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The picture accompanying your April 1 review of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending mistakenly labels Robert Loggia as Cliff Robertson. Robert Loggia was originally cast in the male lead and stayed in the Williams opus throughout the Philadelphia run.
BARBARA P. JAKOBSON New York City
Sir:
Inasmuch as I replaced the male lead prior to the New York opening, I suppose it's only poetic justice that he replace me in TIME'S picture.
CLIFF ROBERTSON New York City
¶ TIME mistakenly used a picture of the play taken during an out-of-town tryout. For the Broadway Orpheus, see cut.—ED.
Inside the Heart
Sir:
Permit me to congratulate TIME, March 25, for its fine presentation and accurate and graphic reporting on our Dr. Bailey. He is an active member of our surgical staff, has performed several of his most recent heart operations here. He is a modest man, friendly too, and is admired and respected by his fellow staff members as well as our entire hospital family. We are grateful to TIME for telling the world about him in so grand a manner.
WM. H. MORRISON Administrator West Jersey Hospital Camden, N. J.
¶ For further news of Surgeon Bailey, see below.—ED.
Death of a Man
Sir:
It was not Lael Wertenbaker's magnificent and moving Death of a Man that I found "painful and embarrassing." It was TIME'S review [April 1], reeking as it did of religiosity and rancor.
FRED RODELL New Haven, Conn.
Sir:
Your review of this book is disgustingly presumptuous. Wertenbaker didn't make it, says TIME'S Last Judgment Department, because he didn't see his "responsibility to God." What God? And much more to the point, who the hell is TIME to tell anyone what makes a good or a bad death ?
NAT HENTOFF New York City
Sir:
Thank you for your excellent criticism of Death of a Man. After reading this soul-baring book, I reached the same conclusions as did your critic. As active Methodist farmers, we thought our idea would be laughed at in more sophisticated circles, but we were glad to see that not all the clever TIME men are iconoclasts.
MRS. L. R. STREET Rupert, Idaho
Sir:
Congratulations on your very understanding review and on the way you have picked up the discrepancy between the way people feel and the way they think they should feel. Mrs. Wertenbaker and her husband actually were two little children playing house; they were totally unable to face the facts of the real world, in which death, and painful death, exists. I myself faced certain death from the closing of my aortic valve about three years ago. Through the miracle of modern cardiac surgery (performed by Dr. Charles Bailey) I was saved, but both my wife and I looked upon me as a dying man. I made no clever remarks; my friends said no witty things, though I published a book about it. My wife, who knows me very well, would not dare write what she thinks I thought.
GEORGE LAWTON New York City
¶ Reader Lawton described his experiences—before and after heart surgery—in his book Straight to the Heart.—ED.
Sir: