archives never used before…The high jinks in Kent at Chilham Castle, seat of Viscount Massereene, where Kim Novak in flesh-colored tights prances around between takes of Moll Flanders…Marianne Faithfull, who looks like a small lost angel, has a sharp edge to her tongue, sings in a wispy way, especially her hit pop song, “As Tears Go By,” and doesn’t want adulation, just money in the bank.
People are talking about…The new Fellini movie, Juliet and the Ghosts, now in the works in Rome…The superbly carried out exhibition, “1914,” with almost two hundred and fifty objects from some one hundred and ninety American collections, now at the Baltimore Museum of Art, all to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary…In Paris, the changes in the Parisian press, with one of the most important changes at L’Express which used to look like a weekly newspaper, but now looks like an American news magazine, the editor hoping thus to recruit younger and less politically minded readers…My Favorite Things, a quirky, commonsensical book by Dorothy Rodgers who has wisely, but sometimes awkwardly, put in it hundreds of her special notions about houses and food….New York’s Bianchini Gallery which has pushed Pop Art to the wall with its exhibition called “The American Supermarket,” supplied with beer cans by Jasper Johns, Brillo boxes by Andy Warhol, fruit and vegetables, oversized, by Bob Watts, plus, among other plaster and wax groceries, some cheese and cold cuts by Mary Inman.
